CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV: Fear and panic – just another day in Breakdown Britain

Witness number 3

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Long Lost Family Special: The Unknown Soldiers

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Everyone is looking for ways to be terrified. Britain feels like a country constantly on the brink of apocalypse – be it Covid, climate change or Putin.

A state of panic is now entrenched, induced by lockdowns, war footage of bombed buildings in Ukraine, documentaries of melting ice caps and slogans warning of planetary extinction.

Witness number 3 (C5) captures and distills the atmosphere of constant fear that reigns in the country.

You can’t escape, he said. Nowhere is safer for you and your family. Whatever you do, death will find you. Nina Toussaint-White is remarkable as Jodie, a young mother who begins smugly thinking she’s doing the right and virtuous thing, and is soon overwhelmed with terror.

Witness number 3 (C5) captures and distills the atmosphere of constant fear that reigns in the country. You can’t escape, he said. Nowhere is safer for you and your family. Whatever you do, death will find you. Nina Toussaint-White (right) is remarkable as Jodie, a young mother who begins smugly thinking she is doing the right and virtuous thing, and is soon overwhelmed with terror

The threats begin after she goes to the police to report a suspicious incident. Looking out the window of her barbershop in a London estate, she saw a man walking another across the road.

The victim was later found stabbed to death. Jodie chooses the attacker from a series of photofits (“Worst dating app ever,” she jokes, looking at the faces on a screen.) and agrees to testify.

Writer Thomas Eccleshare’s screenplay evokes this feeling of fear that builds up in layers, the feeling that even if things are going badly, they can always get worse.

The killer is the kingpin of a drug gang, and his minions track down Jodie – sending scary movie clips to her cell phone and filming her and her son outside their apartment in a sink.

The clues also accumulate, indicating that she was not chosen at random. The police liaison officer (Sion Daniel Young, brilliant last year as Colin Stagg in C4’s Deceit) seems awfully knowledgeable about his private life. And Jodie’s ex-boyfriend is a drug addict who left her with nightmarish memories of trauma and abuse.

This four-part psychological thriller continues tonight. At the end of the first episode, Jodie was screaming in fear and rage in the wreckage of her vandalized shop.

It’s an ugly but powerful metaphor for how endless impending doom makes us all feel. Whether you can handle seeing more hyper-anxiety on TV is up to you.

Striking statistics at the end of Long Lost Family Special: The Unknown Soldiers (ITV) reminded us that at times in our history when the apocalypse really struck, panic was strangely absent.

Harry Miller (right) and his wife Melita (left) and their baby George. A Durham woman has recalled a family legend of how her uncle Jimmy, then a toddler at the time, walked down the street with a toy gun behind his father, Harry Miller, who was leaving for the France. Harry never came home. He died in October 1917 at Passchendaele and his body has not been found. But DNA tests identified him after the remains of nine men were discovered by Belgian workers

The selfless bravery of the men who went to fight in the trenches during the First World War and the stoic courage of the families they left behind are still moving. A Durham woman has recalled a family legend of how her uncle Jimmy, then a toddler at the time, walked down the street with a toy gun behind his father, Harry Miller, who was leaving for France.

Harry never came home. He died in October 1917 at Passchendaele and his body has not been found. But DNA tests identified him after the remains of nine men were discovered by Belgian workers.

Presenters Nicky Campbell and Davina McCall didn’t need to add any suspense. The facts were pretty heartbreaking, especially when we realized that Harry’s widow, Melita, died of scarlet fever a few months later, leaving four children behind.

Harry’s young officer, Second Lieutenant Leslie Ablett, was also among the dead. He was only 20 years old and wore a signet ring engraved by his sweetheart, Peggy.

A final caption revealed that, of the 880,000 British and Commonwealth personnel killed in the First World War, more than half are still missing. It’s a really scary thought.