The Night Desk review – a Radio 4 drama that proves 999 calls are the last great theatre
★★★☆☆ Five 15-minute episodes set in an ambulance control room in Chelmsford are tense and beautifully performed, but a bolted-on love story lets them down
Radio is the natural medium for the emergency call. There is no picture, there is a voice under stress, and there is a second voice whose job is to stay calm. The Night Desk, which ran across the week on Radio 4’s afternoon drama slot and is now on BBC Sounds as a single piece, builds a whole shift from that dynamic and, for about two-thirds of its 75 minutes, is as gripping as anything the slot has produced this year.
The writer, Eoin Farrelly, spent six months shadowing call handlers at an East of England control room, and it shows. The procedural detail is precise without being showy: the way a handler repeats an address back, the triage questions that must be asked even when the caller is screaming, the moment the system assigns a category and a clock starts. Nadia Rahman, who plays the call handler Beth, has a voice that does something remarkable in the third episode, going from soothing to steel in a single breath when a caller admits he has not actually checked whether his mother is breathing.
Each episode is a different call, and the best is the fourth, in which an elderly man in Harlow rings to report that he has fallen and cannot reach his wife, who is in the next room and has not answered for some time. Farrelly does not cut away. We stay on the line with Beth for 14 minutes while she keeps him talking, and the sound design, which lets us hear the room he is lying in, is almost unbearably intimate.
The problem is the fifth episode, in which the drama remembers that it needs a story and gives Beth a relationship with a paramedic who has been drifting in and out of the control room all week. It is well acted, and the scene in the car park at dawn is nicely written, but it belongs to a different, more conventional piece. The Night Desk did not need a plot. The calls were the plot.
The director, Alison Pryce, has resisted music almost entirely, which is the right call, and the control room ambience, a hum of other voices handling other emergencies, is constantly, quietly present. It is a reminder that radio drama, when it keeps its nerve, can do things television cannot, because the listener is making the pictures.
The Night Desk is available on BBC Sounds.
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