It’s Rose Ayling-Ellis’s world at the moment – and we just live in it, which is proving to be a very nice thing for us all. In the three years since she left EastEnders she has: won a Stage Debut award and was nominated for an Olivier for her performance as Celia in @sohoplace’s As You Like It; taken part in two documentaries about deafness (she has been so since birth); starred in the excellent BBC thriller Reunion; was the central character in the first decent episode of Doctor Who there’s been in living memory; and is now the lead in the fine and fun ITV thriller Code of Silence. (She is also due to star in a forthcoming adaptation of Will Dean’s Dark Pines novel, and is developing her own comedy-drama about deaf women dating in London. No, I don’t know how she finds the time either.)
But to Code of Silence. Ayling-Ellis plays Alison, an employee in a police canteen who becomes increasingly involved with an investigation into a violent criminal gang, whose members only meet outdoors in unbuggable locations. Plainclothes officers surveil them with hidden cameras, but back at the station all the official lip readers are busy on other jobs and unavailable to interpret footage of them talking. Enter Alison.
Gradually and inevitably, she becomes more enmeshed with the investigation; at first at the team’s own behest and soon under her own steam as she begins working at the pub that the gang’s newest recruit, Liam (Kieron Moore), uses as his local. To the initial fury and then resignation of the lead detectives (Andrew Buchan as DI James Marsh, haunted by the death of a colleague for which he blames himself; Charlotte Ritchie as DS Ashleigh Francis, trying her best to keep her rogue non-agent from doing anything too wild), she starts accumulating information too valuable to ignore. She also starts falling for Liam, who seems to be a relatively reluctant member of the underworld. Although only two episodes were available for review, I spy a possible redemptive arc for the new guy. But we’ll see.
And we want to see, too. There may be nothing much innovative about the basic plot – or the side story about Alison and her mother living under the threat of eviction by a company that has bought their estate for potential redevelopment, the financial pressures from which provide much of the impetus for Alison’s decisions – but the strength of the cast, and Ayling-Ellis in particular, carries things convincingly.
There are also plentiful details, grace notes really, that evoke the reality of life as a deaf person. When Alison lip-reads from the feeds in the office, only partial subtitles appear at first, lacking mostly consonants, and resolve into words as Alison works out via common sense and context what they must be saying – so “o I bo ved a roun io” blurs, shifts and clears into “No, I moved around a lot” and so on. It’s a stylish way of showing the effort and leaps involved in lip-reading, when so many plosives (and ‘m’s) all look the same from the outside.
Similarly, we see Alison stop watching a television programme at home because the subtitles are frustratingly slow to arrive. The assumptions of hearing people are gently dismantled at many points. When Liam asks if the music in the pub (where she likes it when people order one of the craft beers, because their odd names are easily identifiable) makes her job more difficult, she replies that it does, “but I like the beat”. On one particularly wearying day of simply dealing with the world, she sighs that she doesn’t want to be hearing; rather, “I just want them to be a little bit deaf. Really fed up with trying to prove myself.” The barriers to employment are not insisted upon but are clear from the joy and relief Alison has in securing the gig at the pub, and then by her (also deaf) mother’s need to find an interpreter who can accompany her to the training for the rare job she has secured. There are obstacles everywhere.
It all gives a freshness, as well as an edifying aspect, to the underlying conventions. You can watch and learn – or at least newly appreciate an underacknowledged world – without being shortchanged on your entertainment at all. That’s quite a triumph.
Code of Silence is on ITVX now.