We needed Sir Trevor’s masterly scrutiny, not Susanna Reid’s ego

Television’s biggest lie is the delusion that its stars can do anything and everything. Politicians think they can dance, comedians imagine they are global explorers and scientists believe they are God.

Good Morning Britain’s presenter susanna Reid might have had ambitions to be a serious journalist once, but for the past decade she’s been an amateur hoofer and celebrity fluffer.

so it was an act of monumental arrogance and insensitivity to front a one- off documentary revealing the police investigation that caught two psychopathic killers, in The Murder Of Becky Watts: Police Tapes (iTv).

susanna’s egotism spoiled what should have been a disturbing glimpse into the methods that detectives use to pry secrets out of their suspects in the interview room. it included long extracts from a series of interrogations, as 28- year- old nathan Matthews cockily maintained that he and his depraved girlfriend shauna Hoare, 21, knew nothing about his stepsister’s disappearance.

The police were certain the sick pair had killed Becky, 16, at her Bristol home in 2015. They had found Matthews’s fingerprints in her blood. But even the most hardened crime squad veterans were not prepared for the discovery of her body in a neighbour’s shed, dismembered and wrapped in polythene.

susanna elbowed her way to the foreground of this appalling story, making sure the camera saw her studying footage from the interviews on a laptop while surrounded by heaps of bundled videos.

Her face was focused in a look of intense concentration as she stroked her chin. susanna would have us believe she pored over all the hundreds of hours of tape. somehow, i doubt it.

she also appeared to interview the lead detective, Di Richard Ocone. But he wasn’t responding to her questions: he already knew what he wanted to say, and carefully laid out the facts, while susanna nodded and looked serious.

in similar shows, such as sir Trevor McDonald’s masterly scrutiny of the U.s. mafia, the presenter has had a key role to play, winning the trust of family and witnesses, and persuading them to tell their stories on camera.

Becky’s father, stepmother and grandmother talked movingly of how their lives had been destroyed. But susanna seemed almost silent during those interviews. There was no sense that their testimony was being coaxed out through her expertise.

The great television lie surrounding Donald Trump is that he’s a hapless incompetent, whose rise has been fuelled solely by inherited wealth.

Trump: An American Dream (C4), the first of a four-part series, helped to dispel that delusion by showing how coldly Machiavellian the property magnate has been since the start of his career in the seventies.

For all his narcissism, The Donald must welcome the ‘fake news’ that he became President by accident, swept into the White House on a national wave of disgust at conventional politics.

in fact, as the archive footage in this documentary proved, he has been scheming for ultimate power ever since building Trump Tower in Manhattan in the early eighties, with the help of a $100 million tax bonus.

Rona Barrett, the archetype of sycophantic American Tv journalists, asked him in 1980, when he was 34, what he would do if his wealth vanished overnight.

Trump smiled like a pomaded hyena and suggested he would run for President — before laughing the remark off as ‘facetious’.

it was interesting to see how articulate he once was. That’s changed, bigly.