I catch up with The Escape Artist – David Tennant and Sophie Okonedo in fine form in this legal thriller with a bite
“Everyone deserves a defence”
The Escape Artist kept appearing on my suggested watch items on ITVX but I was sure that I’d seen it, so it has taken me a wee while to figure out that the algorithm knows what it is talking about and that indeed, this would be very much up my street. Dating back to 2013, it was created by Spooks supremo David Wolsencroft and over its three episodes, weaves a tangled web of legal intrigue in the midst of major trauma.
David Tennant plays barrister Will Burton, a rising star who has made a name for himself for never losing cases and getting many a criminal out of a tight spot through exploiting loopholes and technicalities. But when he defends a man suspected of a particularly brutal murder and naturally gets him off despite his reservations about his innocence, reservations of which he makes no secret, that man – Liam Foyle – turns his ferocious attention onto Will and his family.

Without wishing to give too much away, Will soon finds the shoe is on the other foot when tragedy strikes and Foyle ends up in court again, only this time his professional rival Maggie Gardner is representing him, throwing Will’s own above-quoted words back in his face as unconscionable as it might seem. The court case that follows is grippingly tense with a sense of reaping what you sow hitting hard as Will and his family receive the kind of treatment he only too happily doled out on his climb up the legal ladder.
Toby Kebbell is brilliantly malevolent as creepy bird-fancier Foyle, at ease manipulating the world around him to carry out what he will, Monica Dolan as effective as ever as one of his followers/victims. Okonedo is excellent as the fiercely intelligent and ambitous Maggie and Tennant is strong as Will, though in the show’s hurry to make him the victim, it could usefully have shown him being as equally cut-throat and ambitious to really ram home why he is in the position he is.