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Post by Admin on Jun 1, 2020 0:56:55 GMT
BBC One has set the premiere date for Dancing Ledge Productions’ anticipated three-part miniseries, The Salisbury Poisonings. A dramatization of the 2018 Novichok poisonings that rocked the eponymous city and made global headlines, it will air from June 14-16 at 9PM locally. Rafe Spall, Anne-Marie Duff and MyAnna Buring star. Saul Dibb directs. Fremantle, which has a minority stake in Dancing Ledge, is handling global distribution. Check out the first trailer above. We recently spoke with executive producers Laurence Bowen and Chris Carey as well as writers Adam Patterson and Declan Lawn about pulling together this intimate portrayal of hope and bravery in the face of terrible tragedy, as well as its resonance within the current state of the world and what it was like to get through post-production amid the coronavirus lockdown. The real-life mini tells the story of how ordinary people and public services reacted to the Novichok crisis as their city became the focus of an unprecedented national emergency when Sergei and Yulia Skripal were poisoned by Russian operatives. Police officer Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey (Spall) was contaminated at the Skripal’s home and required hospital treatment. Local woman, Dawn Sturgess (Buring), was also exposed to the nerve agent and subsequently died. The Salisbury Poisonings represents Patterson and Lawn’s first major TV script together after a previous career in documentary making. They moved to the historic British city for more than a year as part of their research for the show, spending long hours with the subjects of the series: Tracy Daszkiewicz (Duff), the director of public health for Wiltshire, and Bailey, among others. “The tie around for the show, from [BBC drama commissioner] Lucy Richer, was ‘ordinary heroism.’ This was a story about people coming together and showing the very best of British public service at a time when Britain felt very broken,” says Patterson, referring to a theme that could also be said of the country’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. Lawn says their research process was “identical” to how they would go about making a BBC documentary. They knocked on peoples’ doors to encourage them to talk, and worked with the series’ journalistic consultant Caroline Bannock to get access to the right people. In some respects, it was easier than when they were journalists. “People were more receptive because we didn’t have to film them or record their voices. They didn’t have the scary prospect of going on record,” Lawn adds. Producers wanted to capture the drama from the inside, says Bowen. The idea pitched to the BBC was “a dramatization of it, not as a spy thriller, or an assassination story, but more as a kind of experiential story: What it must have felt like for the key people both on the responder side but also in terms of the families who had been very directly affected by either Novichok or just by being close to the events.” He adds, “Like most interesting stories, you don’t often know what you have in your hands until you start doing your research… Declan and Adam won the confidence of the main families they were talking to.” Was there any resistance to visit the subject so closely to the real events? Says Bowen, “There was a degree of caution… There had been some unwanted intrusion. What we found with the Sturgess family, they felt particularly that the way that the press had covered their daughter did not bear any relation to who she was and to her life, she had been misrepresented in a way that had been very painful. When they sat down with Adam and Declan and saw what the ambition was for the piece, they agreed to work with us. It’s been an intimate and important journey with all of them. From a filmmaker’s point of view, that’s the most important thing in factual drama, that for the key protagonists you have captured their truth and there’s an honesty there. If you get that right, then you feel you’ve done your job properly.” Salisbury is the latest in a long line of dramas based on true events, and Lawn thinks they are popular because they help audiences make sense of the world. “The world is increasingly incomprehensible to people. If you have producers who, in really good faith, spend a big portion of their lives investigating a story and then telling it through the eyes of real people, there’s a certain satisfaction in that for the viewer. They are getting some measure of truth,” he explains.
