Hijacked train drama almost goes off the rails, but fury keeps it on track

Nightsleeper
★★★½
Stan* from September 16

In some ways, the BBC series Nightsleeper is a thoroughly generic action thriller involving a runaway train on a fast track to disaster. No one is going to be terribly surprised by how things unfold, but there’s pleasure enough to be had in the journey to its final destination.

But in some other ways, this six-part series is a product of a unique set of circumstances, owing as much to the politics of modern-day Britain and the nation’s uncertain place in Europe as it does to the conventions of the genre.

The train is a high-speed dual-powered (electric and diesel) intercity express, the Heart of Britain, which is hijacked by hackers – or hackjacked, as the show desperately insists we call it – soon after it leaves Glasgow bound for London.

The hackjackers might be Iranian terrorists, they might be organised crime, they might be insiders within the British security system. Or they might simply be any of the millions of disgruntled rail passengers in Britain tired of delays, cancellations and the most insanely complicated ticketing system ever devised (I mean, have you ever tried to book an intercity ticket in the UK? Does anyone really need 200-plus options, and prices, to choose from?)

As luck (aka the storytelling gods) would have it, there’s a supremely resourceful policeman on board (Joe Cole), and a wildly gifted cybersecurity expert on the case (Alexandra Roach) trying to crack the code at HQ in London. But as bad luck (aka those same storytelling gods) would have it, they each have a murky past: Joe Roag is a bent copper (well, with a name like that, he’d have to be), while Abby Aysgarth is a former hacker herself.

The plot (from writer Nick Leather) contrives to have most of the passengers disembark before the end of the first episode, leaving us with a neat dozen stuck onboard the train when it takes off again, this time without a driver. Abby is convinced one of the hijackers is onboard, which effectively turns the Heart of Britain into a modern-day Orient Express. But is Joe our Poirot, or is he a suspect? And can it really be a coincidence that the government’s transport minister (Sharon Small) is a passenger?

Nightsleeper tries to pack so many twists and turns into its plotting (despite the fact that much of the action is just people looking at screens or talking on phones) that it’s often in danger of going completely off the rails. The cliffhangers stretch credulity at times, but it’s the palpable sense of anger at a corrupt and incompetent Tory government that keeps it interesting, along with the implications of privatisation and deregulation. For all that it mimics the wind-up clock dynamics of an Agatha Christie novel, this show is concerned with the real world too.