Earlier this year, ITV brought us Red Eye, a six-part drama set mainly on an overnight plane from London to Beijing. Displaying a heroic indifference to plausibility, the show was an increasingly deranged mash-up of every thriller convention known to man – while still posing (when it remembered to) as a thoughtful exploration of realpolitik.
By the end, it was all so daft that the biggest influence no longer seemed to be Speed, but Airplane!
Funnily enough, this week’s Nightsleeper was much the same thing – only this time on an overnight train from Glasgow to London. The first sign that the passengers wouldn’t get a restful sleep before Euston came when a mysterious beeping device with lots of wires was discovered in the guardroom floor. Luckily, the man who discovered it was Joe Roag (Joe Cole), a Met detective who happened to know the switchboard number of the National Security Cyber Centre.
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