Ivan Radford | On 17, Aug 2025

How far would you go to protect someone you love? That’s the question at the heart of In Flight, Channel 4’s riveting new drama.

Katherine Kelly stars as Joanne, a flight attendant whose son, Sonny, is in prison. His crime? A murder he says he didn’t do. The twist? He’s behind bars in Sofia, Bulgaria, which makes him that bit harder for her to watch over and visit – and that bit more vulnerable to people who want to cause him harm. (Let’s just pause here to remind ourselves that this isn’t a documentary, and a fictional Channel 4 drama should not be used to form any accurate opinion or judgement of Bulgaria’s prison system.)

One such person is Cormac (Stuart Martin), who approaches Joanne in a bar – and swiftly moves from reasonable and charming to downright menacing, as he gives her an ultimatum: use her job as a flight attendant to ferry drugs overseas for him and his cartel, or her son is killed. Will she do it? Of course she will, and so the stage is set for a series of routine flights given an added dose of peril and tension – from unexpected staff searches and suspicious sniffer dogs to hiding heroin in a tampon dispenser in an airport bathroom.

Muddying the waters is Dominic (Ashley Thomas), an old flame of Joanne’s, who has returned to his wife after they were on a break. Dominic is a customs officer, which gives him double reason to be invested in her plight: he still holds the torch for our plucky flight attendant, but he doesn’t want a crime to be going undetected either.

The script, by Mike Walden and Adam Randall, contrives increasingly taut wringers to put Joanne through, even including the odd kitchen-based dust-up, and director Chris Baugh taps into all the claustrophobic paranoia of airport security along the way. Katherine Kelly holds it all together with a relentlessly charismatic turn, inviting us to root for Joanne in an unrelentingly impossible challenge. Kelly, who spent years charming viewers as Becky McDonald in Coronation Sreet, has just the right balance of wit, grit and sympathy to ground events in a moving tale of a mother trying to help her son.

What would you do to protect someone you love? Over six taut episodes, In Flight’s success is that it doesn’t just ask the question once, but asks it again and again. With Kelly in the lead, it keeps on coming up with the answers.

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