Kind stranger brings hope to grim tale of Hillsborough parents’grief

Like one thin ray of sunlight squeezing through a chink in a heavy sky, a single act of kindness illuminated the bleak Hillsborough drama, Anne (iTV).

As they drove across the Pennines from Liverpool in the small hours on an April night in 1989, Anne and Steve Williams (Maxine Peake and Stephen Walters) found themselves stranded.

Desperate for news of their 15year-old son kevin, in the aftermath of the FA Cup stadium disaster in which 97 fans were killed, they had not stopped to fill up the car. Now they were out of petrol, and miles from anywhere.

in moments of the greatest need, it is so often petty events that push people beyond endurance. That is when the kindness of strangers is beyond price.

Steve hiked to the nearest farm. We did not have to hear the words he used to explain their plight to the farmer. All we saw was a man who offered what help he could, on a cold dawn morning.

With a jerrycan of siphoned fuel, the farmer got the couple moving again. ‘it’s the least i can do,’ he said.

in the first episode of this fourpart drama, airing every night until Wednesday, that moment gave us the only thread of hope to hold. This is a relentlessly sad and horrifying story, and the past 30 years have not softened it.

As the straightforward title tells us, Peake’s character is the whole focus of the script. She portrays the wild grief of a mother, building from hysterical denial and disbelief into an all-consuming anger at the authorities who allowed this tragedy to happen and lied about it afterwards.

The callous lack of sympathy she faced from every official, from the police at the scene to the coroner in his court, was chilling.

Most difficult of all to watch was the scene in which Anne and Steve were taken into the back room of a local government office and invited to pick out their dead son’s face from an array of photographs of corpses pinned to a cork board.

Until that instant, they did not even know he was dead. A few minutes earlier, a thoughtless admin assistant told them their son was in hospital . . . before deciding that must be a different person with the same name.

An indictment of British bureaucracy at its very worst, this is sometimes excruciating but always powerful television. if some viewers felt they could not stick with it, on a New Year’s weekend when we are all looking for a little hope, that is understandable.

it is well worth sticking with the Williams brothers’ darkly comic thriller The Tourist (BBC1), even when the twists are more improbable than a traffic jam in the Australian outback. Jamie Dornan plays a lone traveller across the red desert down under, who wakes up in hospital in a remote town called Burnt Ridge after his car is pursued and rammed by a whistling cowboy in a juggernaut.

He befriends a waitress (Shalom Brune-Franklin) in a local diner, shortly before the place is destroyed by a bomb. She is his ex-girlfriend, but he does not recognise her because he has lost his memory.

Together, they set off to rescue a man who has been buried alive, after an SOS phone call comes through on a mobile hidden inside a stuffed koala.

Olafur Darri Olafsson makes a marvellous villain, with an accent that is part Texan, part icelandic, like a Viking John Wayne.

The dialogue is crammed with oddly quotable lines. Fans of Fargo (and i am certainly one) will love it.

That traffic jam i mentioned was caused by a pair of mating turtles, by the way. Why not? it is as likely as anything else.