It's Amelia's gap year, but rather than going to university or travelling, she gets an implant to give her more hearing after a lifetime of being deaf. But it's not all simple – she now has to spend her days at hearing-therapy sessions, tediously reading out childish sentences and being berated for using sign language. She's got to contend with an overprotective mother who sees her as a vulnerable child and the cacophony of distorted sounds that people with recent implants experience. If that wasn't enough for any moody teenager, she then witnesses a murder. The Silence becomes a clever portrayal of the realities of adapting to a new cochlear implant interwoven into a classic murder drama.

Deaf characters do not appear on TV often and can be cast into stereotypical roles that look at them only in terms of their deafness rather than the whole person. While there's a bit of this in how Amelia is put across as a "vulnerable" girl – 18-year-olds just do not go around knocking on car windows crying: "I'm deaf, please help" – Barr does well in her first major TV role. She gives some depth to Amelia – in addition to having an implant, she's a teenager who smokes, gets drunk, harbours resentment towards her mother and makes some unwise choices in love. Unfortunately, deaf teenagers have to go through all this stuff too..."

Read more at The Guardian.