Control was the most notable absence from this week’s new prestige drama The Control Room (BBC One), which played out across three nights at an undeniably relentless pace.
Call handler Gabe, played with puppyish everybloke familiarity by Iain De Caestecker, is a call handler in a Glasgow emergency control room, a setting which was nicely imagined.
There’s tension to these telephone relationships, with Gabe even acting as midwife to one distressed dad-to-be. But when the lines are dead, the boredom of what is essentially mundane call centre life returns.
Until one day Gabe picks up, and hears a distressed woman apparently confessing to the murder she’s just committed. The drama immediately kicks up a gear, and then another when after a few minutes she recognises his voice.
Gabe tells his superiors he has no idea who she was. That, we learn before the first episode’s end, is a lie. Not only does he recognise the voice of the only woman other than his mother who ever called him “Gabo”, but there’s something about their relationship which makes him want to help her – perhaps even to become complicit in her crime. He’s the first one whose control is lost.
Life or death sense
Writer Nick Leather has spoken about finding the inspiration for this story when his daughter wouldn’t wake up one morning and 999 had to be called (she was completely fine in the end). The series certainly has a bracing life-or-death sense about it, especially near the beginning when a sense of normality is balanced with this unusual, unfolding crisis.
In possibly the moment of the entire series, Gabe bravely and stupidly agrees to dispose of a van containing a dead body from under the noses of suspicious crime scene police – and just as he’s getting away with it, the van is wiped out by a drunk driver. Surely there’s no escape?
These flashes of credible high drama are among the series’ best moments. It also looks gorgeous throughout, from grey and futuristic Glasgow to the field of Christmas trees where a showdown is held in darkness, offering the viewer perfect, thrilling confusion.
Great cast
The cast are also great, especially De Caestecker and Daniel Portman as his friend, colleague and confidant Anthony. Taj Atwal is Leigh, another co-worker, who’s confused by the signals Gabe has been sending in their brief relationship. Yet as he falls further into the rabbit hole in pursuit of Sam (Joanna Vanderham), who can he really trust?
As the episodes advanced, though, the subject of control returned to our thoughts – not in relation to Gabe’s predicament, but to the rapidly careering plot.
Where the story began with subtle, captivating shocks, the strategy in later episodes appeared to involve offering more of the same but bigger. Gabe takes ever greater and more stupid risks, while our link to why he’d risk everything for Sam wobbles on an ever more tenuous hint at tragic backstory.
Meanwhile, good characters’ stories are sacrificed left and right for the sake of the plot, with one supporting player at one point essentially telling Gabe what’s going on, and that most people have figured it out before him.
It’s a shame, because this is a well made and acted series which you won’t mind spending time with. It’s just a shame it loses control towards the end.
