The anguish of a mother still grieving after 25 years
James Bulger: A Mother’s Story (ITV) was the week’s second programme marking the 25th anniversary of an era-defining murder. It contained several of the same haunted interviewees as Channel 4’s The Bulger Killers: Was Justice Done?, all groping for answers in the abyss. There was also the same access to the audiotapes of the 10-year-old killers being questioned by the police.
The difference here was that Trevor Mcdonald visited the home of Bulger’s mother Denise Fergus, who recalled the unimaginable trauma with extraordinary poise. On the one hand, she gave vent to caustic and forgivable regret about the sentencing of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables (“if anything they were rewarded”). But this was balanced by her loving recollection of a boy who lives on as a name and face in the home of his younger siblings. “Every time I see a robin I think it’s James come to see me,” she said, which sounds like a sane and lovely coping strategy.
This documentary will also be a welcome fillip for the James Bulger Memorial Trust, which supports young victims of crime, hatred or bullying.
While it reconstructed James’s abduction, trawled through the unbearable details of his murder, and the subsequent prosecution, it’s not clear that much fresh light can be thrown upon the wider story. I found myself wondering about the collateral damage – to James’s father Ralph, who was mentioned only once, and to the younger siblings brought up in the enveloping shadow of this terrible event. Mrs Fergus’s second husband Stuart, in the grip of understandable paranoia, gave Mcdonald a tour of the home’s copious security arrangements.
And then there was the other, unfathomable side of the story. Cheryl Marshall, from the charity Aftermath, remembered the catatonic reaction of the culprits’ mothers: “They were just completely adrift in a massive horror.” The programme gestured at exploring the contributing factors which could transmogrify boys of 10 into murderers. But it didn’t dig too deep, mindful of the need to honour Mrs Fergus’s decision to participate. “I knew that the evil was them,” she said.
The wounds run so deep that, even now, only one of many witnesses who saw the two boys dragging James through the streets could bear to talk. At the time, when she saw the CCTV of her son with two boys, Mrs Fergus “had a sigh of relief because he wasn’t with an adult. I thought, kids aren’t going to harm a child”. It’s an irony for which there are still no words.
For the best part of six carefree episodes, Derry Girls (Channel 4) has been making light of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Last week’s story found the Catholic family running the gauntlet of the Orange Order march with, strictly for laughs, a suspected Provisional IRA member stowed away in their car boot. The finale continued in the same vein until suddenly, in the last minute, comedy came face to face with tragedy.
A IRA bomb went off, causing truces to be declared – even in the querulous old heart of Granda Joe (Ian Mcelhinney), who laid a hand on the shoulder of his despised son-inlaw Gerry (Tommy Tiernan) as they watched the news. This immensely touching scene was intercut with the school talent contest, in which the show’s young quintet danced without a care to Madonna’s Like a Prayer, miraculously stilling the world-weary cynicism of Sister Michael (brilliant underplayed by Siobhan Mcsweeney).
It was audacious of writer Lisa Mcgee to create a sitcom that ignores the elephant in Northern Ireland’s room. But having set the terms for her comedy, it was just as brave to yank the background into the foreground. And while scouring the landscape for laughter, she never entirely dodged the important stuff.
In this episode, the girls and the English cousin James (Dylan Llewellyn) were accidentally placed in charge of The Habit, their school’s impudently titled magazine. This triggered a plot line preaching tolerance as the friends published an anonymous confession from a schoolgirl about her sexuality. The author turned out to be not James, who has spent the entire series insisting he’s not gay, but serious little Clare (Nicola Coughlan). This brought out the worst in her best pal Erin (Saoirse Jackson), a young woman of expedient morality who has spent most of the series having her selfimage undercut. May there be much more of the same in the second series.
James Bulger: A Mother’s Story ★★★ Derry Girls ★★★★