Peter Viney's Blog

The Salisbury Poisonings
BBC Mini-series

14 -16 June 2020

Directed by Saul Dibb
Written by Adam Patterson (1 & 2)  & Declan Lawn (3)
Music by Rael Jones

Rafe Spall – Detective-Sergeant Nick Bailey
Annabel Scholey – Sarah Bailey
Anne-Marie Duff- Tracy Daskiewicz, Wiltshire Director of Public Health
William Houston – Ted Daskiewicz
Mark Addy- Ross Cassidy
Clare Burt – Mo Cassidy
Darren Boyd – Supt David Minty
Jonathan Slinger – Tim Atkins, Porton Down scientist
Myanna Buring – Dawn Sturgess
Johnny Harris- Charlie Rowley

The DVD – due immerdiately

The series was broadcast on three consecutive nights, so as to retain impact. The director, Saul Dibb sums up the intent well:

SAUL DIBB: It works as a narrative on a number of different levels. It’s partly a domestic drama, partly a thriller, and partly a very prescient virus horror, of this invisible enemy that can kill lots of people. So it was about finding ways to harness all of those things to be able to tell a story which I think all of us felt had the potential to be more than a straightforward docu-drama. And it’s extraordinarily surreal, this weird thing happening in the middle of this small British cathedral city, that even if you were directly poisoned or not, everybody – it seemed to me – became contaminated by this poison.
BBC News website

It is clear that there are many Coronavirus parallels, hence the power of the production right at this point in time.

The other  power of The Salisbury Poisonings for us is that it was filmed where it happened, and we know that part of Salisbury extremely well. Karen would describe it as between the crystal shop and Salisbury Playhouse. In fact, some of the footage is news footage from the original event.

Salisbury Playhouse is one of our favourite theatres over twenty years. I try not to miss their original productions, because they are a producing theatre. We sometimes park in the car park by Sainsburys where the Skripals car was. Sainsburys is in full view in the film. More often we park across town in the Old George Mall, because we’ve found it faster to walk across and drive onto the south end of the ring road than sit in traffic from the north end to drive around it.

Skripal was a Soviet spy, working for the West who was swapped in 2010 and domiciled in Salisbury. He had just collected his daughter, who was visiting from Russia, the day before. They went into Salisbury, had a drink in The Mill, ate in Zizzi restaurant, sat on a park bench and succumbed to the nerve agent Novichok. It had been placed on the door handle of their house.

The poisoning of the Skripals did enormous harm to  Salisbury. Last time we were at the Playhouse, in February 2020, just before lockdown, the city still had not fully recovered two years on. There is a marvellous Indian restaurant, Anokaa, in Fisherton Street near the Playhouse which you used to have to book for their buffet lunch. It was empty. The whole town is quieter.

The poisoning was an extraordinary event. Two Russians flew into Britain just for a couple of days, allegedly so they could see Salisbury Cathedral. The big thing was there might be a little dusting of snow, a sight so rare for Russians (!). Russia doesn’t care in the least and continued to respond with patent lies. Just as they manipulated the US election and got Trump in, and funded Brexit. So now we have two clowns in power in the West.

I was hoping for scenes of Putin plotting and giving direct orders, but no. The series focusses on the emergency services and their dilemma and features the first responder Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey (Rafe Spall), as the one who got contaminated and hospitalized. Anne-Marie Duff plays Tracy Daskiewicz, the Wiltshire Director of Public Health who had to deal with the aftermath. Jonathan Slinger appears as Tim Atkins, the Porton Down scientist explaining that the poison, the nerve agent Novichok, could exist fifty years and potentially kill tens of thousands. We have seen far too little of Jonathan Slinger on screen.

I didn’t enjoy it. To me it was nothing more than a triple length episode of Casualty. They took the human angle by focussing first on Bailey, the police officer who got contaminated, then on Dawn Sturgess who picked up the perfume bottle the Novichok was stored in. There were so many scenes of hospital beds and masks on patients, I kept thinking we’d wandered into a news report on Coronavirus. Detective Sergeant Bailey had been wearing a contamination suit and latex gloves when he responded but it didn’t help. He spent two weeks in deepest intensive care.  The police bought his house, and the Skripals house and destroyed everything in them.

