Oh god, the suffering. The bleak, bleak suffering. Katherine Kelly’s desperate drug-smuggling thriller – featuring distressing scenes set in a Bulgarian prison – is so claustrophobic it’s suffocating
I
wonder, sometimes, if Katherine Kelly misses her days as Becky McDonald in Coronation Street. Yes, Becky was a once-homeless, thieving ex-con who worked her way through the full panoply of soap storylines (abuse, miscarriage, drink problem, buying a child, marrying Steve, smashing up Tracy Barlow’s front room with a sledgehammer, a stint in the Rovers Return) before her departure from the cobbled streets for a new life in Barbados after a triumphant wedding-reception-wrecking, but, y’know, she got to have a laugh while she was doing it.
This was during the early 00s, when Coronation Street still dealt in comedy as well as tragedy, recognising them as two sides of the same life coin, especially among the barmaids – fully formed or embryonic battleaxes all – gazing out on the world and its punters as they wearily pulled pints behind the bar.
Since then, Kelly’s output has largely been one of unrelenting grimness. I can’t remember the last time she took a main role in anything that required a lightness of touch, let alone the exercise of her comic chops. And never more so than in her latest outing, the exhausting six-part thriller In Flight, in which she plays a desperate single mother, Joanne, whose son, Sonny, is sentenced to 15 years in a Bulgarian prison for a murder he swears he did not commit. Oh God, the suffering! The bleak, bleak suffering!
