Daily Mail

You need the patience of a saint to sit through these tales of sin

- CHRISTOPHE­R STEVENS

For those who keep track of such morbid trivia, Sean Bean has been killed off 25 times on screen. That’s not a record, though — the actor with a face like a collapsed quarry is practicall­y immortal, compared to late luvvie Sir John Hurt.

Hurt died 43 times for the camera, a ridiculous fatality rate that saw him dropped from a high tower, consumed by demonic flames, hanged for highway robbery and, most famously, disembowel­led by a piranha-headed creature living in his innards, in Alien.

Sean’s got a lot of catching up to do. But if sheer misery counts for anything, Broken ( BBC1) will propel him far into the lead.

Having a few aliens burst out of his chest would be light entertainm­ent for his character, a priest in a Northern city who lives in a perpetual torment of grief, doubt and guilt.

Father Michael Kerrigan is plagued by flashbacks to a childhood of abuse in his roman Catholic school. He was beaten by his sadistic teachers whether he got answers right or wrong, beaten when he cried, beaten for being beaten.

Now he takes Mass himself, though the thought of giving children Holy Communion makes him despair and he harbours a secret hatred for the Virgin Mary. You can’t help feeling he had some bad careers advice somewhere in his past.

Writer Jimmy McGovern, who must be a real laugh-a-minute at parties, makes sure we understand this isn’t a comedy by packing the soundtrack with jazz laments by crooners such as Nina Simone and Dinah Washington. No need for that, Jimmy — we’d already guessed that Broken wasn’t the new Benidorm.

At least Father Kerrigan is likeable. His favourite lost lamb, single mother- of-three Christina (Anna Friel), is a violent, selfpityin­g thief. She loses her job at a betting shop after nicking £60 from the till and punching her manager.

When her mother dies, of a heart attack while trying to care for those three neglected grandkids, Christina hides the body so she can keep claiming the pension.

Apparently this is evidence that the British benefits system in particular, and society, in general, are ‘ broken’. That’s like opening the bonnet of a car, smashing the radiator and the carburetto­r with an axe, and announcing that the engine is ‘broken’.

This self-indulgent whinge isn’t going to get any more cheerful over the next five weeks.

You might want to watch as a deliberate act of penitence, to atone for your guiltiest TV secrets — if, in moments of weakness, you tune in to The Jeremy Kyle Show and Come Dine With Me, then it serves you right to suffer.

Equally bleak, but far more compelling, was the re-opened investigat­ion into the killing in 1996 of Lin russell and her six-year-old daughter, Megan, by junkie Michael Stone, who also left Megan’s nine-year-old sister, Josie, for dead.

The Chillenden Murders (BBC2) assembled a team of lawyers and forensics experts to re-examine the evidence.

The chief reason for supposing that Stone could be innocent is his own heated avowal. As the show establishe­d, he had no alibi, and a list of conviction­s.

He protests that he was a thief, never a killer. But researcher­s lured him into talking about his violent fantasies, of killing his enemies and burning their houses, in phone calls made from the maximum security prison where he is serving life.

on that evidence alone, if this two-part documentar­y is instrument­al in ensuring that he dies behind bars, it will be doing all of us a favour.

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