Television does love a bit of law and order, doesn’t it? Whether it’s Line of Duty or Slow Horses, we’re forever bombarded with small screen depictions of right being separated from wrong. Enough? Seemingly not, because here comes Showtrial to offer up more.
This is the second series of the BBC anthology, which follows a splashy court trial that prompts a media frenzy and hooks the nation. The first, broadcast in 2021, focused on a student who’d gone missing in Bristol, while this second – different story, different actors – lands in Brighton, a place where climate activists are thriving, closing roads, protecting trees, and giving the local constabulary a right old headache.
When leading activist Marcus Calderwood – bicycle, trouser clips, megaphone – is left for dead in a hit-and-run, he uses his last words to name a serving policeman as his killer. The policeman, Justin Mitchell (Michael Socha), claims his innocence with such sociopathic arrogance that only a fool would agree to represent him in court.
Enter Sam Malik (Adeel Akhtar), an earnest campaigning lawyer whose default setting is perpetual anxiety. Sam wears cheap suits, and is nursing a personal tragedy that has robbed him of sleep for months. He’s going to have his work cut out for him here; as Showtrial is so keen to suggest, the police these days do err towards the corrupt and the bent. “Not just one bad apple,” one of the climate protesters says, “the whole basket is rotten”, later hammering home the point by sneering: “Yeah, like anyone is going to believe the word of a cop these days.”
It quickly becomes clear, then, that it isn’t just Marcus on trial – it’s the entire force. No wonder his lawyer’s shoulders are stooped.
Written by Ben Richards (a novelist who adapted the Scandi noir The Bridge into English in 2013), Showtrial packs a lot into its five episodes. Richards cherry-picks whose backstory he fleshes out, which makes the drama a little uneven. Of one leading detective, for example, we learn only that he doesn’t drink but does like bonsai trees. Meanwhile, we’re given enough biography of the prosecuting lawyer, Leila Hassoun-Kenny (Nathalie Armin), to fill an entire series.
She’s half Arabic, and is constantly warring with her willowy sister, whose life coach – this is Brighton, remember, encourages her to avoid all contact with her because her sister is “red” while she is “yellow”, and these auras rarely mix well. They shout at one another until their mother collapses with a pulmonary embolism. Families, eh? In other episodes, we discover more about bicycle pedals than we would while watching the Tour de France.
And yet, like light coming through trees, tension is gradually built up as the trial proceeds, until it turns the knuckles white. Showtrial works best when it focuses on just Sam and Justin, the former desperate to do good and proper legal work for a client who flaunts a deeply problematic personality. Though Justin strenuously denies murder, he blames the climate protester for the death of a pregnant woman who crashed her car on a road she’d never have been driving on had the protesters not been demonstrating on her usual route. He’d held the woman in his arms as she died, and his PTSD can now only assert itself as a deadly rage.
We already know that Akhtar is one of our very best screen actors. As he showed in the first series of Sherwood and 2016’s Murdered by My Father, he’s someone who can express a panoply of human emotions with just his overcooked eyeballs and their attendant crows feet. But it is Socha (a stalwart of Shane Meadows films) who is the real revelation here – his performance vibrates with intensity. He’s amazing, terrifying, mesmeric. The last half-hour of the fourth episode – in which the two square off at one another, alternately digging through layers of self-protection and trading insults – is surely the most electrifying television of 2024.
It’s only when the credits roll that you realise you’d been holding your breath all along.
‘Showtrial’ continues next Sunday at 9pm on BBC One. All episodes are streaming on BBC iPlayer
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