I wonder, sometimes, if Katherine Kelly misses her days as Becky McDonald in Coronation Street. Yes, Becky was a once-homeless, thieving ex-con who worked her way through the full panoply of soap storylines (abuse, miscarriage, drink problem, buying a child, marrying Steve, smashing up Tracy Barlow’s front room with a sledgehammer, a stint in the Rovers Return) before her departure from the cobbled streets for a new life in Barbados after a triumphant wedding-reception-wrecking, but, y’know, she got to have a laugh while she was doing it.
This was during the early 00s, when Coronation Street still dealt in comedy as well as tragedy, recognising them as two sides of the same life coin, especially among the barmaids – fully formed or embryonic battleaxes all – gazing out on the world and its punters as they wearily pulled pints behind the bar.
Since then, Kelly’s output has largely been one of unrelenting grimness. I can’t remember the last time she took a main role in anything that required a lightness of touch, let alone the exercise of her comic chops. And never more so than in her latest outing, the exhausting six-part thriller In Flight, in which she plays a desperate single mother, Joanne, whose son, Sonny, is sentenced to 15 years in a Bulgarian prison for a murder he swears he did not commit. Oh God, the suffering! The bleak, bleak suffering!
Joanne sits opposite her boy as he cries and gibbers at the thought of spending years – if he is not shanked by breakfast time – in the terrifying hellhole run by thugs (it is safe to say that the Bulgarian tourist board will not be happy with In Flight). She goes home and trawls through his case files again, in preparation for a hearing that promises to be just as unsuccessful as all the others.
It is almost a relief when the thriller proper begins; give me raw suspense over emotional battery any day. Joanne, a long-haul flight attendant, is approached by a menacing man called Cormac (Stuart Martin) and presented with a non-opportunity: start smuggling drugs for the cartel he represents and get her son protected in prison – albeit at the risk of life imprisonment or the death penalty herself, depending on whether she gets caught and in which country – or refuse and get him killed. Cormac hands her a suitcase with a false bottom, tips on how to disguise the smell of the heroin she is told to pick up in Istanbul, and vanishes into the night after warning her not to tell anyone.
She tells Dominic (Ashley Thomas). He is a customs officer and they had a thing while he was separated from his wife. He is now back with his wife and trying to make a go of things, but he and Joanne still gaze at each other yearningly across the baggage carousel.
Thus the stage is set for – well, hours of ordinary people being terrorised into acts of increasingly inventive desperation, really. There are lots of set pieces ratcheting up the tension as Joanne is nearly caught in the act again and again and kilos of drugs have to be hidden in tampon dispensers.
Ambiguous conversations are held and more and moren trusted folk turn out to be corrupt horrors; you would simply give anything to make it stop. Partly so Joanne and Sonny’s anguish can end, partly so yours can.
I don’t know if this counts as a successful thriller or not. Clearly, it works to the extent that the viewer is invested enough to be discomfited along with the characters. Equally clearly, the choking airlessness of it all is … not entertaining, especially with a script that dispenses necessary information in as unadorned a manner as possible.
But I am a coward when it comes to the drug-smuggling thriller format. I feel as if I am being forced to watch a dog chew off its own leg to escape from a trap. But for those who love precisely that about it, In Flight will be a classic of the genre: the claustrophobic nature of it all, the endangerment of hapless innocents and the reminder of the evil that spreads untrammelled across space and history are a cluster of superb selling points. It’s brisk, it’s well made, it’s entirely harrowing. I wish you your strange, strange joy of it.
In Flight airs on Channel 4 and is available online now