I was well warned by Peter Hitchens’ comments on talkRADIO about the BBC’s new drama Vigil. He was very dismissive of the programme, especially as he has spent time on a nuclear submarine. Apart from the general awfulness of the first episode (beyond which I will not progress), Peter Hitchens’ point was that the Navy was the ‘friendly service’ and that he had been treated especially politely and looked after very well on board, despite being an ‘interloper’. In Vigil, the high ranking officers who report the incident at the centre of the series to the police, the land crew who process the police officer who is helicoptered to the submarine and the crew of the submarine remind me of the cast of Deliverance only without the benefit of their banjos.
So, the story goes like this. Someone dies a sudden death on a submarine and the police are called. Since this is a nuclear submarine from a Scottish base, the police are from Glasgow. The sudden death, occurring within the first few minutes of the first episode removed the character played by Martin Compston of Line of Duty fame. I can only assume that Compston, a reasonably talented actor, was the reason most people tuned in and his early demise must have been a major disappointment. His body was wheeled out in the course of the investigation, and I believe he makes an appearance in a subsequent episode on video from beyond the grave. Best place for him to be, in my view, you’d not want to be on a submarine with this crew of psychopaths. Other reasonably talented actors appear, for example Shaun Evans of the Inspector Morse prequel Endeavour. He is not a detective in this series, yet he persists in speaking like his character in Endeavour. Shaun Evans is a Liverpudlian with a thick Liverpool accent for goodness’ sake. Are Liverpudlians not permitted on submarines? Talking of accents brings me to the Scottish actors. As a Scot I am sensitive to the portrayal of Scots. Therefore, it is a mystery to me why genuinely Scottish actors cannot seem to convey a Scottish accent accurately. Why, especially in police dramas, are they always so surprised, dramatic and achingly sincere? I almost expect them to give us a rendition—in serious tones—of ‘it’s a braw bricht moolicht nicht the nicht; och aye!’
Then the wokeness. While women have been permitted on submarines since 2011 and first boarded in 2014, the number of women on submarines remains small. You could barely move for them on HMS Vigil. The submarine commander was black. As attractive and affirmative as that sounds; does it ever actually happen? The police officer investigating the case is a woman with a fear of being submerged under water [I am not making this up] and she was dropped off at the submarine base—meeting a couple of CND protesters on the way—by her female colleague. You got there before me: they were lesbians. I half expected to see someone in a wheelchair whizzing through the submarine. Mind you, it was big enough. The command room looked like a cross between a first class airline lounge and the deck of the Starship Enterprise and the corridors were deliberately portrayed as being twice as wide as they really are. This, reportedly, was to enable the actors to hold a dialogue. Apparently, this is hard in single file, bless their little cotton actors’ socks. Narrow corridors were no impediment to the hilarity of Down Periscope or the tension of The Hunt for Red October.
This is not just woke; it is complete rubbish. The police would never be called to or expected to investigate an incident on a submarine in the first instance. Senior officers of all services are the first line of investigation and if foul play is suspected an incident would be handled by the Military Police. The police officer is permitted to take her mobile phone on board, albeit without the SIM card. That would never happen. Mobile phones have batteries and occasionally catch fire, just a about the last thing next to flatulence that you want on a submarine. I could go on to the ‘no alcohol on board policy’ (not true apparently) and other inaccurately portrayed aspects of submarine life, but I risk becoming more boring than Vigil itself. The BBC wonders why folk have stopped paying the licence fee. I don’t.
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