Starring Vicky McClure as Met Police bomb “expo” Lana Washington, Trigger Point is being watched not just by casual TV viewers, but also the real-life experts. Here, they tell Sky News what the show is getting right – and wrong.
First it was bent coppers, now it’s explosives planted around London – Vicky McClure’s characters never have it easy.
The BAFTA-winning actress is currently on screen as Lana Washington in the second series of ITV drama Trigger Point, leading a team of bomb disposal experts – or “expos” – working for the Met Police.
Written by Daniel Brierley, it’s another series executive produced by Jed Mercurio, the man behind Line Of Duty. While it hasn’t quite reached the same fevered levels of fandom just yet, the first season was a ratings winner and a linear TV draw for viewers tuning in to see what – or who – will face an explosive end each Sunday night.
Warning – contains spoilers
The penultimate episode airs this evening and the tension has ramped up; Lana has faced car park bombs, disused tube station bombs and laptop bombs – not to mention her detective ex being pushed down a lift shaft by a woman disguised as a firefighter checking the scene, right after their romance had been rekindled.
But how good is Trigger Point at getting the work of a real-life expo right?
Major Chris Hunter, who spent years in bomb disposal for the army and the Special Forces – and whose work inspired the Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker – has written books including Extreme Risk and Eight Lives Down.
He now works for an NGO clearing explosives from conflict zones and has been watching Trigger Point in Iraq. While he wasn’t too impressed with the first series, he says things have vastly improved second time round.
“You can’t help sort of looking at the technical aspects of it and critiquing it,” he told Sky News. “And I think a lot of the aspects are really technically on the ball [in series two].”
‘Absence of the normal, presence of the abnormal’
There’s still “a little bit of running around, a little bit of shouting” in the show, he understates it, but appreciates you need this to make a drama. In reality, he says it’s not so chaotic.
“We don’t do that as bomb techs, we just don’t shout. We don’t run around. We don’t run towards a bomb, we don’t run away from a bomb. Everything is calculated. Everything. You’re constantly going through this threat assessment.
“When you turn up at a bomb scene, you’ve got to draw on your experience, you’ve got to draw on your intelligence, your intellect, your IQ. You’ve got to draw on your intuition as well, because you’ve never got 100% of the threat picture, if you like. So you have to make a plan based on what information you’ve got.