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Holiday Hell!

But Keeley had me on the edge of my seat

Kathryn Flett My

CROSSFIRE TUESDAY, BBC1

hhhh

After a turbulent fortnight following the Queen’s death, TV audiences may well have been searching for potentially comforting combinations of consolation and distraction. So where to turn? The BBC’S three-part drama Crossfire, starring Keeley Hawes, was initially scheduled to run on consecutive nights from last Monday but was inevitably shunted around before finally starting last Tuesday. And if it was ‘escapism’ you were after then Crossfire delivered – not least because its shooters-on-the-loose plot was set inside a hotel in the Canaries, where former copper-turned-security consultant Jo (a compelling Hawes) was holidaying with her husband, their two young children and her older daughter from a previous marriage. So far, so Happy (modern, blended, mixed-race) Families.

Somewhat less plausibly, however,

Jo was forced to save her family, her relationship and her friends

Jo and co were also on holiday with their closest friends. Personally, I find organising my own holidays hard enough without attempting to co-ordinate other people’s schedules, so the fact that a bunch of busy middle-aged people with careers and kids could pull it off in just a few weeks (via flashbacks, we discovered that the idea of an Easter holiday was conceived at New Year’s Eve) felt like dramatic sleightof-hand by writer Louise Doughty.

The author of the novel Apple

Tree Yard (a huge hit when adapted for the BBC in 2017), Doughty’s storytelling comfort-zone is exploring what happens when outwardly strong and capable women find themselves in situations during which events spiral out of their control. In Apple Tree Emily Watson’s Yvonne had a fling with Ben Chaplin’s Mark that got very dark, very fast, while in Crossfire it’s the unfolding of Jo’s relationship with one of her husband’s oldest friends (on the same holiday, with his family...) set against the backdrop of a couple of angry gunmen running around firing at holidaymakers.

As Jo was forced to refresh her policing skills, it fell to her to try to save her family, her relationship, the lives of her friends and the other hotel guests and staff. It was a big ask – and her journey was predictably edge-of-the-seat with inevitable twists; the excellent Hawes (who also co-produced) was the glue that successfully bound together some slightly frayed plot strands.

Lots of viewers will want to catch up with it on iplayer, so I don’t want

to give too much away. However, if there was anything about Crossfire that felt slightly jarring it was the BBC’S diversity-in-action checklist – ensuring Jo’s tight friendship group (great performances from Royal Shakespeare Company stalwart Josette Simon OBE, Line Of Duty star Anneika Rose and Shalisha James-davis as Jo’s daughter) felt slightly forced, while the shooters’ own motives were so vague they felt less like a proper plot than a neat plot device. The random-shooter-withno-clear-motive also appeared in the otherwise entirely brilliant Sherwood – I hope it isn’t simply a trend deployed in order not to offend.

However, while enjoying much of Crossfire’s welcome escapism it was the series’s final shot that pulled me up short. The close-up of a uniformed police officer adjusting their hat with its shiny ‘E II R’ badge was – suddenly, unexpectedly – certainly far more emotionally emblematic than the show’s creators could ever have predicted.

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2022-09-24T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-09-24T07:00:00.0000000Z

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