Three Girls was hard to watch but even harder to ignore
This year’s Bafta TV awards privileged unflinching realism over splendour and gloss. The Crown and War & Peace traipsed home emptyhanded while gold was showered upon Murdered by My Father and Damilola: Our Loved Boy, both of which helped viewers grope towards a comprehension of profound social ills.
No one can relish trawling through this murk, and yet there is an evident hunger for cathartic insights into the complexities of multiculturalism, say, or the grim outcomes that can grow from poor life chances. Both themes converge in (BBC One), so it will be no surprise to see it clutching an armful of Baftas in 12 months’ time.
The bare facts of this gruelling story, which is running across three consecutive nights, remain hard to take in. Between 2005 and 2008, hundreds of teenage girls were groomed and sexually abused by Asian men in the Rochdale area. In 2012, nine men were convicted of child abuse offences, but only after Sara Rowbotham, a sexual health worker, was able to persuade Greater Manchester Police to pay attention.
To encompass a story of sexual abuse on an industrial scale, scriptwriter Nicole Taylor has compressed an abundance of research material into the story of a few representative victims, whose names have been changed.
Principal of these was Holly Winshaw (Molly Windsor), a newcomer to Rochdale who soon fell in with a teen gaggle who personified the worst fears of her father Jim (Paul Kaye). But even his most hallucinatory nightmares couldn’t have had the bandwidth to conjure up anything grimmer than sex with spotty boys.
The last moments of Holly’s innocence came heavily freighted with irony. Her new best friend Amber (Ria Zmitrowicz) disdained the infantilising world of school embodied in “The Lion, the Witch and who gives a f--- what’s in the Wardrobe”. Then they went through a rear portal of their own, into an unimaginable hell.
“This is absolute ’eaven,” chirped one of the girls as they guzzled kebabs and necked vodka served up by a smiley Pickwickian Pakistani they called “Daddy”. Holly alone wondered why all this bounty came free. She soon discovered there was a price tag.
The camera looked away as she was raped, and gawped instead at her discarded clothing, then a tacky pink wall-clock. “You’re my bitch now,” said “Daddy” afterwards as he thrust a tenner at her. “And if you cross me I’ll kill yer.”
Taylor’s explanatory script mapped out the perfect storm that allowed this horror story to unfold. Holly’s distracted father treated her as a domestic drudge. Amber, with no sign of parents to guide her, offered a more seductive form of control. The threats of violence locked them all into terrified silence. And even when Holly told the police, the stifled yawn of the officer interviewing her semaphored institutional indifference.
Meanwhile, over at Rochdale council, a box-ticker from social services dismissed the girls’ “lifestyle choices”. Rowbotham (Maxine Peake) tried to shock them out of their inertia with sordid details. The role is a natural fit for Peake, who turned the dial down as Rowbotham earned the trust of the young visitors to her clinic, and amped it up to bawl out the ineffectual authorities.
Kaye, who so often plays sleazy characters, has rarely been so touching as the scales fell from the eyes of Holly’s dad. But the truly eye-catching performances came from the young actresses: Liv Hill as Ruby, Ellie Lightfoot as Zoe, Zmitrowicz as the scheming survivor Amber. As Holly, Windsor was heartbreaking as she surrendered to sorrow and dread.
Much like Murdered by My Father, Three Girls will be seized on by opportunists seeking to denigrate British Muslim culture. It can’t have been easy for a talented group of actors to say yes to playing groomers and rapists, so credit to Simon Nagra as “Daddy” and Wasim Zakir as Tariq, who picked up the girls from school and, anaesthetising them with vodka, taxied them to the abyss. Another script, however, might have had more nuanced curiosity about the culprits.
The director is Philippa Lowthorpe, who has celebrated childhood in Swallows and Amazons and Cider with Rosie – but she also shot Five Daughters about Ipswich’s murdered sex workers. Three Girls is just as unwatchable, and yet it must be seen and believed.