Crossfire

Gunmen are on the loose in a hotel, and people can't stop phoning each other in hallways – even when they're meant to be hiding silently.

One couple-man has escaped with other holidaymakers and two of the kids, but stupidly loses the stupid brats by helping a stupid woman down a stony bit of a stupid path. Eventually the security manager pairs up with Jo and is delighted to find that she is a trained police officer from when Hawes was in Line of Duty. “See if they’ve called my phone!” she says, because she left it on the side when she heard the gunshots 20 long, long minutes ago and because she doesn’t remember that it is stuffed to the cyber-gills with sexy texts and selfies to – well, I shan’t tell you, because you will be in need of all the suspense you can get if you’ve made it this far through episode one. The rest of it is just people running up and down corridors in the hotel to places of greater or lesser safety. Or, more often: “I’m under a table/in the kitchen/between stacks of pool equipment and still too vulnerable to be having this frantically whispered conversation. If you like any of these – and if you like all of them, hold on to your hat right now – then has the BBC got a treat for you!

Hawes' Jo and her husband are enjoying a family trip to a holiday resort with friends and lots of kids in tow. keeley hawes in bbc drama crossfire, standing ...

Self preservation or preparation for something more sinister?" While another tweeted: "Blonde waiter. The series, which sees "a holiday turn from heaven to hell in a second", is airing three consecutive episodes this week and has already got off to a nail-biting start.

Written by best-selling author Louise Doughty, who is turning her talents to the world of TV for the first time, the series follows Jo (Keeley Hawes) and her ...

[BBC One ](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001c9gh)and [iPlayer](https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer) at 9pm on Tuesday, September 20, 2022. [will be made available](https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/drama/crossfire-bbc-keeley-hawes-release-date/) on BBC iPlayer in full following the broadcast of episode 1. Crossfire will arrive on BBC One at 9pm on Tuesday, September 20, 2022.

An idyllic holiday is thrown into chaos when a group of violent gunmen descend on a hotel. Nail biter is an understatement. Crossfire,19-09-2022,1,Episode 1 ...

The terracotta maze of the hotel is transformed into a war zone with bloodied bodies strewn across its chic tiled floors and sinister masked gunmen prowling its endless corridors. Armed with an ancient rifle, she becomes an unlikely action heroine clad in Boden’s holiday collection. On the morning of the attack, she is alone in her room sending flirty selfies to a mystery man when the first shots ring out from below. The whole trip was her idea but even before the first night is over, cracks are showing. Suddenly everyone is fending for themselves, separated from loved ones and faced with split-second, life-or-death decisions. Viewers tuning into BBC One’s [Crossfire ](https://inews.co.uk/culture/television/crossfire-bbc1-josette-simon-no-such-thing-black-actor-1867186)will find a similarly idyllic setting – a sprawling Canary Islands hotel where sun-drenched middle-class guests enjoy boozy dinners and aqua aerobics while marital tensions simmer beneath the surface and hint at inevitable combustion.

The new BBC One series about a terror attack at a Spanish resort plays out like a zombie survival movie – Hawes needs better scripts to come her way.

Crossfire is hardly the first case of Western holidaymakers fighting for survival (it evokes shades of Naomi Watts in tsunami thriller The Impossible, Armie Hammer in Hotel Mumbai’s take on the city’s 2008 attacks, and even Sheridan Smith’s sexual assault in a Turkish resort in the ITV legal procedural No Return). In an unreliable world, she is a reliable constant. Of course, the terror attack is really just a prop designed to expose how unhappy these couples truly are. The resort is on an island inexplicably cut off from the emergency services, allowing most of the drama – in three hour-long episodes – to play out before armed police intervene. Jo is an ex-copper and Miriam a doctor, allowing the Brits to become protagonists and order around a bunch of humble, mewling Spaniards. Hawes is Jo, wife of Jason (Lee Ingleby) and mother of Adam (Noah Leggott) and Amara (Shalisha James-Davis). In 2022, for example, the deadliest shootings have been in Nigeria, Mali and Pakistan. The trip is a disaster from the off: Jo and Jason’s relationship is still recovering from an affair she’s conducted, while Jason is trying to bully his wife into not returning to her high-flying career as – you guessed it – a police officer. [Keeley Hawes](/topic/keeley-hawes) seems to be undertaking. She’s just arrived on holiday with two other couples: Vikash Bhai’s Chinar and Anneika Rose’s Abhi (“Mr and Mrs Perfect,” as the group knows them), and Miriam (Josette Simon) and Ben (Daniel Ryan). Well, this is an experiment that If her agent was looking for a project to make [The Bodyguard](/topic/the-bodyguard) look cerebral, boy did they find it.

