For once Channel 4 has produced a brilliant drama
But In Flight (Channel 4), a propulsive new thriller, chooses a different kind of protagonist. Jo (Katherine Kelly) is a hard-working flight attendant. Her world falls apart when her 19-year-old son is jailed in Bulgaria for a crime he swears he didn't commit, and two heavies turn up at her house to tell her that they will arrange for him to meet a grisly fate in prison unless she agrees to become a drugs mule.
'If you refuse our proposal, we'll kill your son. If you go to the police, we'll kill your son. If you talk to a lawyer, your boss, a friend, we'll kill your son. If you do anything other than exactly what we tell you to do, we'll kill your son.' Put this way, Jo doesn't look to have many options. What follows are six episodes of stress and suspense as she tries to escape from the trap.
Cabin crew are unlikely to come under suspicion, so Jo is a canny choice. Most mules, she is told, get caught because they travel too often, they travel too light and they look guilty. On her first run, Jo is terrified, but before you can say 'Peru Two' she's become a dab hand at it. At the same time, she's desperate for a way out, enlisting the help of an old flame (Ashley Thomas), an ex-police officer who works for the Border Force.
Six episodes of Jo becoming increasingly miserable or hysterical wouldn't make a great series, so writers Adam Randall (Slow Horses) and Mike Walden (Marcella) give her character inner reserves. Her immediate goals are to save her son from harm and turn the tables on her tormentors.
Cormac (Stuart Martin) is the Northern Irish gangster who puts the frighteners on Jo. As luck would have it, he's pretty hot. Can you see where this storyline might go? If you're being threatened by someone from a murderous drugs cartel, it does soften the blow when they're handsome and the rendezvous can take place over drinks in the plush bar of a Bangkok hotel.
Channel 4 doesn't have a great track record when it comes to drama, but this one is a cut above their usual fare and could sit just as happily on ITV primetime or Netflix. Although Netflix would definitely have thrown some more money at it – the production values are a bit cheap and dreary. For a series set in various international locations, you never get the sense that it's being filmed anywhere other than a cold European country.
Kelly is great in the lead role, playing an ordinary person caught in an extraordinary situation. On the one hand, she's engaged in this high-stakes, life-or-death mission; on the other, she's maintaining a facade and joking around with colleagues (Ambreen Razia, as fellow flight attendant Zara, brings just the right note of normality). I'm sure we could nitpick about how likely all of this is – why don't the airport sniffer dogs find Jo out? – but just enjoy it for what it is: a lean and effective thriller.
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The Sun
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Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
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The Independent
an hour ago
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'The legacy of slavery is a deep and disturbing one, and it's one that's really hard to get away from when you plunge into the history of the city,' Dickey added. After the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861, Congress established the Metropolitan Police Department in a bid to tackle the ensuing disorder. 'It was a time of constant danger in the Nation's Capital,' according to the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Memorial and Museum. 'With the beginning of the Civil War, an army was billeted in the city, government employees were increased by ten-fold, and hordes of unsavory elements descended upon the District's few square miles.' 1950–1970s: 'A utopia for criminals' and Nixon declares D.C. 'crime capital of the US' During President Dwight Eisenhower's first term, there were several consecutive years where the city experienced a decline in reported crime, though the authors of a controversial 1951 book declared D.C. 'a cesspool of iniquity and a Utopia for criminals.' Reported crime had dropped by nearly 20 percent over three years from 1954 to 1957, a 1978 Justice Department report noted. But a spate of violent offenses toward the end of the decade targeting public officials heightened public alarm. 'In August 1959 there was the mugging of the widow of former Deputy Defense Secretary Donald Quarles, the brandishing of a knife at Congressman Diggs, the murder of an Air Force sergeant, and a gang beating of a police officer,' the report said. 'These events mobilized renewed official concern and action.' In 1968, in the wake of the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr in Memphis and the subsequent riots that ignited across the country, Richard Nixon declared D.C. one of the 'crime capitals of the nation.' As anger rippled through the city, 13 people died in the violence and more than 900 businesses were destroyed. Police and firefighters became overwhelmed and federal troops moved in. 'The disorders and the crime and the violence that are now commonplace in Washington are more than a national disgrace,' Nixon said on the campaign trail, citing a 67 percent increase in the homicide rate between July 1967 and July 1968. Conservative lawmakers have for generations used denigrating language to describe the condition of major American cities and called for greater law enforcement, often in response to changing demographics in those cities driven by non-white populations relocating in search of work or safety from racial discrimination and state violence, the Associated Press noted. 1980s – late 1990s: A decade of 'unbelievable violence' Washington, D.C. was in the grip of a drug crisis from the late 1980s into the late 1990s as a crack cocaine epidemic, fueling gang violence, took hold. 'The city was going through a terrible time,' Ruben Castaneda, a former reporter at The Washington Post, told the BBC in 2014. 'Through the late 80s to mid-to-late 90s there were just unbelievable levels of violence behind crack cocaine, and fights over drug turfs, witness killings and retaliatory killings.' The annual homicide rate hit over 400 by 1989 as the city was once again branded the 'murder capital' of the U.S. Its image wasn't helped by the arrest of the city's scandal-plagued Mayor Marion Barry in 1991, who was caught on camera smoking crack cocaine in a sting operation. Despite serving a six-month prison sentence for cocaine possession in 1991, he remarkably reclaimed the job in 1995. Barry, who died in November 2014, wrote in his autobiography that back then he was fueled by a 'mix of power, attraction, alcohol, sex and drugs.' Despite his 'tumultuous' life, as former President Barack Obama put it, Barry was praised for advancing civil rights while he was in office. Meanwhile, by 1991, the city set a grim new record of 482 recorded murders, which was the worst murder rate in 20 years. 2000s – today: A declining crime rate but fears remain The levels of violence seen in the 80s and 90s are down a significant amount today. Lehman noted that a 2005 strategy targeting the people and places that drive violence, implemented by the Metropolitan Police Department and the federal government, saw homicide rates drop. 'The success of 2005's initiative shows that the administration does not need to preempt the District in order to bring crime down,' Lehman wrote in the Atlantic. In 2012, D.C. recorded an 'astoundingly low' 88 murders, which has ticked up again in the last 10 years, crime data analyst Jeff Asher, co-founder of the firm AH Datalytics, wrote in a Substack post. 'Murders in DC peaked in 2023, began falling in 2024, and have been steadily falling through July 2025,' Asher wrote. 'The bottom line is that violent crime in DC is currently declining and the city's reported violent crime rate is more or less as low now as it has been since the 1960s,' Asher added, with a disclaimer that not all crimes are reported to police. 'The city's official violent crime rate in 2024 was the second lowest that has been reported since 1966.' What is undeniable is the growing public concern over safety in D.C. A poll by The Washington Post conducted last year found that 65 percent of D.C. residents said crime is an 'extremely serious' or a 'very serious' problem, up from 56 percent in 2023. 'The city has a real problem,' Lehman said. 'Someone needs to be responsible for fixing it.'
