Young Muslim Britain

Peter Kosminsky’s Britz (Channel 4, Wednesday and Thursday) was heavily flagged beforehand as a drama that was going to annoy a lot of people. Naturally, I assumed that one of those people would be me. It came in two parts, the first telling the story of Sohail, a young Bradford Muslim recruited by MI5, the second about his sister, Nasima, who, would you credit it, becomes a suicide bomber. At the end, everyone dies.

Kosminsky based it on interviews with British Muslims in ‘Leeds, Bradford, the Midlands and London’, though not, I suspect, with many people from MI5. Which is to say that the first episode felt more like Spooks than gritty, observational drama. When MI5 officers give in-house briefings, do they really have sensurround-style banks of TV screens rather than just the one? Is the room where they listen to bugged telephone conversations really bathed in eerie blue light, like a sinister marine aquarium? Do you always get allocated an attractive blonde mentor who then shags you? (And, if so, how can MI5 possibly be still having recruitment problems?)

I have a feeling that Kosminsky’s heart was much more into the wordy, worthy, stilted but nonetheless harrowing and effective second episode, about how a nice, bright, middle-class, not very religious Muslim girl with everything to live for chucks in her medical career to become a suicide bomber.