My neighbour murdered by Putin: David Tennant is uncanny in a new drama about Alexander Litvinenko

Few of us will have forgotten the haunting image of Alexander Litvinenko lying on his hospital deathbed, hooked up to monitors, his eyes clouded with pain and exhaustion. It’s become a symbol of Vladimir Putin’s evil.

Seeing David Tennant so perfectly re-create it for a new TV drama about Alexander’s brutal killing with a tea laced with a deadly radioactive substance will resonate with us all then, but for me it is particularly painful. I’ve written about many true crime dramas for Weekend, but this one is uncomfortably close to home because Alexander – a Russian former KGB agent who accused Putin of state-sponsored murder before defecting to Britain – was my next-door neighbour and I saw some of the events depicted in the drama first-hand.

The last time I talked to Alexander – Sasha to his friends – was on 18 October 2006 when he and his wife Marina came over with flowers to meet the son I’d just given birth to. As they were leaving, Alexander vowed with a smile, ‘I will teach him Russian.’

Two weeks later, as I was feeding the baby in our front room, my father-in-law who was staying with us shouted that there was an ambulance outside. I saw Alexander being helped into the vehicle by paramedics. As it sped off I opened the door and saw Marina, her face bathed in tears. We hugged. They thought it was food poisoning, but she wasn’t sure.

The drama starts shortly afterwards. On 16 November two officers, DI Brent Hyatt (Neil Maskell) and DS Jim Dawson (Barry Sloane), turn up at the hospital to hear the story of a man who claims he has been poisoned by Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Tennant, who listened to Alexander’s interviews and worked with a dialect coach, is uncannily realistic as my former neighbour. As well as the Russian intonation, he nails the way Alexander often struggled to find the right word in English before apologising.

Faced with a man who claims he’s been poisoned on the orders of one of the most powerful people on the planet, at first the police aren’t sure whether to believe him. ‘If he’s a nutter,’ says one, ‘he’s the most level-headed nutter I’ve ever met.’

I can empathise, because the first time I met Alexander my jaw hit the ground at the things he told me about Putin. He said Putin had helped fund 9/11 and had bombed his own people in order to start a war against Chechnya. Admittedly, I too wondered whether he was just another conspiracy theorist, or whether I’d been ridiculously naive about the events that were shaping our world.

Alexander was a Russian former KGB agent who accused Putin of state-sponsored murder before defecting to Britain

The drama could not be timelier. The war with Ukraine means we’ve all now seen just how far Putin is prepared to go, bending the truth and sacrificing his own people, and how shrewd he’s proved to be in destabilising the West. Europe is paying the price for his greedy ambition, but back in 2006 he was deemed more of an ally.

The four-part series looks at how, shortly before Alexander’s death on 23 November 2006, investigators finally realised he was telling the truth. He’d been poisoned with the radioactive substance polonium-210 while drinking tea with two Russian men, one of whom was a former KGB officer, at a London hotel – making it an attack on a naturalised British citizen on British soil. But knowing how he was murdered formed just a small part of the story, as the following three episodes make clear.

They follow the frustrations of the police as they hit dead end after dead end. But spurred on by Alexander’s dying plea that they demonstrate British justice and fairness as opposed to what passes for it in his own country, slowly they piece together what happened.

The drama also follows stoically determined Marina, played brilliantly by Russian Margarita Levieva, as she fights to make sure the world knows what happened despite the establishment’s resistance. It was in 2014, eight years after her husband’s death, that Marina won the right to a public inquiry, which found Putin had ‘probably’ sanctioned the assassination. And just last year the European Court of Human Rights ruled Russia was responsible for the murder.

The four-part series looks at how, shortly before Alexander’s death on 23 November 2006, investigators finally realised he was telling the truth 

‘It is painful, but I’m very grateful to get the chance to tell this story,’ Marina told me after the show’s press launch. ‘Every time I talk about what happened, or there is a new way of telling it – a documentary, a play, an opera – I feel it is justice for Sasha. It’s not proper justice but there is a victory in making sure as many people as possible know what happened.

‘There are still people who deny Putin had anything to do with it. But getting justice for Sasha has always been the most important thing for me and we had to work really hard to make that happen with the public inquiry and the European Court of Human Rights. Now people see what is happening in Ukraine and see there is a strong link. They also see that eventually you have to make a decision – are you for human rights and decency or are you for business deals?’

Marina worked with co-producer Richard Kerbaj on making the drama as authentic as possible, knowing she could trust him as he had also made a documentary about her husband. Their son Anatoly, who was 12 when his father died, worked on the series as an executive producer.

‘Even my friends were surprised when I sent them the photograph of David Tennant as Sasha – they look so alike,’ says Marina, who spent time with the actor telling him her story. ‘He has Sasha’s voice and accent, and I’m pleased someone so well known is playing him because it means more people will watch it.’

Marina also spent time with Margarita, whose family fled anti-Semitism in Russia. Incredibly, they discovered a link between their two families. When Alexander and Marina first escaped Russia they met a lawyer who was trying to help them get sanctuary in America – he was Margarita’s stepfather. ‘I think we have a similar soul,’ says Marina of the actress, who looks uncannily similar to her throughout the series.

While the drama didn’t film in Osier Crescent, Muswell Hill, where we lived, it did spend time filming at Alexander’s grave in Highgate Cemetery for what are, quite possibly, the most moving scenes of the series.

Marina, who has seen so much death – not only that of her husband but also of many of his friends including the oligarch Boris Berezovsky – remains a regular visitor there. ‘There have been a lot of tragic stories but that means I value everything that remains. I won’t let Russia destroy me. They wanted to destroy Sasha’s memory, but this drama is going to show people what they did.’

Litvinenko will be available on ITVX from Thursday.