Tense, claustrophobic, gripping, thrilling, realistic: just some of the adjectives no one is using to describe BBC1’s Sunday night submarine drama Vigil. Were one of Britain’s four Vanguard nuclear subs to launch retaliatory strikes on Broadcasting House and the show’s producer World Productions, I think it would be entirely reasonable and proportionate. It’s so amateurish and implausible it makes even the dreadful Sky One remake of Das Boot look classy by comparison.
Which is a shame because its screenwriter, Tom Edge, has done some good stuff in the past. Besides writing for The Crown and on the likeable J.K. Rowling detective series Strike, Edge created and wrote three series of the funny, charming comedy Lovesick (original title Scrotal Recall), starring Johnny Flynn. You can still probably find it on Netflix and it’s a far more rewarding use of your time than Vigil.
Someone depth charge HMS Vigil now and put us all out of our misery
What happened, I’m guessing, is what happens to so many talented writers when they get sucked into the primetime TV drama sausage machine. Out goes the quirkiness, the originality, the wit; in comes the hackneyed dialogue, the implausible plotting and the box-ticking.
It’s supposed to be a nuclear sub yet mysteriously it runs on diesel; its captain and crew are so incompetent that when the sub surfaces it nearly gets decapitated by a giant oil tanker that its electronic equipment has failed to notice. If the skipper hadn’t spotted it with his periscope, causing them to dive dive dive just in the nick of time, it would have been curtains. Given that we know how tough the ‘perisher’ course is, and we know how much submarine design has come on since the era of Das Boot, how is any of this remotely likely?
Apparently — so various navy types have complained — the uniforms are wrong; the ceilings are too high and the sub generally far too spacious; the security at the RN base in Scotland is impossibly lax; there’s no way a sub commander would call his XO (Executive Officer; 2ic) a ‘prick’ in front of his crew, nor would a shore-based rear admiral act quite so pompously and high-handedly towards either police or civilians.
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