Prisoner 951

Philippa Lowthorpe has spent two decades making British television about people the state would rather not deal with — Five Daughters, Three Girls, the early episodes of The Crown. Prisoner 951, written by Stephen Butchard and broadcast on BBC One over four nights in November 2025, is her account of the Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe case. Narges Rashidi won the BAFTA for Leading Actress for it, and Úna Ní Dhonghaíle took the craft award for editing.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe was a project manager at the Thomson Reuters Foundation who flew to Tehran in 2016 with her small daughter to visit her parents, and was detained at the airport on the return leg. Rashidi plays her through the interrogations, the isolation and the calculations of a prisoner working out how much to concede; Joseph Fiennes plays Richard Ratcliffe in London, learning the machinery of the Foreign Office, the press and a decades-old unpaid British debt to Iran. Marion Bailey is his mother. The prison scenes were shot in Greece, and Lowthorpe cuts between the two countries so that a hunger strike outside an embassy and a cell in Evin occupy the same rhythm.

The Guardian gave it four stars for the performances and the script, and it holds a perfect critics' score. What sets it apart from the run of British campaign dramas is its patience with bureaucratic detail — the ministerial phrasing, the categories a case gets filed under — and its refusal to make either spouse straightforwardly heroic about six years of it.