On one end of the line, a man is speaking reassuringly into a landline, twirling a pen between his fingers. On the other, the audience can hear tinny screaming as a woman goes into labour in a broken-down car. He’s attempting to coach her panicked partner in the intricacies of childbirth; a cheer goes up in the control room as the baby is born.
Such is the life of the staff of the control room – that switchboard that deals with 999 calls. Overworked and underappreciated, they work as on-call nurses, amateur police officers and– later on in this TV series – accomplices to a crime.
Welcome to The Control Room, the BBC’s newest police-procedural thriller.
The premise is simple. Gabe, an emergency call handler in Glasgow’s Strathclyde control room, gets a call from a distressed woman. Normally all in a day’s work for Gabe, but this time the caller, Sam, knows him, and she needs his help.
Who exactly Sam is, and what she needs his help with I won’t say. However, in his attempts to protect her and fix the situation, Gabe (Iain de Caestecker, who first found fame on the other side of the pond as scientist Fitz in small-screen Marvel spin-off Agents of SHIELD) finds himself descending into a rabbit hole of chaos and violence.
Shot in various shades of black and umber, there’s a hazy, vaguely claustrophobic air to it all. People peer out of windows from unlit rooms and drive down highways in the middle of the night. The forbidding landscape, switching between Glasgow’s urban sprawl and the trees and lochs outside it, is almost a character in itself.
And there’s a lot of angst. Everybody is at odds with each other – Gabe and his estranged father (touchingly played by Bodyguard’s Stuart Bowman); Gabe and his work colleague Anthony (Daniel Portman, aka Podrick from Game of Thrones); Gabe and pretty much everybody, actually.
Not that Gabe is an antagonist. On the contrary, De Caestecker plays him with puppy-dog eyes and a kind of helpless, lost air that makes you want to pat him on the head and tell him everything will be alright.
He’s a man with few real connections or convictions, so you can understand why he’d drop everything when this mysterious woman comes calling.
The problem is that Joanna Vanderham’s character Sam, who forms one of those connections, is less fleshed out, with no real personality to make the audience root for her rather than see her as a source of endless inconvenience.
Fortunately, the action itself (featuring, among other things, blackmail, car crashes and run-ins with the police) gets more and more nail-biting with each episode. The show’s writer, Nick Leather, keeps ratcheting up the tension and claustrophobia, as Gabe finds himself in ever-more compromising situations while trying to maintain a façade of innocence in front of his colleagues.
Sadly, the Control Room itself doesn’t feature all that much, which is a shame, because it’s a fascinating environment that doesn’t often find itself in the police procedural spotlight. What drives somebody to become a emergency call handler? How does it feel to navigate such a high-pressure environment day after day?
These questions are left unanswered. Instead, we get mysterious flashbacks to Gabe’s childhood and high-stress situations galore as he attempts to reconcile the two halves of his life and avoid the vultures circling him.
It feels very much like the BBC is trying to replicate the success of the teeth-grindingly stressful Martin Freeman series The Responder. The Control Room doesn’t get there, and it certainly doesn’t move the genre forward, but it’s an exciting watch nevertheless.
