“Die Hard in a…” is a commissioner’s dream pitch. The protagonist is, often reluctantly, called to action when they find themselves trapped in a location, cut off from help. Throw in a group of stock characters plus a ticking clock element and bingo — you’ve got the skeleton of your plot.
The commissioner will throw questions at the producer and writer to stir creative juices. “What if the train can’t be stopped? What if the hijacker isn’t even on board and it’s all been done remotely? What if one of the passengers is in on the plot?” The question no one considered with Nightsleeper was: “What if ITV and AppleTV+ had both recently made better versions of this story with a greater sense of scale and cast members far better suited to their roles?”
Joe Cole takes the John Mclaine role as Joe Roag, a former policeman (the hero is usually ex-police or ex-military, so they come ready-made with the fighting and technical skills required for what’s to come). He’s an ex-Detective Inspector with a murky past, though the baby-faced actor barely looks old enough to have made it to CID, let alone reached the rank of D.I. — and the beard he’s grown to try to hide this doesn’t succeed. He’s on the “Heart of Britain” train sleeper service from Glasgow to London, and it’s been remotely hijacked via computer (a manoeuvre the show clunkily dubs “hackjacking”), following a cyber-attack, and whoever is remotely operating it is demanding a ransom.
The God perspective in this story comes in the form of the National Cyber Security Agency, headed by Abby Aysgarth (Alexandra Roach), who, like Cole, looks too young and feels like they don’t belong in the role. With her pudding bowl hair and art student jacket, it’s impossible to take the character too seriously. If this was Slow Horses, her entire arc would be to enter, hand Kristin Scott-Thomas a folder and then leave. Here, she’s running a government department.
The casting is a huge problem. It’s like the B-team have turned up to play. When Leslie Sharp is heading up a crisis in Red Eye, she’s believable in the role as an experienced, competent professional who would be working in the role. In Nightsleeper, Abby comes across like a supply teacher nervously stumbling into a classroom, exuding anxiety. The rest of her crew are a collection of 2D cutouts, barring a criminally underused David Thewlis doing his best to inject some character and humour into the proceedings as an aging raver computer expert.
Despite all the dramatic pauses for camera, the pacey editing and the score that’s trying to subtly ape the far superior Line of Duty, Nightsleeper lacks a sense of real jeopardy and the stakes feel low. There’s only a handful of passengers and it’s a train, after all – it’s limited in where it can go by the tracks on the ground, so it’s not like it can go smashing into The House of Commons. Similar genre shows Red Eye and Hijack ramp up the danger by setting their events on planes, meaning 200+ lives minimum at risk, plus the unpredictability of what the aircraft might crash into, causing additional carnage. Here, the target is Euston station and everyone knows it, meaning they have hours to evacuate the station and surrounding area.
The concept is fantastical but it still needs to operate within the confines of believability. If a train was actually highjacked, the police and Security Services would take charge, with Abby’s cyber agency one of many departments reporting to them. Here, the computer boffins are apparently running the whole operation, with direct control over police helicopters and the ability to instantly access the conveniently high-quality and well-covered CCTV of mid-budget airport hotels to aid their investigations. In the real world this would involve sending people to the site to argue with exhausted staff while they try to find the keys to the CCTV hardware cupboard. Here, civil servants can just bring up the feed instantly. Audiences will allow one or two suspensions of disbelief, but Nightsleeper keeps lobbing them and moving on quickly, hoping no one will notice.
Many of the supporting cast do their best with the material, with James Cosmo and Sharon Small always reliable. The action moments, and there are a few to look forward to, are done well. But the problems begin with the script. Attempts to engineer chemistry between the two leads, like having them quoting Kate Nash song lyrics to each other on the phone, fall completely flat. Some of the dialogue is cringeworthy, like Abby’s responding to news that Police are kicking down the doors of suspects with the line: “We only use the back doors. And we don’t kick in. We log in.” As Harrison Ford once said to George Lucas: you can write this stuff down, but you can’t say it out loud.
Some will enjoy Nightsleeper, taken in by the momentum of the speeding train, which gives the most convincing performance of the ensemble. It’s a show designed to be cut into exciting “next time” clips and trailers which will draw people in. But they will, in all likelihood, find themselves pulling the emergency brake at the next available stop.
All 6 episodes of Nightsleeper are now available to stream on BBC iPlayer.
