A panicked call to the emergency services kicks off this four-part drama, but it’s hard to know if we’re meant to laugh or cry
Do you remember that Demi Moore film Striptease? It was 300 years ago, in 1996, so you may not. It was intended as a gritty look at one woman’s fight to survive desertion by her husband and raise her child alone by any means necessary and finding empowerment through one of the few avenues The Patriarchy lets women earn an independent living – stripping. Test audiences laughed at so many scenes it was quickly recut and issued as a comedy.
I thought of Striptease often as Intruder, Channel 5’s new four-part drama, unfolded – stripped (I promise no pun was intended) across the week. The initial setup was suspenseful enough: a woman’s hysterical call to the emergency services and a tumbling, semi-coherent account of an intruder, a stabbing, her husband, someone dead, a plea for an ambulance, playing over scenes of a dark, threatening garden whose thick foliage could hide a million horrors. And then we flashed back to the beginning of the evening and the programme proper began and felt … very different.
