Any drama with Stephen Graham will be good, right? That’s just the default setting. He is a brilliant actor. And the walk-in (ITV) was written by Jeff Pope, who specializes in meticulously handled true-crime adaptations such as: Four lives. What could go wrong?
Well, after watching all five episodes, I think this one misses the mark. Pope has taken Britain’s far-right hate groups as his subject, following the murder of Jo Cox and a… conspiracy to assassinate another Labor MP, Rosie Cooper, with a machete. Graham plays Matthew Collins, a former member of the National Front and neo-Nazi group Combat 18 who repented and now works for the anti-fascist charity Hope Not Hate.
The drama centers on a true episode in which Collins dealt with an informant – or ‘walk-in’ – within National Action, the first far-right organization since World War II to be banned by the government. They intend to start a race war with the intention of using violence, saying that Hitler’s mistake was showing too much mercy to the Jews.
The nuance here, as it is, is that at least one of the recruits isn’t as downright bad as the rest. Robbie Mullen (Andrew Ellis) is naive, easily manipulated and weak enough to believe the group’s claims that Jews are withholding a cure for cancer. Unlike Collins, he has no conversion on the road to Damascus – he may think killing a MP is a step too far, but he still clings to his unpleasant views.