One Night: ITV to show Jodie Whittaker drama exploring traumatic memory
She was recently announced to be joining the BBC’s TV adaptation of Dear England, a play about former England manager Sir Gareth Southgate, which is set to air next year. But before then, Jodie Whittaker will be on screen in six-part mystery drama One Night, which is coming to ITV this month.
The show tells the story of three women whose bond was all but destroyed by the traumatic events of one night twenty years ago.
Since then, Simone (Whittaker’s co-star Nicole da Silva) has harboured secret hopes of becoming a novelist but most of her haphazard attempts have been shoved into her bottom drawer.
Now, at the age of 40, she has finally written the one story she could never get out of her mind, and her debut manuscript has become an unexpected overnight success.
But it soon becomes apparent that the devastating story the book tells doesn’t exclusively belong to her.
For at the heart of Simone’s novel is a tragedy which also happened to her two childhood best friends.
“One Night is a battle between remembering and forgetting,” explains creator Emily Ballou, an award-winning Australian-American poet, novelist and screenwriter currently residing in the UK.
“It’s about how we tell stories to help us to understand our lives and how not telling a story, either through self-censorship or the injunction to be silent in the face violence, corrodes the self. And over time, calcifies.
"But sometimes these memories involve multiple persons, so who owns the truth and who has the right to tell the story?"
West Yorkshire-born Whittaker, who is perhaps best known for her role as the first female and Thirteenth Doctor in the BBC’s Doctor Who, plays Tess in the show – one of the childhood friends of Simone.
The pair were always inseparable. But after that fateful night twenty years ago, Tess gave up on her friends and herself and took up drinking.
It took her years to find her feet, give up alcohol and make a career.
Now a successful banker, she revisits her home town, and the scene of the crime, and it becomes clear that she has not yet recovered from the traumas of her past.
"I wanted to tell a story, still sadly relevant to too many of us, about sexual violence and the injunction not to speak of it,” Ballou says of the show.
“To not tell the story. To remain silent. I wanted to use the intimate, private form of storytelling that is the novel, as a way to bear witness.”
One Night, which was first released in Australia in 2023, raises questions around experiences, memories and whose they are to tell. What’s Ballou’s take?
"I believe that a traumatic memory left unspoken becomes over time, a form of psychic cancer,” she says. “But telling it can help to heal not only yourself but others.”
- ITV1 and ITVX will broadcast One Night in August.