TV Pick of the Week: The Listeners - review by Yvette Huddleston

English teacher Claire (Rebecca Hall) has a busy job in a large secondary school and a happy, comfortable home life with her husband Paul (Prasanna Puwanarajah) and their teenage daughter Ashley (Mia Tharia) who attend the school where her mother teaches. One day Claire begins to hear a low, continuous humming noise that no-one else seems to hear. It begins to torment her and after a series of tests conclude that there is nothing wrong with her hearing and that it is not a form of tinnitus and a brain scan confirms that there is no neurological reason for her condition, she is left to cope as best she can. It disrupts her sleep, causes mood changes and affects her work and relationships.

Then she discovers that one of her students – Kyle (Ollie West) recently moved over from Ireland with his mother and seemingly distracted in class – can hear the sound too. Despite her misgivings, Claire agrees to accompany Kyle to nearby phone masts and wind turbine sites to try and find possible explanations for the hum that is affecting their wellbeing. Alarm bells start ringing when Kyle then tells her that he has found on the internet a group of people who live locally and can also hear the noise and he suggests that they attend one of the meetings together. Some of those present have started hearing the sound recently, others have been living with it for years.

Rather unwisely Claire has not told her husband or daughter about any of this and when Paul finds out that she has attended a meeting, he insists that they go to the next one as a family. Which is when they found out that last time Claire was there, she was with Kyle. Things then start to unravel very quickly for her – Kyle’s mother finds out and Claire is suspended from her job for meeting a student outside of school. And still the mystery around the hum continues.

Tannahill’s script delicately, engagingly, navigates the tension around this unexplained phenomenon suggesting both supernatural and scientific reasons for it and exploring how an intelligent, rational person can get drawn into conspiracy theories and end up beginning to consider espousing beliefs that border on the cultish.