The Night Caller begins in dramatic fashion. A man in the shower, washing away the blood, then staring in the mirror at his battered face. That’s what I like about Channel 5 dramas: there’s no messing about. You’re straight in with a wallop.
The man is Robert Glenister. He plays Tony, a former teacher who, after an incident glimpsed in flashback that seems to involve a pupil in a swimming pool, lost his career and is now reduced to driving a black cab at night. “Twenty-seven years’ loyal service so they could just throw me on the scrapheap,” he laments.
He’s miserable, lonely and nursing a deep sense of betrayal. There is nobody in his life, so he confides in a late-night radio DJ named Lawrence, who becomes – in his mind – the closest thing he has to a friend.
As is the way with this kind of drama, Tony is about to get drawn into a terrible chain of events. It’s a pretty simplistic plot, and the show (told over four episodes) has a heightened tone common to all Channel 5 thrillers.
The villains are verging on cartoon baddies. You never quite believe in the swimming pool where Tony completes his laps without ever seeing another soul. But it’s grounded in Glenister’s performance, which digs right into the pain of a sixtysomething man who feels that, as an older white man, society no longer wants him.
Tony believes in Lawrence, but we can sense that there’s something false about him. He promises that he is there to lend an ear, and to foster a sense of community among his listeners. But he’s subtly whipping up their grievances and stoking their fears.
Sean Pertwee is the radio DJ, no doubt cast because he has such a fabulously rich voice. It’s a voice so associated with MasterChef: The Professionals – he has narrated it since 2011 – that you can’t listen to it without imagining him talking about spiced duck breast with an octopus veloute. Pertwee succeeds, through tone alone, in making Lawrence slippery and unlikeable. I have no idea if Lawrence meets a sticky end, but it’ll be satisfying if he does.
