This tale of one family’s six-year ordeal just highlights what an unserious country Britain became in that era. The cast, including Joseph Fiennes, are excellent
“My name is Nazanin. I do not know why I am here.”
“Everyone says that.”
As Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe enters an Iranian prison for the first time and introduces herself to a fellow inmate, you feel the sudden chill, deep in her bones. She knows the Iranian regime has no grounds to be holding her. But straight away, she has learned that that doesn’t matter. Meanwhile, back home in London, her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, is cheerfully preparing their flat for her return – flowers on the kitchen table, favourite ice-cream in the freezer – blissfully unaware that he won’t see his wife for almost six years.
This four-part drama – adapted by Stephen Butchard from the couple’s forthcoming book A Yard of Sky – attempts a difficult task. The horror that engulfed this family between 2016 and 2022 was both brutal and infuriatingly banal. In Iran, Nazanin was confronted with a Kafkaesque nightmare at the hands of an unaccountable theocracy. Without knowing it, she wasn’t a prisoner as much as a hostage; a victim of forces set in motion before she was born. Meanwhile, in London, Richard faced a British government in constant flux, that was scrolling, post-Brexit, through a hopeless series of ministers, seemingly distracted by the chaos and immobilised by the gravity of what faced them.
