Deaf actress a hit in BBC1 production, "The Silence"

Sam Wollaston's review in The Guardian in the UK:

When I was a teenager I used to take our dog for a lot of short walks. Not out of kindness or a sense of duty or anything, but because I wanted to smoke a crafty cigarette in the trees round the back of our house. Poor Sesame, she would be tied up for the time it took me to suck down a Marlboro and then brought back, unexercised and thoroughly fed up – not to mention the effects of passive smoking. No wonder she growled and dug her feet in whenever I held up the lead and told her we were off out.

It's pretty much the same for Brodie, some sort of collie, in The Silence (BBC1). "I'll take him," offers 18-year-old Amelia, who's staying with her cousins. But then, as soon as she's a safe distance from the house, she sits down on a bench and sparks up.

At this point our experiences differ somewhat. Because never, in all the hundreds of thousands of times we went for cigs together, did Sesame and I witness a brutal gang-related murder. And if we had, I'd like to think we would have maybe mentioned it to someone, even if it meant 'fessing up to the smoking. But then I wasn't profoundly deaf, as Amelia is; she has a difficult relationship with the hearing world, further complicated by the recent fitting of cochlear implants.

Now, Amelia is central to the case. She's a witness (a silent one, to begin with anyway), so her own life is in danger. She's also helping out in the investigation, by lip-reading the people on the CCTV footage for the chief investigating officer, who happily happens to be her uncle (as well as Brodie's owner).

It all adds up to quite a big ask of the viewer. But it's worth going along with, because there's a pacy thriller in here, to be unravelled over the next three nights. And it's nicely knitted together with the deaf storyline: Amelia's isolation and frustrations, the way other people – particularly her mother – are overprotective of her, treating her like the child she no longer is. Plus the implant thing, which seems to be a total nightmare, like living with a radio inside your head – one that isn't properly tuned to any station but is picking up the odd bit of several, plus a lot of interference. No wonder Amelia's a bit bolshy.

There are some good performances: Douglas Henshall as the workaholic cop, Dervla Kirwan as his irritating, busybody florist wife, and Gina McKee as Amelia's well-intentioned but misguided mother. "What did you say?" Amelia asks her in the car, when she doesn't catch something. "Nothing," says her mum, irritably. That must be just about the most infuriating thing, for a deaf person.

But all these actors are eclipsed by Genevieve Barr's (pictured) mesmerising performance as Amelia. She is understated and natural, totally convincing. And Barr herself is deaf, I'm pleased to say. I'm still cross that Artie from Glee was up out of his wheelchair and dancing the other day, though not half as cross as a real paraplegic actor would be, I imagine.

Oh, and Brodie the collie is pretty good, too. He's not mentioned in the credits, so I don't know who's playing him, or if he's even a collie in real life or not. Sesame, sadly, is no longer with us. Lung cancer.