Kidnapped: The Chloe Ayling Story review – TV as nonsensical as the crime it’s based on | TV & Radio

WWhat would you do? How would you react in this extraordinary situation? That question is at the heart of all drama to some extent, but it is especially crucial in Kidnapped: The Chloe Ayling Story, a dramatization of real but controversial events.

Chloe Ayling is a British model who was kidnapped in 2017. She was hired through her agent for a photoshoot in Milan, but when the 20-year-old arrived at the specified location, a quiet building on a back street, masked men attacked her, doped her up with ketamine and drove her to a remote farmhouse. Six days later she turned up at the British consulate in Milan, where she was released despite no ransom being paid.

What makes the Ayling case worth studying is what happened next. After staying in Italy for three weeks while local police investigated, Ayling returned to the UK and began making media appearances, starting with chatting to TV reporters in her mother’s front garden. This is where the problems began: according to various commentators, Ayling was too calm, too cheerful, too eager to pose for press photographers, too sexy in her clothes. By the time she appeared on Good Morning Britain later that year, presenter Piers Morgan was armed with the big trap that Ayling’s haters in the tabloids and social media had jumped on: in a police interview, she had given a misleading answer about a detail of the case.

Kidnapped opens with a flash-forward to the meeting with Morgan, adapted by screenwriter Georgia Lester, but with Robert Glenister mouthing the presenter’s words verbatim. Morgan repeatedly emphasises his one point (“You LIED!”), justifying it by noting that Ayling earns money from interviews and has signed a book contract. She should expect “tough questions”, he insists, though he shows no interest in the answers. Ayling is maddeningly reluctant when the chance to explain herself arises: Nadia Parkes plays her, nailing the flat tone and stilted delivery Ayling displays when pressed by a brand of journalism more interested in winning battles than uncovering the truth.

As the interview airs, Lester shows us a viewer who casually disbelieves Ayling’s story after reading online that her testimony has been called into question. On her phone after the show, Ayling scrolls through dozens of comments calling her a “fake.”

Kidnapped thus captures an unpleasant phenomenon of the digital age: your confident assessment of a situation you know nothing about can be communicated not only to the world, but also directly to the person involved. The series also shows us how someone like Ayling is treated on a daily basis, even before her kidnapping; how men she rejects in a club or resists when they approach her on the street react with aggressive anger. She is a woman men would like to sleep with, then she becomes a public figure. Either way, she is “fair game”.

The opening double bill of the six-part drama, however, spends most of its time on the less interesting part of the story: the crime itself. This involves a pairing between Parkes and Julian Swiezewski as a man who will eventually be revealed as Lukasz Herba. In 2018, after the media furore had died down, Herba was convicted of kidnapping and attempted extortion and, as the main culprit in the case, sentenced to more than 16 years in prison – but at the farm he tells Ayling that he is an unwilling foot soldier for a dark web mafia called Black Death. They want to auction her off as a “sex slave”, he claims; he objects and can protect her if she does as he says. She is initially handcuffed to a chest of drawers, but Herba soon offers to relax this arrangement if she will share his bed instead.

What would you do? As Ayling tries to show gratitude for keeping her captor on her side, without being forced into a situation where she has to have sex with him or risk angering him by rejecting him, a tense psychological battle could ensue. But it doesn’t, because Kidnapped is tied to what really happened – and what really happened is small and stupid. Herba’s plan was a blunder from the start: much of what he said and did, or at least the picture we have of it from Ayling’s memory and the police evidence, makes no sense. Kidnapped trades on its veracity, but without the psyche of a criminal mastermind to investigate the truth, this is frustrating. There’s a lot of inert drama to wade through before later episodes focus more rewardingly on Ayling’s time in the public eye.

Much of her difficulty in explaining herself stemmed from the fact that her true story was complicated and nonsensical. Ayling could not turn it into a compelling story; neither could Kidnapped.