These vile, swaggering, lying killers got 30 years each. Good

ACURIOUS coda at the end of fly-onthedocumentary Catching A Killer ( C4) complained the Press had failed to cover the trial of two men accused of shooting a 19-year-old in a drugs den.

We heard a montage of radio headlines: none of them mentioned Mohamed Noor or Albert Prempeh, two drug dealers accused of going to a house in Milton Keynes and shooting the youth as he begged for his life, in September last year.

The dead man, Suhaib Mohammed, was by all accounts a likeable lad from a loving family, who had recently gone off the rails.

But the story was ignored — and though it tried diligently, this documentary could not ignite much interest either.

However unpalatable, the truth is stark and harsh: anyone who goes to a squat on a rundown housing estate, to buy and use drugs, tends to forfeit public sympathy.

Suhaib, whose family came here from Somalia, certainly didn’t deserve to die, but he was hardly the sweet innocent teen this programme attempted to portray.

As the cameras followed detectives around the streets, it was obvious neighbours were terrified of the criminal gang that ran the den. No one would admit even to hearing the gunshot.

BABY BUMP OF THE NIGHT: It turns out the pregnant bride in Love, Lies And Records (BBC1) wasn’t expecting after all — she just had a cushion stuffed up her dress. Still, it looked more believable than the plot of this bonkers drama.

The killers themselves were vile bullies who thought they could bluster, lie and threaten their way out of the charges.

Noor was so arrogant he handed himself in, declared the whole business had been an accident, and expected to be set free.

His indignation when the police asked where he had acquired a gun was chilling: this was not a man accustomed to being questioned.

Prempeh attacked a cameraman when he was arrested. Then he decided to play the victim, denouncing Noor and pleading his own innocence.

The coppers made a great show of debating the duo’s stories, over coffee at their desks, but there was more than a dash of play-acting here: you didn’t need to be a detective to see that Noor and Prempeh couldn’t open their mouths without lying.

As long as they both got long sentences, it was impossible to care what happened to them. Sure enough, they were both jailed for 30 years.

But the Press were right at the time: there was precious little interest in this tale. The contrast could not have been greater with Blitz: The Bombs That Changed Britain (BBC2). This outstanding historical series relived the appalling toll of a single high explosive shell that fell on a house in Clydebank, beside the Scottish shipyards, in 1941.

At the foot of the stairwell, sheltering from the bombardment and trusting the thick walls of their tenement house to keep them safe, were 16 members from four generations of the Rocks family. The youngest, baby Jeanette, was a day old.

By a horrible mischance, the bomb fell through a skylight, straight into the stairwell. The only member of the family not present was the grandfather, Patrick: he had swapped shifts at the yard with his son.

What Patrick suffered, on hearing his whole family was dead, cannot be imagined. When he tried to identify his loved ones’ remains, he fainted.

Three-quarters of a century on, the community still grieves. Brendan Kelly, who was eight then and in his 80s now, lost his best mate, Tommy Rocks.

‘I went to bed at night a boy, I wakened up a man,’ said Brendan. He must have spoken those words many times throughout his life.

But how can any words describe a tragedy so awful?