Not even Lady Lucan could shed light on this mystery
In terms of lurid fascination, Lord Lucan: My Husband, the Truth (ITV) should have had it all. The subject matter encompassed jet-set lifestyles, gruesome murder, attempted murder and the most publicly obsessed-over disappearing act of the last 50 years. And here was a central player – the only witness, officially, still alive to tell the tale – speaking on camera about it for the first time in 30 years. Yet half way through I found myself checking my watch, wishing it were over.
That was partly down to the format. For an hour, Lady Lucan, the 79-yearold dowager countess spoke to camera, prompted by an unseen and largely unheard interviewer (Michael Waldman) as old newspaper headlines and older home movie footage spooled out in the background. She told of how she met her husband-to-be (“my sister said ‘he’s got socialist parents, he’s a professional gambler, and he’s said to be queer’ – so very not so”.) And how the life of marriage and motherhood that followed was one, essentially, of gilded misery, hitched as she was to a gambling addict with a taste for the high life he’d been born into but was unable to afford.
Lady Lucan also described, in horrifying yet almost clinical detail, the events of November 1974 in which her husband brutally bludgeoned their children’s nanny, Sandra Rivett, to death in their home, then attempted to do the same to her before fleeing, never to be seen again. Her own theory as to his disappearance being that he “got on the ferry and jumped off in the middle of the Channel, in the way of the propellers so that his remains wouldn’t be found – quite brave, I think.”
A peculiar way to describe the man who tried to murder you. But this account, related mostly in a tone of conspicuous emotional detachment, featured many such oddities. Such as when Waldman asked Lady Lucan if her maternal relationship with her three estranged children (whom she hasn’t spoken to for 35 years) had been cold. “All my relationships are cold,” she replied with chilly hauteur. Which made it just that little bit harder to sympathise with a woman who, by any standards, deserves sympathy for the horrors she endured.
In the end, this was a film that shed little light on a mystery that’s been endlessly pored over for 43 years. Even so, it seems only right that Lady Lucan should have her account of it on record. Sometimes what’s important is that your voice is heard.
That was certainly the case with many of the women featured in Bill Cosby: Fall of an American Icon (BBC Two), a high-impact report aired on the opening day of the trial in Pennsylvania of Cosby, one of the America’s best-loved TV personalities, for aggravated sexual assault.
Here in Britain (though we’ve had more than our share of seeing how fame and a powerful media presence can be used to conceal predatory sexual behaviour) it is hard to fully appreciate the shock this has been met with across the Atlantic. Cosby’s long-running Eighties sitcom The Cosby Show was not only a global success but, in its depiction of a black middle-class family as the norm, it offered to many a comforting sense of putting the US’S racial divisions behind them. As the head of that family, Cosby was for many Americans the ideal dad.
Now, they’re being forced to come to terms with the possibility that ever since finding fame in the Sixties, Cosby may have been a serial sexual criminal, drugging and raping large numbers of victims. Since 2014, more than 50 women have come forward with remarkably similar accusations. There are similarities apparently supported by sworn evidence of Cosby’s that his legal team had been forced to reveal.
In terms of outlining the background and hearing from many of those involved, this was an exemplary report, even if for something shown on the opening day of a trial, there was rather too much of the done deal about it. It was as if Cosby’s guilt was something that might safely be assumed. Still, many of his accusers point out that, as they’ll never get their day in court, the media is their only recourse. And by that admittedly dubious standard of justice, the words of actor Whoopi Goldberg – initially at least a defender of Cosby’s right to a fair trial – were among the most resonant: “If this is to be tried in the court of public opinion, I got to say all of the information that’s out there kind of points to guilt.”
Lord Lucan: My Husband, the Truth ★★★
Cosby: Fall of and American Idol ★★★★