In Flight, Channel 4 review - drugs, thugs and Bulgarian gangsters

What would TV screenwriters do without drugs? In Flight, created by Mike Walden and Adam Randall, is yet another drama depicting the perils and pitfalls of getting sucked into the narcotics trade, though it does deliver a twist or two to distinguish it from earlier specimens.

It revolves around Jo Conran (Katherine Kelly), a single mum who works as a flight attendant for an airline called Avalon. The fact that her job involves regular flights to various European and Far Eastern destinations means she could be very useful as a drugs courier, though this has never been her ambition. However, when her son, Sonny (Harry Cadby), gets arrested and jailed in Bulgaria for a murder which he may or may not have committed, she’s confronted by a bearded and menacing Ulsterman called Cormac (Stuart Martin, pictured below). He tells her that if she doesn’t bring three kilos of heroin back into the UK on her next trip, his gang have a man inside the prison in Sofia where Sonny is being held, and they won’t hesitate to kill him. Also, if she tells anybody else about this not-tremendously-enticing offer, this will also trigger the death of her son.

She has little option but to comply. She gets a bit of help from the surly Cormac, who supplies her with false bottom attachments which let her conceal bags of heroin in her luggage, but she still has to run the gauntlet of airport customs officers, even if they may be inclined to wave cabin crew through more leniently than the average punter. Though, on one occasion, Jo rather cynically swaps bags with her fellow crew-member Zara (Ambreen Razia), which was fortunate since she did get searched on that occasion.

Inevitably, the stress gets too much. The increasingly desperate Jo eventually feels she has to confide in somebody, and the obvious choice is Dom (Ashley Thomas, pictured below), who is not only a Customs officer and an ex-cop, but also Jo’s former lover. Indeed, he would be very happy to be her current lover, even though he’s now back under the family roof with his wife Melanie (Bronagh Waugh) and kids.

As the story evolves, we get to see some different sides of the various characters, and we learn that Jo isn’t the only one who has been coerced into an impossible predicament. Cormac has his own backstory involving his one-time inamorata, Aoife (Cliodhna McCorley), who found herself on the wrong end of the law, while Jo gets her detective hat on to unravel the real story of how her son found himself banged up for murder. This involves some tense confrontations with the Bulgarian equivalent of the Cosa Nostra, and suffice to say it doesn’t pay to get on the wrong side of a gang matriarch bearing a grudge.

You’d hardly call In Flight plausible (unless you were on drugs), but the show is kept on the road by a capable cast. Martin and Thomas both deliver skilfully nuanced performances, while Kelly is a deceptive actress who always has a little bit more going on than you think behind her rather inscrutable exterior. In Flight isn’t going to give Breaking Bad a run for its money, but give it a go, and you might conceivably get addicted.

• In Flight continues on C4 on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday this week. All episodes available to stream online.

• More TV reviews on theartsdesk