I’d suggested to my husband a couple of times that we watch The Salisbury Poisonings, but he kept putting me off, saying we hadn’t finished White Lines, he wanted to watch Bosch on his own, read a book, wash the car (we don’t have a car), brush the dog. It took me a while to realise something was going on, and he eventually confessed that he’d auditioned for a part in the series, so watching it would remind him of his failure to secure the role.

This redoubled my enthusiasm for the viewing - the added pleasure of working out which character he was supposed to be. ‘Were you Rafe Spall?’ I asked, when he appeared. ‘No,’ he replied glumly, reaching for the Lindor salted caramels. I rubbed my hands together with the glee of a golf widow watching a storm brew.

The Salisbury Poisonings is the BBC’s dramatisation of one of the most bizarre and shocking events in recent history – the Novichok crisis. It began in March 2018, when Sergei and Yulia Skripal were found collapsed in the city centre, and were subsequently discovered to have been poisoned with a lethal nerve agent. Because of all the insane and awful things that have happened since, my memory of it has faded somewhat, and all I can really remember is that everyone said that it was Russia who did it, except for Jeremy Corbyn, who said we should ask them if they did it before accusing them.

So I was intrigued to watch this show and fill in the blanks, though what’s interesting about the BBC’s take on it is that they focus much more on the local aspect of the story rather than the whole international-espionage-assassination bit. It’s more Wiltshire PCs (could one of them have been my husband?) power hosing park benches and erecting corrugated iron fencing around the infected branch of Zizzi. Bureaucratic headless chickens, rather than Cold War resurrection. If this was Killing Eve then we’d be straight to a shot of the Red Square, with ‘MOSCOW’ in huge letters across the screen. But instead of the Russian capital with its cold and its Kremlin, we get lovely, genteel Salisbury, with its spire and its shops. Tracy Daszkiewicz, the Director of Public Health for Wiltshire (played by the marvellous Anne-Marie Duff), seems very agreeable, and has a nice kitchen with an Aga. There were a lot of cutaways to the handsome cathedral, and I found my hand almost unconsciously groping for my phone.

‘Found a good one for £825K’ said my husband, scrolling furiously. It turned out we were both on Rightmove.

‘If you expand your price bracket, then there’s a lovely Georgian one just outside town,’ I suggested. ‘Could we stretch to £1.4 million?’

‘No,’ he grunted.

‘Are you Anne-Marie Duff’s husband? The one doing press-ups?’

‘No.’

We’d allowed ourselves to be distracted from this worthy and scrupulous reconstruction in favour of fantasy property porn. I forced myself to concentrate. Rafe Spall, not my husband, plays DS Nick Bailey, one of the first officers on the scene, and the first officer in the Skripals’ house. Memories of Guardian articles began to surface. ‘Don’t touch the handle!’ I shrieked, as he approached the front door.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and I had it in spades. As such, it made me absolutely furious with DS Bailey for being so slow on the uptake. Why did he rub his eye with his gloved hand? Why didn’t he realise that he’d contaminated himself? When he woke up in bed, sweating and hallucinating, why didn’t he think ‘I should get this checked out?’ Why did he drive his car when he couldn’t see properly? He might not be my husband, but was he Dominic Cummings? I was so fucking livid with Nick that I accidentally expanded my search area and found a fetching 6-bed Tudor house in Alderbury for £1.5 million.

The other issue I had was the prompt and overkilly police response to two dudes keeling over on a park bench in town. They’re swarming round the place before you can say ‘Vladimir Putin,’ but in an area populated with numerous drunks and addicts, I’m pretty sure the initial supposition would have been that two winos overdid the Spice. You don’t see someone vomit next to a bin and think ‘I wonder if that’s a deadly nerve agent at work?’ So I didn’t really buy all the walkie talkies and barricade tape. Still, I did like the red tape, when Tracy got going in the contamination-containment HQ. That whole track & trace thing is obviously very timely, and it was fascinating and slightly depressing to see the Wiltshire constabulary attempt it with much more vim and vigour than our government, who couldn’t be arsed to trace a snail.

Also depressing is the Dawn Sturgess storyline, which unfolds well and sadly, with her fumbling around town, neglecting her daughter, failing to address her drinking problem, circling her own demise like a scuttling spider sucked down a plughole. The most cruel and random of fates, and a brutal afterthought, since it occurred months after the event, when we’d all moved on to heatwaves and the World Cup. It was a grim postscript to the story that is often forgotten.

There’s an interesting scene when a Porton Down expert explains the properties of Novichok to Tracey. This particular chemical weapon is very specific in its reach. It could be left as a tiny splash on a pub bar, and if you touch it, you’re toast. But if you touch right next to it, even just an inch away, you’d be fine. I was struck by that – how close you can be to either scenario, the sixpence falling one way or the other. Tails you lose. It felt like a potent metaphor for anything between missing out on a part in a BBC drama to plucking a perfume bottle full of poison out of a recycling bin.

Mostly though, I found The Salisbury Poisonings diligent and earnest, which is to say ever-so-slightly dull. And I felt guilty about that, because it’s an important tale to tell, but the BBC gave us the gentrified, small-town version of it, circling the Novichok splash without ever quite touching it. The production was fine, the story was fine, but there was a bigger, deadlier story to tell.*

• The Salisbury Poisonings, 3 episodes, BBC One

*If you’ve got to this point and are still wondering which part my husband was up for, then it was Supt Dave Minty but he lost out to Darren Boyd.