In Episode 2, the hospital staff line up to clap Sergeant Bailey as he leaves hospital. Did they do that in 2018? It seems such a Coronavirus event.

Karen thought it important that they focussed on the human cost on a few individuals, and that they treated Dawn Sturgess, the only one to die, with dignity. That was in stark contrast to the muckraking tabloids. They portrayed her family well. Four months after the initial attack, Dawn’s boyfriend Charlie Rowley had found a plastic container with what he thought was a bottle of perfume inside a charity shop bin. He gave it to Dawn, who sprayed it on her wrists.

Since then, the real Nick Bailey has tried to return to work twice and couldn’t cope due to memory loss and depression,

That’s important indeed but it was all so solemn, with far, far too many shots of Anne-Marie Duff as the beleaguered public health official, looking miserable.

I differ on the approach the writers took.

The perpetrators got away with a radio report in a car of eighty (Wiki says twenty-three) Russians expelled from the embassy (?). The two assassins were mentioned in a few seconds as starting their trip in a Holiday Inn with a bag of marijuana and a “hooker.” Do British people say hooker? It sounds American to me. Their recreational activities were hardly the point. Blame needed laying. It wasn’t. Fingers needed pointing. They weren’t.

The REAL CCTV footage

Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov (aka Anataloy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin) were charged in absentia, with Interpol warrants. They are said to be agents of Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate, the GRU. Putin laughed in our faces. No, they would not be extradited. I don’t recall their names even being mentioned over the three hours.

PUTIN:  Treason is the gravest crime possible and traitors must be punished. I am not saying that the Salisbury incident is the way to do it. Not at all. But traitors must be punished. Listen, all this fuss about spies and counterspies, it is not worth serious interstate relations. This spy story, as we say, it is not worth five kopecks. Or even five pounds, for that matter.

It all seemed to come from the sky. We heard very little about the Skripals, who like Sergeant Bailey, survived. (They are reported to have moved to New Zealand).

Which brings me to another point. Central Salisbury was cordoned off for months. Twenty emergency vehicles were destroyed, as were cars parked near the Skripals’ car. The point was made that they’d washed down the area immediately afterwards and flushed it into the river. Hang on! Doesn’t that river come out at Christchurch near us!

Was the balance right?  There was nothing on the economic effect on a whole community. The town rallied round … when Zizzi eventually re-opened, there were long queues to get in and show solidarity. Actually, I’ll admit cowardice. While it was shut we were looking for a restaurant in a town many miles from Salisbury, were about to go into Zizzi, and thought, ‘Hang on! Say they moved tables and chairs from Salisbury?’ (No. Everything was destroyed by the police, I hasten to add).

Did the city need to be shut down for that many months? Was it truly that deadly to tens of thousands of people for fifty years? The victim had sprayed it heavily onto herself. The Skripals had merely touched a door handle.

The series got four star reviews in The Telegraph and The Guardian.

To me, it was “The Salisbury Poisonings: The Soap Opera.”

LINKS ON THIS BLOG:

RAFE SPALL
Jurassic World: The Fallen Kingdom
One Day

ANN-MARIE DUFF
Macbeth, National Theatre 2018,Lady Macbeth

JONATHAN SLINGER
Macbeth, RSC 2011 as Macbeth
The Tempest RSC 2012 as Prospero
Comedy of Errors RSC ’12  as Dr Pinch
Twelfth Night RSC 2012    as Malvolio
Hamlet RSC 2013  as Hamlet
All’s Well That Ends Well RSC 2013 as Paroles
Plastic, by Marius von Mayenburg, Bath 2017
Absolute Hell, National, 2018
The Provoked Wife, RSC2019

MARK ADDY
The Hypocrite, RSC 2017

CLARE BURT
Miss Littlewood, RSC, 2018
This Is My Family, Chichester 2019