Morgan’s film was more damp squib than killer revelations
Piers Morgan clearly wanted to make a serious true crime documentary. The trappings were all in place: the stern face, moody soundtrack, glitchy graphics and Netflix-esque photography. Unfortunately, he couldn’t suppress his tabloid instincts, meaning that Confessions of a Serial Killer with Piers Morgan (ITV) veered into trashy territory.
That fact that the serial killer doing the confessing was Bernard Giles – who was either unable or unwilling to explain his crimes – only compounded this programme’s problem.
A wiry 65-year-old wearing bifocals, Giles looked less like a bogeyman than a depressed loss adjuster. He recalled first feeling the incipient thrill of sexual violence as a six-year-old boy, while playing a game with his female neighbour. As a teenager, he knew he was destined to kill. “This was my life’s passion,” said Giles chillingly.
By age 20, he could no longer control his impulses. Over a threemonth period in 1973, he murdered five young women – all hitchhikers picked up on the highway near his Florida trailer park home.
Time and again, Giles quietly stonewalled Morgan’s questions. Could he remember the names of his victims? “No,” came the reply. His main criteria for choosing them? “Access.” How did killing feel? “Hard to describe.” How was he functioning in everyday life? “Badly.”
Morgan’s attempts to get under his monosyllabic subject’s skin came across as increasingly shrill. He desperately tried to spice up proceedings with sensationalism, calling Giles “an horrific ticking time bomb” who committed “heinous crimes”, while throwing in hysterical US cable news clips and gratuitous references to The Silence of the Lambs.
For no apparent reason, Morgan stood in front of a clichéd evidence board, covered in mugshots connected by red string, gazing at it meaningfully as if trying to crack a crime solved almost half a century ago.
The publicity for this show said: “Piers draws fascinating psychological revelations from Bernard Giles at every turn… and gains a powerful, vivid insight into the mind of a murderer.” The trouble was, he didn’t.
He asked the emotionless Giles to look down the camera and apologise to the victims’ families. Giles declined. Morgan was reduced to waving a photograph of Giles’s daughter, who he hadn’t seen for 45 years, under his nose, asking how he’d feel if she was raped and murdered. “I wouldn’t appreciate it,” mumbled Giles. The final damp squib in a deeply unedifying hour.
‘What sort of people were these, who felt more hungry for music than for their lunches?” So said museum director Kenneth Clark about the moraleboosting daily lunchtime concerts by pianist Myra Hess at the National Gallery in London. The answer was anyone seeking escapism, inspiration or solace. This second episode of fourpart project Our Classical Century
(BBC Four) explored music’s vital role in Britain’s resistance and resilience during the Second World War.
For this instalment, presenter Suzy Klein was joined by music-loving foreign correspondent John Simpson. Cream-suited Simpson was infectiously enthusiastic but it was Klein who stole the show: striding around purposefully in a selection of wrap dresses and jumpsuits, with a quizzically raised eyebrow and her formidable knowledge worn lightly.
After the tragic destruction of Queen’s Hall during the Blitz, the film charted the triumph of the first Prom in its new home of the Royal Albert Hall and the remarkable reception that greeted one of the pieces played: the debut performance of Shostakovich’s defiant Leningrad Symphony, written under siege and elaborately smuggled out of Russia via Iran to London.
The dramatic story was told through rare archive footage, evocative newsreel and eyewitness accounts. We were treated to several performances, too: standouts were tenor Stuart Skelton singing part of Benjamin’s Britten’s opera Peter Grimes and an audience of transfixed schoolchildren enjoying The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. Even The Telegraph restaurant critic William Sitwell got in on the act, reciting his great-aunt Edith’s Façade through a megaphone.
With the documentary bookended by the coronations of George VI and Elizabeth II, both soundtracked by William Walton anthems, this was music to stir the soul and television to nourish the mind.
Confessions of a Serial Killer with Piers Morgan ★
Our Classical Century ★★★★★