Do you remember when the mood shifted against Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe? It was the day that she gave a press conference on her return to Britain, criticising the government for taking six years and five foreign secretaries to secure her release from Iranian custody. “Ungrateful,” people said. But watch the illuminating drama Prisoner 951 (BBC One), which dramatises her hellish ordeal, and you may feel that she had a point.
The four-part series begins with Zaghari-Ratcliffe (Narges Rashidi) being stopped at the airport in Tehran, where she has been visiting family. She follows officials into a room, leaving her parents holding her 22-month old daughter, Gabriella. The officials accuse her of spying. Then she is blindfolded and taken by van to prison. Meanwhile, her husband, Richard (Joseph Fiennes), is at home preparing for his wife’s return: fresh flowers in a vase, her favourite ice cream in the freezer.
What happens to Zaghari-Ratcliffe is the stuff of nightmares. Interrogations, secret trials at the Revolutionary Court, moments of hope cruelly dashed. She endures a mixture of grim solitary confinement, a prison psychiatric ward, a women’s wing where she at least has the comfort of friendship. Eventually, she is allowed to spend time at her parents’ home under house arrest.
