The tragic true story behind a hit BBC drama
Dismissed as a channel for teens, BBC Three is making some of TV’S most important dramas. By Jasper Rees
On Saturday August 11 2007, in a skate park in a small town in Lancashire, Robert Maltby was savagely beaten by a gang of youths. As his girlfriend Sophie Lancaster protected his prone body, she too was attacked. A young witness dialled 999 on his phone. “We need an ambulance at Bacup Park!” he said. “This mosher has just been banged because he’s a mosher!” Mosher is regional slang for goth.
Robert survived the attack, but Sophie never regained consciousness. Her life support was switched off 13 days later. She was 20.
Ten years on, the story of Rob and Sophie has been made into a moving new drama. Murdered For Being Different forms part of BBC Three’s Sorry Not Sorry season, which celebrates “stories of those who are taking back control of their identity and owning it”. But its spoiler-alert title also establishes it as the latest instalment in a series of empowering films that began in 2014 with Murdered by My Boyfriend and continued in 2016 with Murdered by My Father. In each case, the film ends with a grim litany of statistics – about domestic violence, honour killings and, in the case of Murdered For Being Different, hate crime. Partly thanks to feelings stirred up by the EU Referendum, last year brought the highest ever recorded instances of hate crime: 70,000.
There is a perception, mainly from people who don’t watch it, that BBC Three is the home of levity and grotesquery, which channel controller Damian Kavanagh is keen to quash. “We are trying to find stories that have a basis in reality that are happening in our society at the moment,” he says, “to help people understand themselves and their place in the world. Drama allows you to do so in a visceral way that you can’t in a traditional documentary.”
Hence the almost unwatchable re-enactment of Sophie’s murder, which her mother, Sylvia Lancaster, forced herself to watch. “It’s brutal,” she says. “I had to watch it to make sure it did justice to Sophie. It was very very difficult. I don’t think I’ve cried as much in 10 years. It absolutely broke my heart. It’s very graphic, but I don’t think it’s gratuitous. We have to get that message out there that this is unacceptable behaviour.” It’s a measure of their success that BBC Three’s dramas, which raise awareness while not shying away from moral complexity, tend to pick up awards. Georgina Campbell won the Bafta for her portrayal of a young mother in an abusive relationship in Murdered By My Boyfriend. Adeel Akhtar won best leading actor playing a conflicted Muslim who kills his beloved teenage
‘You don’t have to be part of the mob. You can stand up and make your voice heard and make a difference’
daughter when she refuses to enter an arranged marriage. Don’t Take My Baby, about disabled parents under pressure from social services to give up their newborn child, won best single drama. Abigail Lawrie, who plays Sophie, gets the ultimate endorsement from Sophie’s mother. “I felt she was very, very good,” she says. “There is one scene where she’s sat on the couch and Rob comes in with a Harry Potter book. That took my breath away because that was Sophie. That looked like her, it felt like her.”
“The aspiration is always to find the real story,” says Aysha Rafaele, creative director of the documentary unit in BBC Studios, who has been executive producer on three of the films. “There’s nothing more impacting than starting with the words, ‘This is a true story’.” The man who finds these stories is development producer Marco Crivellari, whose job it is to bridge the gap between script development and the real world and help turn a true story into a captivating 60-minute drama.
Murdered by My Father was in fact an amalgam of different cases, while names were changed at the family’s request for Murdered by My Boyfriend. Murdered For Being Different is BBC Three’s truest story so far. It is told from Rob’s point of view, partly because the script draws on his specific testimony, but also because of the reservations of Sylvia Lancaster.
“I had quite mixed feelings,” she says. “I just felt there’s been enough on Sophie’s story.” Sophie’s name has been honoured in concerts, music festivals and media campaigns; she’s been the subject of an animation, a book and poems by Simon Armitage broadcast on Radio 4 in 2015.
The only fictionalised element of the new film is the character of Michael Gorman, a young witness to the attack who is slowly persuaded to break rank from his peer group and give names to the police. He’s a composite of different people, partly to protect individuals who still live in Bacup, but also so that one young character can embody the possibility of hope. “We want there to be a rallying cry,” says Rafaele. “You don’t have to be part of the mob. You can stand up and make your voice heard and make a difference.”
The Murdered films advertise their grim content in the title. Rafaele says the writers, all of whom are commissioned on the basis of an affinity with the subject, treat it as, “a dramatic device that gives you a lot of power to keep the audience guessing.” (Nick Leather, who wrote Murdered For Being Different, is a young writer from Lancashire who has most recently worked with Jimmy Mcgovern on the BBC One series Broken.) The writers and directors are not instructed to work to a template, but all abide by a governing principle: to give a voice to the voiceless. A line of dialogue from Don’t Take My Baby, scripted by This is England and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child writer Jack Thorne, can be taken as an epigraph for all the films: “Whatever you decide to be, be you. It’s your life. Live by your own rules.”
Sylvia Lancaster remembers her daughter setting her own rules early on. “She was always very different. When she was five she told me, ‘I’m not wearing that and you can’t make me. It’s my life.’ It was a pretty red coat and hat from Marks. I remember being quite taken aback.” She started dressing as a goth from the age of 11. After the fatal assault, Sylvia learned that the pair had been attacked several times already. “She just brushed it off. A lot of young people who are alternative just expect that.”
That bravery is forthrightly portrayed. In part a beautiful love story, the film shows Sophie urging Rob not to give in to bullying gangs by hiding in his bedroom. She pays the ultimate price for her courage.
What would she have made of this latest instalment of her remarkable legacy? “She’d be totally gobsmacked,” says Sylvia, who was awarded an OBE in 2014 for her campaigning. “She was shy. One of the last conversations we had, she was talking about never having her face on a T-shirt. But I hope she’s proud.”
Murdered For Being Different will be on BBC Three’s iplayer channel from Sunday