BBC’s Nightsleeper: thumbs up or thumbs down?

Every TV programme produces a range of different reactions and BBC’s recent controversial six-part drama Nightsleeper is no exception. We have two contrasting reviews below. Have your own opinion to add? If so, please comment below or contact brian@pennypost.org.uk.

 

In many ways, I’m a pretty rubbish man. I have no interest at all in cars, gadgets, power tools, real ale, golf or rugby and have never had a desire to grow a beard or take possession of a shed. Show me a train, however, particularly one that’s either very fast or has steam coming out of the top, and I’m generally all in.

Any drama set on a train is compelling because there’s a fixed group of people operating in isolation from the world for as long as the train keeps moving (or, in the case of Murder on the Orient Express, remains stuck in a snowdrift). An action drama set on a train is even better: for then there will also surely be a scene in which someone, for reasons that seem good at the time, gets out and climbs along the top while the thing is in motion, generally above a precipice or near the entrance to a tunnel.

On these admittedly rather narrow and shallow criteria, Nightsleeper delivers. It also has a main character in an interesting personal dilemma, various other passengers with ambiguous motives and a group of people back at HQ riven with rivalries of various kinds. It has a hard-faced boss, an unsympathetic rival expert, an angry father, an alcoholic daughter-in-law, a ruthless journalist and a doped-up IT boffin. Other character tropes were available but these provided a decent sprinkling to keep the plot moving along.

That’s not to say I accepted the plot at every point, at the time or afterwards. Nor did I have any benchmark against which to measure the accuracy of the processes. However, I’m good at suspending my disbelief to buy into any premise of something I think I might enjoy. If I can get through the first half an hour, I’m probably there for keeps. As long as the plot points make sense at the time, and as long as there’s not some preposterous crowbar to solve a problem, I can live with it.

Each drama sets its own rules which you buy into or not. A good example is Speed, for which it was necessary for us to believe that if the bus went at less than 50mph it would blow up. If we can do this, and if the tension that follows is a fair payback for the leap of faith we’ve been asked to make, it’s job done.

Unlike my fellow reviewer (see below), I have no expertise in cyber-security issues nor how a train network operates. My ignorance was a blessing – within the limits mentioned above, I was happy to accept on these matters whatever I was told for the purposes of the plot. This was, after all, a work of fiction, not (thank goodness, and as she reassures us) a documentary.

There’s been a lot of criticism of this six-parter, much of which I think is unfair. Poor acting was cited by some, to an almost rabid extent, but I didn’t see that. There were some plot holes, sure (show me a drama that’s flawless in this respect), but nothing that caused me too much distress. It’s not an addition to the BBCs canon to match Brideshead or Tinker Tailor but it doesn’t claim to be – it’s an action adventure, set on a train. That’s it. On these terms – and it doesn’t aspire to anything more – you might enjoy it; as did I.

Brian Quinn

 

The first rule of cyber-attack, as everyone knows, is to place your hood firmly over your head. Episode one of Nightsleeper started with a cliché and wasn’t going to let reality stop it, with Police Officers who couldn’t scale chest-high gates and a hacking device which was basically a Raspberry PI, which bleeped (why, when it has no moving parts?) and was fitted with a screen (why, who was planning on looking at it?).

That was also a very odd set-up at the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) Headquarters, in which juvenile family members were allowed to wander into control centres without security clearance, but we’ll let that pass.

I work in the Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) and I’m going to reassure you that whilst the premise is technically possible, the response was firmly in the realms of fantasy.

In my experience, NCSC operatives do not give their full names even during threat briefings to sector partners, making it highly unlikely that Acting Technical Director’Abby was going to give name and pack drill over the phone to a random bloke on a train whilst sitting on one herself. The hacking device would have been detected even if the clumsy hackers hadn’t left the floor panel open. I was also struggling to get over the plot quirk which meant that no one thought to isolate it whilst the train was stationary. After all, it clearly wasn’t a bomb.

The biggest issue for me, however, was that an attack on any part of the CNI triggers a well exercised and coordinated response that brings in a number of defence actors – none of whom appeared to have looked at their emergency messaging systems during the one episode I could bear to watch.

In the CNI, we are fully aware that with the threat level constantly increasing we have to be ready for when rather than if a cyber-attack occurs,. As well as constantly improving our cyber defences and monitoring our networks 24/7 we also put a lot of time and energy into two very important pillars of cybersecurity maturity: response and recovery. If the worst happens, we need to know  how quickly we could we shut down affected systems, then recover them again with minimal threat to the public.

Networks are segmented or segregated rather than “flat”, precisely so that an attack on one part can’t easily spread across the estate. We regularly role play tabletop exercises in which we consider scenarios and plan our reaction and we work with our partners and experts such as the NCSC, the National Crime Agency (NCA), our sponsoring government departments and emergency responders in order to make sure that every part of the sector understands exactly what their role will be and is ready to respond at the drop of a hat.

So, if it helps any of you hesitating over whether to travel by train, whilst nothing in the programme was completely beyond the bounds of possibility, the rescue wouldn’t be down to the willingness of one unlikely cyber expert to abandon her holiday plans…

Julie X

Brian Quinn
Author: Brian Quinn

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