The Reckoning Room review – a Hull crime drama with a brain and a conscience
★★★★☆ This six-part series about an inquest into a trawlerman’s death takes a form usually reserved for courtroom procedurals and makes it strange, slow and gripping
The inquest, as a dramatic form, has been oddly neglected by television. There is no jury to play to, no verdict of guilt, and the single most powerful person in the room is a coroner whose job is to find out what happened rather than who to blame. The Reckoning Room, which began on Sunday night, understands that this is precisely what makes it interesting.
The six-part series, written by the Hull playwright Dawn Osterley, follows a two-week inquest into the death of a 26-year-old deckhand, Kieran Beale, who went overboard from a trawler 80 miles off Flamborough Head in a February gale. The coroner, Judith Marr, is played by Angela Fenwick with a weary precision that is a long way from the barking QCs of the genre. She does not raise her voice once in the first two episodes. She does not need to.
Osterley’s structure is the series’ great strength. Each episode belongs to a different witness, and each flashback is the story that witness is telling, which means that the night of the death is replayed six times and is different six times, not because anyone is lying, exactly, but because everyone was somewhere else. The skipper, played with magnificent sourness by Tony Beckinsale, remembers a crew that ignored him. The crewman who was on deck with Kieran remembers a skipper who was asleep.
The production, from a Leeds-based independent for the BBC, has resisted the temptation to make Hull look like Scandinavia. The city is shot in the sodium-orange of real streetlights, the coroner’s court is a strip-lit room above a job centre, and the trawler sequences, filmed on an actual boat in actual weather, are the most convincingly frightening thing I have seen on British television in years. You can feel the cold.
What stops it being a five-star drama is a subplot involving the coroner’s own son, which exists to give Fenwick a scene at a kitchen table every episode and never earns its place. It is the one point where the series behaves like every other series. There is also a tendency, in the second episode, to have a trade union official explain the economics of the fishing industry at a length that suggests the writers were worried we would not understand it. We would have.
But these are small things. The Reckoning Room is about grief, work and the way institutions turn a death into a document, and it has the courage to be slow. Give it two episodes.
The Reckoning Room is on BBC One on Sundays and available in full on iPlayer.
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