The Salisbury Poisonings
[5] On 4 March 2018, emergency services receive a call to attend to Sergei and Yulia Skripal who have been found unconscious on a park bench in Salisbury city centre.It emerges that he and his daughter were poisoned with a highly potent Novichok agent which was smeared on the front-door handle of their residence.The docudrama also deals with the incidental exposure of several other persons, including a police officer and an uninvolved couple who found a perfume bottle containing the nerve agent which they administered to themselves.At the end of the series, the real-life people involved in the story are pictured returning to the scene, and some film is shown of Dawn Sturgess, the only person to die from their exposure to the Novichok.Writing in The Guardian, Lucy Mangan praised the show's script and direction as being "admirably restrained", and compared the calm actions of its characters facing a "new normal" to the reactions of the public during the COVID-19 pandemic.