Last week, a submarine; this week, a whaler. Thanks to the BBC’s current drama output, my skin, metaphorically speaking, is all puckered from being in the water. Is it possible, I wonder, to put pills for seasickness on expenses? But never mind.
Though I’m not enjoying The North Water as much as Vigil, and I don’t like it half so much as The Terror, which the BBC also screened not so long ago (Jared Harris and Ciarán Hinds star as the ill-fated captains of two Victorian naval explorer ships searching for the Northwest Passage), it’s pretty good, I think. Unlike a lot of BBC drama, this one is uncompromising. Its producers seem not to care for ticking boxes. So grim is it, in fact, that they’re putting it out after the 9pm watershed.
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