Wright’s powerful film on abuse is a stark lesson for all
If there is one video guaranteed to make me cry, it’s the one in which Ian Wright is reunited with his primary schoolteacher, Mr Pigden. Wright had a tough home life and Mr Pigden, a former Spitfire pilot, recognised that this little boy needed help. He became a vital role model. It was to him that the former Arsenal and England football star dedicated his autobiography. Wright says he still thinks about him every day.
But the young Wright never told Mr Pigden what was happening at home. It is only now, in Ian Wright: Home Truths (BBC One), that he has truly confronted his past.
This was a powerful and profoundly moving hour of television. Wright is 57 but as he walked back into the room where he had once lived with his mother, stepfather and elder brother, he was transformed back into a traumatised child. “I remember hating him so much but feeling so scared of him because he was so big, his voice was so growly,” Wright said of his stepfather.
It was a horrific childhood at the hands of a violent man. Wright regularly witnessed his mother being beaten; his older brother, beside him in bed, would cover his ears to protect him from the screams. There were
also acts of terrible, petty cruelty: nine-year-old Wright made to stand and stare at the wall when his favourite programme, Match of the Day, came on television. The film stressed that domestic abuse can be emotional as well as physical, although in this case it was both.
But the adult Wright also had to reconcile something even more painful, which was the fact that the mother he adored showed him no love in return. She beat him too and told him repeatedly that she wished she’d had a termination. “Hearing your mum don’t want you – it’s going to cause you a problem when you get older,” he said.
It takes a brave soul to lay all this bare on television. Wright has reached a point in his life where he feels the need to make peace with it all; when a psychiatrist told him that his childhood experiences met the clinical definition of severe emotional abuse, it appeared to lift a weight from his shoulders.
And when Wright said he was also making this programme in an effort to help the million children in the UK living with domestic abuse, you believed him. He met people dedicated to stopping the cycle of abuse and looking out for the kids caught up in it. Amid the bleakness, they represented hope – as did Wright himself.
The latest Channel 5 documentary to revisit a truly awful crime, The Abduction of Milly Dowler took us back to 2002. Thirteen-yearold Milly disappeared on her walk home from the station after leaving school for the day. The documentary camera crew travelled along the same road, where today’s schoolgirls were making the same journey. It was a detail that brought home how randomly Milly was chosen, along with the fact that she usually walked home with her best friend, Hannah, but that particular day Hannah stayed late to take part in a sporting event.
Documentaries like this one serve various purposes. They are an act of remembrance for a life lost – the film included pictures and video footage of a smiling Milly – and a lament. The contributions from a grown up Hannah were especially poignant. A detective recalled Milly’s friends attending the trial of her killer, nine years after the abduction; he was struck by the fact that these girls were now young women embarking on their adult lives.
True-crime films also show the inner workings – and failings – of police investigations. Surrey Police were criticised for their failure to catch Levi Bellfield, and he went on to carry out other murders and attacks on women. But the difficulty of the operation was clear from this film, as was the work that went into it. The detectives involved clearly cared deeply about getting justice for Milly’s family. Her parents did not contribute to the programme. Archive footage of their public appeals was heart-rending.
But there is the danger of packaging crimes as entertainment, and this one strayed into tackiness. Thumping, dramatic music. A voice-over declaring that Milly’s disappearance was
“a crime that shocked the nation” and that she “vanished from the face of the Earth without a trace”. The decision to project some quotes about the News of the World onto the screen as tabloid headlines was misjudged, particularly as that newspaper’s appalling role in hacking Milly’s voicemail – giving her poor parents a glimmer of hope that she was still alive – played a central role in the story.
Ian Wright: Home Truths ★★★★★ The Abduction of Milly Dowler ★★★