The irony of watching a high quality drama about the Israel-Palestine conflict while the real life conflict flared into agonising images on every news broadcast cannot have been lost on many viewers.
But even if The Honourable Woman had been screened at a quieter time in the Middle East, Hugo Blick's extraordinary eight-week venture on peak time TV scored many pleasurable firsts, not least Maggie Gyllenhall's rather wonderful British drawl in her role as Baroness Nessa Stein.
I also loved - and who could not? - Stephen Rea as the not-quite-washed-up British spy, his tangled curls flopping in all directions, and Lindsay Duncan as his estranged wife. But perhaps in the desire for top-notch casting, some of the roles did not work so well. Andrew Buchan as the oddly-named Ephra (Ephraim?) Stein was one of the least convincing Jews ever seen on screen, even if he was meant to be patrician. But Igal Naor playing the Kojak-like Shlomo Zahary almost made up for Buchan, with the added joy of almost an entire episode with dialogue in Hebrew, as the extent of the Stein Foundation's controversial communications work in the West Bank became clear. Delicious, indeed, to discover a readily-believable team of Israeli special agents working literally underground, monitoring the comings and goings of the Stein Foundation's Middle East academy.
Blick had a lot of loose ends to tie up in episode eight, in which we learned that Atika Halabi (played beautifully by Lubna Azaba), the one-time fellow captive of Nessa in Gaza, was not only the Honourable Woman but had been playing both ends against the middle for almost a decade, betraying Nessa, sleeping with Ephra, and working for the evil spy, Monica Chatwin. In the closing scenes, Chatwin more than got her comeuppance with a sustained stint of water-boarding and then a rather unpleasant dispatch on the back of a hotel door.
Altogether this was a slow-burning, engrossing and fascinating drama. Kudos to the BBC for continuing to run it throughout this volatile summer.
