The Control Room is a 2022 British thriller television series created by Nick Leather and produced by Hartswood Films. It stars Iain De Caestecker and Joanna Vanderham. The three-part series was broadcast on BBC One over consecutive nights from 17 to 19 July 2022, and was simultaneously available on BBC iPlayer.
Leather was inspired to write the series by a real-life health-scare that happened with his daughter. He explained, "So when I then sat down and was trying to think of the story, when everything's okay, I just thought back to that and how, just for a few minutes, you don't know if things are going to be alright and you're so desperate," and in those "desperate few minutes, I realised sort of how profoundly the person on the other end of the line can help you and affect you. Their manner is so important", and "[i]t's such an intense relationship, such an intense conversation with [the emergency call handler], who you’ve never spoken to before, and you’re never gonna speak to again. You don't know what they look like, they don't know what you look like, yet despite that anonymity you are so dependent on them and you're reaching out to them. And the person on the other end of the phone line is a bit of an everyday hero. So based on that experience, I thought 'God, I wonder if there's something in that as a starting point?'", pondering "what if an emergency call room handler was pulled into the emergency? What if, in that professional situation, suddenly it was a personal situation?". He said "the next time I sat down and tried to come up with a story, I wrote two things at the top; one was call room handler and caller. I then put a circle around it and tried to think of the way the relationship between those two people would be and a scene that involved them both."
