#6: Litvinenko
I ask only why - why was this made? For all intents and purposes, well actually I’m not sure what the intents and purposes are, so for the intended intents and purposes, whatever those may be, this is good television. Sharp, relatively interesting, but largely a memory of the past that’s intending to kind of shovel something political into our faces under the surface.
We all know the Litvinenko story, we all remember the picture. A former Russian spy poisoned in an Itsu in broad daylight in London might sound like a really awful pitch for a Channel 5 detective drama with a brooding, likely Gaelic lead actor with alcohol issues. In actuality, this really did happen, and it sounds ridiculously British to have done it in an Itsu.
Itsu’s aren’t even that good — maybe the whole thing wasn’t about corruption maybe it was about mass-produced high street food chains. It’s most likely not, it would be a bit much to poison a man with polonium because Itsu exists. Anyhow, as decent television as Litvinenko is, adding to ITV’s ever-growing slate of true British crime dramas, it felt distinctly lacking in valid reason.
It’s not that television necessarily needs to have a reason beyond entertainment, it’s that it often gets embroiled in having a reason beyond entertainment. Collectively, we seem to care quite a lot about what is put on our screens, especially when it comes to the BBC. Litvinenko probably couldn’t have been made by an ‘unbias’ broadcaster like the Beeb, so its home was always naturally going to be ITV. Though, the issue I have with Litvinenko is not that it is historically inaccurate, or that it is necessarily politically motivated, I think most people in the country would not be pro-Russian corruption, nor would they like to down polonium in an Itsu in central London.
The issue I have with the production of this show is that it feels like it was made too soon — that there is more to unpack, that it is not yet sufficiently ‘historical’ enough, if anything can be sufficiently historical— it’s still to close in time to be accurately analysed.
I remember a saying when I was studying history that was along the lines of ‘you’ve got to wait 25 years before anything can really be ‘historical’’. That is, you have to wait a quarter of a century before the full extent of an event, someone’s life, or even a whole time period, can be assessed. TV shows and films naturally present to us a motive, if we’re being cynical, or a moral, if we’re being naively nice. ‘Litvinenko’ is no different. However, I feel that while the Putin presidency rages on, ‘Litvinenko’ served as an untimely reminder of what’s going on in the world. We know Putin, we know that he has invaded Ukraine and that he is on some kind of seeming last hurrah before he tackles one too many bears. ‘Litvinenko’ is void of direction because of this — it’s not really about the man who was poisoned at Itsu, but it seems to be ITV’s attempt to cash in on calamity.
Of course, one would only regard it as cashing in on calamity because, well, that’s my opinion based on the fact that history can’t be fully wrestled with unless it happened 25 years ago. That being said, if we take other examples, namely James Graham’s excellently titled political drama ‘Brexit: The Uncivil War’, you wouldn’t be out of your mind to suggest that it was a great representation of what lay behind the 2016 EU referendum’s curtain and was produced in 2019. So, if that was a good representation, made only three years after the event itself, why can Litvinenko, made 16 years after the event, be regarded as, well, great.
The answer to this is, I think, that ‘Litvinenko’ clearly doesn’t attempt to be a singular story, it is quite obviously part of a wider narrative of Russian collusion and corruption. ‘Brexit: The Uncivil War’, however, delivers to us singular events. It is a retelling without a whimper of the broadcaster attempting to portray some kind of moral goodness — if Channel 4 wanted to do this, they wouldn’t have presented us a weirdly likeable version of Dominic Cummings via the beloved Benedict Cumberbatch… or maybe they did that accidentally and just couldn’t resist putting a bald cap on a man with such wondrous curls. That would suggest immoral practice to me.
This review, I realise, is not so much about ‘Litvinenko’, but that’s not a problem because ‘Litvinenko’ isn’t really about ‘Litvinenko’ it's about ITV going ‘oh yeah, remember that? everyone’s talking about Russia at the moment let's make that they’ll watch it’. We did, so more fool us. This is more about how we present historical drama on-screen, Chernobyl is the obvious comparison point. It is a part of that Russian corruption canon, but was given to us 33 years after it happened — we knew the outlay, its effects, not just on those in the town but around the world.
So I revert back to my original question: why was this made? Do we know the full extent of the ‘Litvinenko’ segment of this wider story? I would hasten to say no, given that the men who did it still haven’t come to justice. It kind of feels like making a WWII film during WWII. I know the Nazis did that but they lost so clearly it’s a shit idea.
Lastly, as a stand-alone drama in and of itself, ‘Litvinenko’ is a good watch. If you can drag your mind away from the obvious connotations it is making and enjoy (?) it as a piece of historical intrigue then do. I couldn’t, but I did feel like I knew far more about the poisoning. Mainly that it happened in Itsu. Actually, maybe it didn’t happen in Itsu, maybe it was in a hotel. Or maybe that’s what they want me to think?
Lastly, lastly, don’t be swayed by David Tennant’s beleaguered face being strewn and stretched pixel by pixel across the ITVX site, he is in it for about 15 minutes. He’s great. Neil Maskell is quite dull but nice, inoffensive to be exact. Sam Troughton and Mark Bonnar are weirdly funny for a suspenseful drama, and despite being actually Russian Margaret Levieva somehow seems to butcher the accent.
SYSW Rating: 6/10 — worth a watch if you’ve already seen The Bear, Banshees of Inisherin, Happy Valley, Waterloo Road, LOST, Star Wars, and Hancock’s Half Hour.
