The Salisbury Poisonings
Sunday-Tuesday, BBC1
My Brilliant Friend
Friday, Sky Atlantic
Rating: 
The Salisbury Poisonings was way over the top, honestly. A Russian spy. A nerve agent so deadly that one spoonful could kill thousands. The local branch of Zizzi, now contaminated with more than just corporate, mediocre Italian food. The race to close everything down. The Whitehall spads bleating: ‘But how will businesses survive?’ A police officer with pupils reduced to pin-pricks and who is woozy at the wheel of his car, with his kids in the back. A woman who is battling addiction and whose boyfriend gives her what he thinks is a vial of perfume. A swan on the river that was reported as ‘wonky’ and had to be tested in case the watercourse had also been poisoned. (As it turned out, the swan was merely suffering from ‘bumblefoot’.)
Anne-Marie Duff as public health director Tracy Daszkiewicz. This was wonderfully performed by everyone, and told so cleverly it was always infused with tension
It was all extremely far-fetched and ridiculous and couldn’t happen. Except, of course, that it did. Every bit of it. And this dramatised account of events was properly terrific. Three hours, and I was gripped throughout. And also, I have to ask: can’t Tracy Daszkiewicz run everything now?
Written by Adam Patterson and Declan Lawn, and directed by Saul Dibb, this opened with a father and daughter vomiting copiously (afraid so), then slipping into unconsciousness on a bench outside a shopping precinct. An overdose? They didn’t seem the type. Police Google the father’s name as found in his wallet and discover he was part of a spy-swap deal between Russia and the UK eight years earlier. But this was not about Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who was visiting him. They barely even figured. (And now live under assumed names in New Zealand, apparently.) This was an ordinary-people-caught-in-the-most-extraordinary-circumstances scenario.
This was about Nick Bailey (Rafe Spall), the police officer who searched the Skripals’ home and became contaminated – so spooky, those pin-prick pupils – and Dawn Sturgess (MyAnna Buring), whose boyfriend had not found a vial of perfume, as it was the poison discarded after the assassination attempt. (Oh, God, watching Dawn spray herself…)
And it was about Daszkiewicz (Anne-Marie Duff), director of public health for Wiltshire, who single-handedly averted disaster, and saved so many lives, by quietly yet determinedly always doing what was right. And contact-tracing the hell out of everything. Cars. Ambulances. Swans. Anyone who might have brushed past the Skripals. Anyone who visited Zizzi that day. She had this part of town cordoned off, then that part. She slept in her office. She saw off the Whitehall bleaters. (‘But tourism is already down 80 per cent!’) She did not buckle and did not, at any point, offer anything as stupid as ‘herd immunity’ as an option. (Just saying!)
This was wonderfully performed by everyone, and told so cleverly it was always infused with tension. We knew it was Novichok – a synthetic toxin and one of the deadliest on Earth – before they did, because we know the story. But waiting for them to find out was still brilliantly nerve-racking, and the authorities’ reaction was brilliantly captured too. That? Here?
Plus, it was filled with compassion and humanity. There was Bailey’s paranoia that he’d contaminated his wife and children, while the funeral for Dawn, who did not survive, was absolutely devastating, and how one’s heart went out to her family, who loved her so. I don’t know if we also needed Daszkiewicz having to juggle the needs of her job with the needs of her husband (‘What, you’ve only come home for a change of clothes?’) and young son, as we see that trope rather too often, but if that’s the way it was then that’s the way it was. And also, I won’t hear a word against Tracy. Who should be allowed to run everything.
On to the other five-star show of the week – I spoil you, I know – which is the second season of My Brilliant Friend, as set in Naples and based on the novels by Elena Ferrante.
We are still in the 1950s and even if there was no narrative whatsoever, I’d go away happy, as I am always stunned just by the look of it. Each scene is like a ravishing painting with every inch of canvas used, right up to the corners. (Oh look, there’s a baby bawling on its mother’s knee, top left.) But there is narrative, of course, as we continue to chart the friendship between Lila (Gaia Girace), who is fierce and clever and magnetic and beautiful, and Elena (Margherita Mazzucco), who is diligently studious and more impressionable and also our narrator.
The two have been intertwined since childhood as they fight for their freedom – this is how I see it, anyhow – from fathers, brothers, and now husbands. Lila has married Stefano Carracci, who hasn’t a hope of understanding his wife. And their wedding night? Gruesome. You will have to keep a Wikipedia tab open to remind yourself who’s who – who is Alfonso again? Who is Carmela? – but so worth it. And anyway, you can just look at the cars. Gorgeous, too.