It’s a tough job, being an air hostess, isn’t it? One minute, you’re serving drinks to rowdy customers. The next, you’re smuggling three kilos of heroin from Istanbul to London in your luggage. C’est la vie!
Or at least, that’s what In Flight would have us believe. Channel 4’s latest six-part thriller casts Katherine Kelly as Jo, a beloved flight attendant at Avalon – a necessarily vague high-end airline.
She’s good at her job, but her personal life is a shambles. At the very start of the show, Sonny, her son (somebody in the scriptwriting team was unforgivable lazy there) winds up in prison. He’s been banged up in a Bulgarian jail for a crime he says he didn’t commit, which we find out via an overly dramatic opening voicemail.
Jo says she’ll do her best to get him out, but three months later, she’s still spending her days working and her nights highlighter-ing various parts of her son’s legal defence.
Things are stalling. Then she meets a creep at a local bar. “You’re a journalist, aren’t you?” she asks him drunkenly. He’s not; he’s actually a crime boss, and soon enough Jo is being blackmailed.
You see, he has eyes and ears inside the prison, as well as the capacity to ensure Sonny never sees the light of day again. In return for his safety, Jo is being expected to ferry drugs in her luggage from her various overseas destinations, back to the UK.
“You’re a senior member of cabin crew,” the crime boss, Cormac (Stuart Martin), tells her. “It’s one of your usual routes, so you won’t be suspected and you won’t be stopped.”
For Jo, there’s no way out. Comically so, in fact. The Bulgarian lawyer she has hired has been bribed to drop her case. She has no family she can rely on. The police are off-limits and the criminals apparently know every single move she’s going to make, sometimes before she even does it. Cormac also has a nasty habit of lurking in the background at airports, right when Jo’s resolve is wavering. How does he do it?
Fortunately, Jo doesn’t put up too much of a fight. Soon enough she’s googling the jail sentence for drug smuggling in Turkey (24 years, no bother!) and getting her custom drug-smuggling suitcase ready for travel.
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As might be evident from the above, the quality of the show varies. The scenes in which Jo is smuggling said drugs are wonderfully tense, and Kelly sells it utterly – vomiting in the toilet one minute, staring of glazy-eyed into the distance the next. She has a wonderfully expressive face; the kind that can switch from woebegone to terrified in a nanosecond, and both of those expressions are working overtime here.
Other elements, mainly the plot, don’t stand up. There’s an intriguing, if extremely convenient, relationship with customs officer Dom (Ashley Thomas) to contend with. As we find out, the pair had a brief fling while Dom was broken up with his wife, and fortunately for Jo, Dom still seems to harbour a soft spot for her. Soft enough to let her get away with her increasing list of crimes? We’ll see.
To be honest, this isn’t the kind of show to think too hard about. It rattles along pleasingly enough, and Kelly is magnetic in the lead role, which just about keeps things on the rails. The plot doesn’t make sense, but as lazy Tuesday night viewing, it fits the bill. Chocks away.
In Flight is streaming now on Channel 4