A sun-baked island resort; Keeley Hawes taking a leisurely dip in an infinity pool as we hear her in voiceover musing on how events happen unchosen, ...

[Murder in Provence, ITV review - a little light sleuthing amid fabulous French scenery](/tv/murder-provence-itv-review-little-light-sleuthing-amid-fabulous-french-scenery)Roger Allam and Nancy Carroll make an urbane crime-solving duo [The Newsreader, BBC Two review - a drama series of welcome substance from Australia](/tv/newsreader-bbc-two-review-drama-series-welcome-substance-australia)It's 1986, and a Melbourne TV news team are battling rival stations and each other [The Control Room, BBC One review - twisty thriller set in an ultra-noir Glasgow](/tv/control-room-bbc-one-review-twisty-thriller-set-ultra-noir-glasgow)A mysterious woman caller turns an ambulance dispatcher's life inside out [Trom, BBC Four review - there's something fishy in the North Atlantic](/tv/trom-bbc-four-review-theres-something-fishy-north-atlantic)Murder, conspiracy and ecological awareness in a cold climate If you enjoy watching this kind of torture, it's a four-star of the genre. A dead body floating in a pool managed a voiceover in Sunset Boulevard, so there is no guarantee Jo has survived all the shooting, of course. Also in the group is Amara (Shalisha James-Davis), an older mixed-race teenager, who you eventually realise is Jo’s daughter from her first marriage. The script throws in a handy scene with a know-it-all man at the resort who is trying to guess the six friends' professions (though their names are rushed past: we have to struggle on, adding those in step by step). [writer](https://theartsdesk.com/topics/screenwriting) Louise Doughty (Apple Tree Yard) is trying to avoid the traditional arc of the disaster movie: that is, assemble a disparate bunch of people in an enclosed space far from anywhere, immerse the audience in their back stories, then after about 45-60 minutes start killing them off.

Created and written by Louise Doughty (best-selling novelist and author of Apple Tree Yard), in her first original series for television, Crossfire is set ...

My heart was beating out of my chest when I read it and I got to the end of each episode and I had to go on to the next. I thought it was one of those where, you know, the indication of a good script is always in the writing and it was just great, it was a page turner. I think it's a representation of somebody from the Indian subcontinent that we don't often get to see on screen. I think what audiences will relate to in Crossfire is the fact that it's a very familiar situation. She has made the decision and it is a matter of breaking it to her husband that it’s what she wants to do. It was a joy, especially the Spanish cast as well as it was a nice mix, especially the social side of things and we get to hang out together. I suppose firstly it was something quite unusual to have a woman at the centre of a story which is so action-based and at the same time has this moral dilemma with this much emotion. However at the same time, what it's actually about is the human stories and the kind of moral dilemma at the heart of it. I think people at home will be able to relate that at your most relaxed, at your most unguarded and this thing strikes and how would I behave if it happened to me? Of course we would all like to think we would behave heroically; the truth is not all of us would. I wanted to write about the human choices that we all make under pressure and of course the consequences of those decisions that reverberate for years to come. I hope that what people watching relate to is the sense that this event happened during the course of something that for many people is very ordinary and often a treat.