There’s been a grisly murder and you’ll be dying to know whodunnit
The perfect murder is easy to commit. It’s afterwards that the problems start: how to get rid of the body? Pigs provide the ideal means of disposal, according to gangland legend. Greedy porkers aren’t fussy about what or who they eat.
Gambler and zookeeper John Aspinall preferred tigers. Some say that after Lord Lucan killed his children’s nanny, he shot himself — and Aspinall fed the body to his big cats.
On the remote Scottish farms where One Of Us (BBC1) is set, there are no tigers, or pigs — just dog cages in a barn. And in one cage, a corpse with its throat slit.
This nightmarish drama by Jack and harry Williams, the brothers who created 2014’s disturbing The Missing, starring James Nesbitt, hurls scenes at us like challenges, daring us . . . What would you do?
They say One Of Us was dreamed up as ‘a dark morality tale’. It’s too contrived to be conventional drama: after the murder of a Romeo and Juliet couple, two feuding families on the edge of the highlands confront the killer when he crashes his car on their farmland.
he’s still alive when they drag his body from the wreckage, but by the next morning, he isn’t — though none of them will admit to the crime.
That set-up is so theatrical it could easily be adapted for the stage. There’s more than a hint of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap about it: a remote house cut off by filthy weather, the overturned car, the impending arrival of the police.
But the characters are so well drawn, and the actors so top-notch, that we’re snared from the start.
Juliet Stevenson is the bitter alcoholic divorcee, who eases her selfloathing by shooting on sight anything with feathers. John Lynch is the bearded Presbyterian, running his home like a punishment block.
And in an intriguing final scene, we glimpsed Juliet’s ex-husband, Adrian edmondson — an idler, so soulless that he greets the news of his son’s death with a shrug.
Add a younger generation, including Joanna Vanderham as Juliet’s daughter, and you have a cast as strong as anything we’ve seen since War And Peace.
With so many faces to introduce, the early stages of the story were sometimes confusing. There was a stalker, a rapist, a junkie, a dying woman in a care home giving away her heirlooms . . . that’s too much melodrama, especially in an hour that began with the double murder of newly-weds.
No wonder a hurricane-force rainstorm was engulfing the highland farms — anything else would have been an anti-climax.
But as the families drew together to mourn the dead couple, and the killer wrote off his stolen car in a flash of lightning, the tangled threads pulled together into a taut noose. This story had us by the throat.
By now, you’ve had long enough to answer the question about disposing of a body. I don’t see how it can be done, not without leaving some trace. Juliet should have thought ahead, and got a tiger.
The murderer’s best hope is that the officers investigating the crime are fresh recruits, the sort we met in Rookies (ITV). These apprentice bobbies from Surrey were courageous and wellmeaning, but it’s unlikely that this documentary, the first of three, left criminals paralysed with dread.
Constable Loz, 5ft 2in in her boots, had a sneezing fit whenever she felt anxious, which meant her first arrest went, ‘Anything you — atcch-ooo — say may be taken down and — atcch-ooo — used in evidence!’ And burly Constable Anthony managed to sit on one of his colleagues during another arrest, breaking her leg in three places and dislocating her ankle.
The makers of this show had clearly won access with promises that the police would be shown in a glowing light, and there were moving moments when parents talked about how proud they were of their young heroes.
But the editors couldn’t resist the Keystone Kops angle, with trainees using water-pistols during taser training, and posing with drunken girls for selfies outside nightclubs on a Friday night.
If that’s what the police are really like, no wonder they never found Lord Lucan.