Trigger Point review: Jed Mercurio’s preposterous but riveting new drama

“Until the first ad break arrives to remind you that Jed Mercurio’s new police thriller is on ITV rather than the Beeb, you might as well be watching a new Line of Duty,” said Ed Cumming in The Independent. There are differences – but “only if you squint”.

Trigger Point opens with Vicky McClure “speeding through the Blackwall Tunnel as tense radio chatter and foreboding bassy music plays in the background” – yet here she is Lana Washington, not Kate Fleming, and in the bomb disposal squad, rather than AC12. She has an “easy rapport” with her partner, Joel Nutkins (Adrian Lester) – they both served in Afghanistan – and likes to use his “lucky” wire cutters.

Tension is ramped up from the off, said Christopher Stevens in the Daily Mail: I was dripping with sweat after just a few scenes, and by the end I was “lying in a puddle on the floor”. No one comes up with better twists than Mercurio, and the first episode finishes with a “shock” so eye-popping, you’ll be “leaping out of your skin”.

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The six-part crime drama is certainly “great fun”, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian – “as long as you set your preposterousness levels to ‘high’“. In short order, Washington and Nutkins are “attending a call to a suspected bomb factory in a London tower block; rescuing bound women and children from within divan beds; discovering IEDs behind toilets”, and moving crowds as the bomb risk builds. It’s all a bit silly; more “CSI: Peckham or Bomby McBombface than The Wire But With Actual Wires”.