Oktober

First shown on ITV in April 1998 after a last-minute scheduling shuffle, Oktober arrived with the feel of an event drama: ambitious, international in scope, and unusually cinematic for British television of the era. Adapted from his own 1988 novel by Stephen Gallagher—who was also making his directorial debut—this three-part thriller fused conspiracy, horror, and techno-paranoia into a taut, visually arresting piece of late-90s telefantasy.

Stephen Tompkinson leads as Jim Harper, a Swiss-based English tutor who falls for Rochelle Genoud the elder sister of one of his pupils and tries to meet her high in the Alps at a seminar for the company that employs her, multinational pharmaceutical giant Risinger Genoud. Rochelle is no ingénue but a coolly driven executive overseeing development of Mentozone, a mind-altering drug with extraordinary and terrifying consequences. Those exposed to it appear trapped within a shared nightmare landscape—an eerie collective mental realm that blurs individuality and autonomy.

When Jim is mistakenly identified as a spy and accidentally killed, Risinger Genoud revive him using a contaminated strain of Mentozone. The side effects are unprecedented. Previously, the drug has left a unit of Russian soldiers in Chechnya catatonic yet psychically linked; now Jim becomes something else entirely—a functioning anomaly. What he doesn’t realise is that he has become an asset of unimaginable value. Rochelle chillingly describes him as “$50 billion on legs”: a walking experiment whose altered state could yield illegal millions as the company scrambles to replace a soon-to-expire patent.

From that point, Oktober transforms into a tense fugitive thriller.  The series’ real power though, lies in its atmosphere of corporate omnipotence. Even when Jim flees to England, the implication is clear: multinational interests do not respect borders. Though aided by Linda (Maria Lennon), he cannot escape the tightening net. Wherever he turns he finds duplicity; allies shift, loyalties fracture, and surveillance seems omnipresent. Paranoia here is not irrational; it is earned.

Jim’s world edges into a liminal space between life and death, waking and dreaming, sanity and madness. The shared nightmare motif becomes both metaphor and mechanism: is he resisting corporate control, or already subsumed within it?

Visually, Oktober is among the most handsome British thrillers of its decade. Location shooting in the Swiss Alps, France and London lends the production scale and authenticity, even if filming at altitude reportedly left several crew members unwell. The alpine sequences are particularly striking—icy, remote, and forbidding—mirroring the emotional isolation of its protagonist. Production designer Julian Fullalove (later known for work ranging from BUGS to The 10th Kingdom) gives the corporate interiors a sleek sterility that contrasts effectively with the raw grandeur of the mountains.

Stephen Tompkinson, then widely recognised for lighter or ensemble roles in series such as Drop the Dead Donkey and Ballykissangel, relishes the chance to carry an action-led thriller. As he noted at the time, the role’s physical demands and Hitchcockian undertones—he explicitly referenced The 39 Steps—were part of the appeal. His performance grounds the escalating strangeness in recognisable humanity. Jim is no super-agent; he is an ordinary man reacting to extraordinary events, and Tompkinson ensures that vulnerability remains visible even as the stakes mount.

Maria Lennon brings warmth and steel to Linda, while Lydzia Englert and Michael Bertenshaw provide strong support, the latter adding a welcome note of ambiguity to the corporate milieu. The ensemble’s relative freshness helps sell the premise; we believe these people inhabit a world just slightly askew from our own.

Gallagher’s television pedigree—having previously written Warriors’ Gate and Terminus for Doctor Who and adapted his novel Chimera for Anglia—prepared him well for blending genre elements. Yet Oktober feels like a maturation of his thematic concerns: the fragility of identity, the ethical vacuum at the intersection of science and commerce, and the thin membrane between rationality and horror. Critics of the original novel praised its “diamond-sharp” prose and genre-blurring confidence; much of that sensibility survives the transition to screen.

Carnival Films, later associated with cult fare such as Bugs and Crime Traveller, clearly invested in scale and polish. The result is a production that feels closer to an international co-production than a domestic three-parter.

If Oktober occasionally shows its 1990s roots—particularly in pacing and some technological assumptions—it nevertheless stands as a bold example of British genre television willing to think big. It asks a timeless question: if everyone really is after you, is it still paranoia? In Gallagher’s hands, the answer is both chilling and exhilarating.