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Post by Admin on Jun 8, 2020 7:34:04 GMT
A former spy and his daughter who were poisoned by Russian military intelligence agents have started a new life in New Zealand. Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia settled in the country after spending more than a year ensconced in a British MI6 safe house, according to the Sunday Times of London. The two were both found unconscious on a park bench in the British city of Salisbury in March 2018. An investigation revealed the pair had been poisoned with Novichok, a Soviet-era chemical nerve-agent, which had been smeared by Russian operatives on the door handle of their home. Once a Russian spy, Skripal fell afoul of his old colleagues after acting as a double agent on behalf of the British during the 1990s and 2000s. Both father and daughter survived the attack after a lengthy period in critical condition. Enlarge ImageAlexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, who were formally accused of attempting to murder former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, are seen in an image handed out by the Metropolitan Police in London
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Post by Admin on Jun 15, 2020 7:29:27 GMT
Scenes of streets in lockdown, health officials wearing PPE, dangerously contaminated surfaces and a battle with an invisible enemy are set to feature in a new TV drama from Sunday. But the events depicted in BBC One's The Salisbury Poisonings took place two years before the coronavirus pandemic began. The three-part series is based on the events of March 2018, when the Wiltshire cathedral city faced one of the biggest threats to UK public health in recent years. Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found slumped and foaming at the mouth on a city centre bench, having been poisoned with the deadly nerve agent Novichok. The government would later conclude it was an assassination attempt by two agents of Russian intelligence service the GRU. It's an extraordinary story, which Salisbury is still recovering from. But the dramatisation isn't some kind of James Bond-style spy thriller. The Skripals are only seen briefly at the beginning of the first episode, and the Russian suspects are not shown at all. Instead, it focuses on the response of the local community and health officials. "We were drawn to the stories of the people who had to clean up this mess, rather than the people who made it," says Declan Lawn, who co-wrote the script with Adam Patterson. "It's about ordinary people who have to pick up the pieces. We thought that's where the drama was, where the emotion was. We didn't want to do the obvious thing, which would have probably been an espionage drama. "But I hope that what we've done is show that there are people out there who take a bullet for us, they are a hidden network of people who keep this society together."
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Post by Admin on Jun 15, 2020 21:11:46 GMT
Cautious approach At the centre of the The Salisbury Poisonings is Tracy Daszkiewicz (played by Anne-Marie Duff), the director of public health for Wiltshire. She had been appointed just three months before the Skripals were poisoned, but had worked for Wiltshire Council for more than a decade. In reality, Daszkiewicz played an integral role of the response to the poisoning, but avoided media exposure - in part to not betray the trust of local residents. Together with the police, she used CCTV to work meticulously to find out who the Skripals might have come into contact with on the day they were poisoned, and took a cautious approach to protecting the public. "To us now, it seems perfectly logical," says Duff, referring to how common certain health measures have become since coronavirus. "Of course we close our doors and windows and wear masks, but at the time, it seemed like she was being thoroughly extreme and overreacting. "But what's glorious about Tracy is her background. Her background is in social work, she's very grassroots, she comes at things from a tactile level. So she'll ask, 'What do we know to be true? What do we know if someone has food poisoning? What if the water source becomes contaminated?'" Both Skripals survived the attack, as did Det Sgt Nick Bailey, a police officer who was one of the first to respond to the attack. But a local woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after coming into contact with the substance several weeks after the initial attack. On 30 June, Ms Sturgess and her partner Charlie Rowley became unwell at a house in Amesbury, eight miles from Salisbury, after spraying a bottle of perfume containing Novichok on her wrists. The perfume had been given to her as a gift from Rowley, who had found it in a charity shop bin. He said it had been disguised as a well-known perfume brand and was in sealed packaging. Actress MyAnna Buring, who plays Ms Sturgess, says the portrayal of her in the Salisbury Poisonings may surprise those who remember media coverage of her death in 2018. "A lot of us remember a lot of news outlets describing her as homeless and a drug addict, and in doing so sort of dismissed her death as inevitable because of her life choices," Buring recalls. "And that simply was not true. She was not homeless, she was not a drug addict, she was a woman who had experienced mental health issues, and knocks in life, which I think all of us can relate to. She did struggle with alcohol but she was working really hard to turn her life around. She had a loving family, partner, friends."
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