Silently Witnessing

While the world and his wife, okay mainly the wives, tuned into channel 4’s fascinating and bizarre Big Fat Gypsy Weddings on Tuesday 25^th January, I settled down to the second part of Silent Witness.

First airing in 1996, and now in its fourteenth series, the drama follows life (excuse the pun) in a pathology laboratory.  Created by a former murder squad detective, the programme was based on a female forensic pathologist with whom he had worked, suggesting a sense of authenticity, though dramatic licence is indeed executed for which it often receives criticism.   I can’t imagine the real deal having me so gripped, thus I welcome its far-fetched nature.    

Having only got into the BBC One drama (Monday and Tuesday 9pm) at the beginning of its current series, I was blown away by last week’s offering.  The weekly two-part episodic nature allows greater exploration of intricate and dramatic storylines, and more time out of the lab, which now resemble other BBC thriller dramas such as Spooks.

Last week, Silent Witness did a brave thing: They stepped out of the office, so to speak, to Budapest.  Taking a British drama abroad is always risky, unsettling characters and audience alike, which can backfire if the viewer feels it too distant from the norm.  Silent Witness, however, triumphed.  Described as a ‘thriller’, I felt that aspect really brought to life in this two-parter, as Harry Cunningham (Tom Ward) found himself in a very dark and dangerous world. 

With twists-a-plenty, including the supposed death of central character Harry at the climax of Monday’s episode, the story kept me on the edge of my seat throughout.  The feeling was reverberated across the country it seems as the end of the first part, where Harry was shot and his body set alight (or so we believed), sparked outcries on social networking sites on Monday night, proving the power of television in the digital age in uniting viewers from all corners of the UK. 

Admittedly it was rather convenient that the majority of key foreign characters spoke good English but I was so caught up in the chase, willing Harry to survive and expose the criminals that I breathed a sigh of relief each time someone revealed their better-than-expected linguistic skills.  

The cinematography and haunting music in the story’s finale combined with the consistently good acting of Tom Ward, Emilia Fox and William Gaminara made this offering of Silent Witness a truly awesome piece of television that I witnessed in stunned and awed silence.