When the nicest of boys does the nastiest of things
Last night on television Jasper Rees
According to the United Nations, an adult court is an unsuitable arena in which to try a child, even if that child were to be charged with murder. The dock, after all, is a lonely place, exposing anyone who enters it to the fiercest glare. The 90-minute drama Responsible Child (BBC Two) gave that stance a necessary crossexamination – necessary because, for sufficiently serious offences, the English, Welsh and Northern Irish justice systems are still able to subject minors as young as 10 years old to a full trial by jury.
Sean Buckley’s harrowing script was based on a real but unnamed case of two brothers (one 12 years old, one 23) who killed their violent stepfather in his sleep. There was no stinting on the savagery of the crime, the full horror of which was held back for the climax. And yet young Ray (a remarkable Billy Barratt) had the aura and looks of a cherub. “You’d think the boy had fallen off a cloud,” his solicitor marvelled.
Ray behaved angelically too. With his enfeebled mother in a narcotised daze, he was the protector of and carer for his little half-siblings. He suffered torments of grief when he crushed a ladybird. Not all children in court are as saintly. Nor are their victims as villainous: the axe-wielding stepfather Scott (Shaun Dingwall) was Bill Sikes with a man-bun. By alighting on such a paragon, the drama could be accused of loading the dice. (In order to unload them a little, Ray was made to punch a bully at school.)
Once upon a time, this campaigning project would have been in the hands of the screenwriter Jimmy Mcgovern (of Hearts and Minds, The Street and Accused) – and when the two bloodied killers wandered from the crime scene into a church, it briefly seemed as though it were. Buckley was wasting no time in sticking up his signposts. In being held in a Victorian police station, Ray (the script implied) was being subjected to Victorian laws.
Tom Burke (for the prosecution) and Michelle Fairley (for the defence) were well-matched as the legal system’s scary and caring faces, while a psychiatrist (Stephen Campbell Moore) explained why, since their prefrontal cortex isn’t fully grown, children can be prone to irrational decision-making and a dangerous loss of control. Whether Ray had lost control or had killed in cold blood was left open. Either way, there was no one making the case for trying children in adult courts. Perhaps that’s because there isn’t a good one to make.
Is Mike Bartlett a bit of bully? He does love to inflict pain on his characters. Nowhere was this tendency more overt than in Bull, a sweaty play about workplace bullying. To thump home the point, the action took place in a boxing ring with the audience watching from the other side of the ropes.
Bull has now mutated into Sticks
and Stones (ITV), to be told over three nightly episodes. Susannah Fielding survives from the play as a minxish tormentor who blows hot and cold. Bartlett’s punchbag is the pathetically likeable Thomas Benson (Ken Nwosu, who has the nicest face). When he cocked up a pitch to sell a company a “bespoke office solution”, fainting in the middle of the bid, his team was soon plotting to thwart him, subtly egged on by their nudging-andwinking boss (Ben Miller).
To amp up the jeopardy, Thomas has been provided with a nice home and a delectable family: his wife Jess (Alexandra Roach) works as a nurse, and his daughter Millie (Daisy Boo Bradford) is deaf. Surely they’re too blamelessly good to be collateral damage in Bartlett’s sadism? There was a welcome hint at the end of the episode that Thomas will discover his spine and embark on a course of vigilantism.
As with Doctor Foster, we’re in a heightened version of the Home Counties where nothing feels wholly plausible. It was central to Bartlett’s plot that Thomas wouldn’t notice that his clocks were wrong and would turn up for a key meeting a whole hour early. Then his car was towed away minutes after he’d parked it. You can taste the diluting flavour of a buffoonish Tom Sharpe farce here.
By leavening the psychological savagery with jollity, Bartlett leaves you feeling vaguely queasy. It’s not quite clear how entertaining, exactly, Sticks and Stones is meant to be. It’ll only be dramatically satisfying if – in contrast to the events of Bull
– Thomas ultimately sees fit to fight back. “You do it back but worse,” he tells Millie when she’s bullied at school. More of that, please.
Responsible Child Sticks and Stones