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In retirement, comedy legends and best pals Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner would hang out together and watch films. They told The New York Times that they sought out movies with lines like: “Secure the perimeter”, “Lock all doors!”, and “I want a five-block seal!”. If they’d managed to decode all the UK regional accents, Brooks and Reiner would, you suspect, have had a fine old time with Nightsleeper.
The six-episode BBC thriller plays out in real time as a Glasgow-to-London sleeper train is – and I learned a new word here – hackjacked. That’s a hijacking, but instead of terrorists using guns to take control of a vehicle, they use a credit card-sized computer and miles of code. In our brave new hyperconnected world, it’s not just celebrity nudes that are vulnerable to hacking.
Nobody knows this better than Abby Aysgarth, Acting Technical Director at the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre. Played by Utopia’s Alexandra Roach, Abby’s a fast-thinking whizz kid (think Lisbeth Salander, but Welsh, sardonic, and without the trauma) whose career ascendance means she has something to prove to the naysayers. When we meet Abby, she and girlfriend Meg (Remy Beasley) have one foot on a plane to Marrakesh for a long-overdue break. And then – we’ve all been there – the office calls. Their holiday goes on ice, and Abby spends the next six hours sweating out of her eyeballs and simultaneously using six mobile phones to devise ingenious attempts to stop the train, while being taunted by the hackers. Abby is cool. To someone (me) who has only a 50/50 success rate of getting on the free Wi-Fi in any given branch of Pret, she’s a modern day hero. If anybody can save The Heart of Britain’s passengers, it’s her.
Luckily (?) for Abby, those passengers include Joe Roag, a Met police officer with a very particular set of skills. Played by Gangs of London and Peaky Blinders’ Joe Cole, Roag is proficient in firearms, hostage negotiation, gallows humour, and looking good in a t-shirt. With Abby at HQ in London and Joe on board the train, they form a remote team to try to defeat the hackers and keep everybody alive. If Nightsleeper had been made in the 90s, this would have been their meet-cute and the start of a beautiful romance; at times it feels as if this script wishes it were.
In the ‘keep everyone alive’ goal, it’s no real spoiler to say that Abby and Joe don’t succeed. Not everybody makes it, but each of the passengers does get a go under the ‘are they guilty?’ spotlight. The spinning carousel of suspects is an opportunity taken by creator Nick Leather (The Control Room, Mother’s Day, Murdered for Being Different) to sprinkle over some state-of-the-nation and class-clash texture. In short: if hell is other people, then that goes double when you’re hurtling towards certain doom at 110mph in club class and there’s a free bar.
Character-wise, it’s a country house murder mystery-style mix, and almost everybody has something to hide. There’s an abrasive accountant (Alex Ferns), a self-interested politician (Sharon Small), an activist solicitor (Ruth Madeley), a truth-seeking journalist (Katie Leung), a retired train driver (Brian Cosmo), a couple of train workers (Sharon Rooney and Scott Reid)… Over in HQ is a similar assortment of stern authority figures (Pamela Nomvete), narky stick-in-the-muds (Parth Thakerer), and tech genius renegades (Gabriel Howell). David Threlfall’s Pev is one of the latter, a beardy metal fan and ex-employee who left HQ under a cloud but who predicted this whole mess could happen and has come out of retirement to lend his expertise.
Everything goes as we’ve come to expect from the genre: action, tension, twists, brief attempts to construct (unnecessary, frankly, but the effort’s appreciated) emotional lives for the characters, more action, more twists… a lot of urgently delivered “secure the perimeter”-style instructions and breath-held moments while characters silently watch flashing lights on massive screens. If you enjoyed recent British thrillers Bodyguard, Vigil and Redeye, then you know the score. You’ll be gripped while you’re watching, but it’ll go out of your mind by the time the credits roll and won’t trouble you until you’re next fighting for a seat on the daily commute.
Generally though, it’s compelling stuff, well-handled by directors John Hayes and Jamie Magnus Stone, with two good leads in Roach and Cole, and a fun sideline in satirical swipes at government and, of course, the UK rail service. As a story of course, it’s also totally unrealistic, far-fetched, and would never happen in real life. That train from Glasgow to London only left the station 10 minutes late and involved not a single rail replacement bus. Ridiculous.
All episodes of Nightsleeper are available to stream on BBC iPlayer now.
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