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Britz

Riz Ahmed as Sohail Wahid
  • Posted at 12:02pm
  • 25 October 2007
  • by AlisonGraham-RT

You can see Channel 4’s marketing department faced a big problem when it poured itself a glass of sparkling mineral water and sat down to decide how to promote Britz, its huge two-part drama (Wednesday 31 October and Thursday 1 November). The nights are drawing in, the committee would have pondered, the temperature is dropping and your audience’s trip home from work is probably going to be chilly and bleak.

So, then, after your viewers have turned up the central heating, had a warming evening meal and sat cosily on the sofa, waiting to be entertained, how do we sell them a four-and-a-half-hour drama, spread across two nights, about a suicide bomber? Not easy, is it? Not the kind of cosy, midweek feet-up-with-a-box-of-Bourbons programme that’s going to be highlighted with marker pen in many copies of RT.

What they came up with, as you’ll have seen in the on-screen trails, is to decide to push Britz as a "thriller". Which I suppose it is, though it hardly moves at a thrilling pace. It’s not Spooks. That’s not to say it isn’t gripping, it is, particularly Thursday’s second part.

But really, Britz is a social drama, centred on two very different members of a British Muslim family. Sohail (Riz Ahmed) loves his country and joins MI5, effectively to spy on his friends and neighbours. His sister Nasima (Manjinder Virk) is angry and radicalised after a personal tragedy. Brother and sister thus take very different paths.

Though rewarding – and it’s important to watch both parts, as neither stands alone – I can’t help but feel that Britz could have been better condensed by its author/director, Peter Kosminsky. If the writers of, say, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation had been presented with such a scenario, I’m pretty sure they’d turn out two perfectly polished 40-minute episodes that would deal with such potentially difficult subject matter briskly and without any loss of nuance.

Half Broken Things

ITV1 is a big fan of the psychological thriller, a description that usually means “nothing much happens and it’s not very thrilling anyway”. But Half Broken Things (Sunday 28 October) is an exception. I’ve read Morag Joss’s novel from which the story is adapted, so I knew the ending. But I still got caught up in the feeling of mounting trepidation and dread as a fantasy world constructed by deluded housesitter Jean (Penelope Wilton) threatened to come crashing down.

The National Television Awards

It’s The National Television Awards on Wednesday (31 October, ITV1), which are potentially more laughable than usual this year when you look at the ludicrously soap-stuffed nominations list - Corrie’s Antony Cotton for best actor, anyone?

**

Alison Graham is TV editor of Radio Times.

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