Rare and powerful chance to watch the trial of a murderer
For better or worse, criminal trials in England and Wales are not televised. Hence the reconstruction with actors that was The Jury: Murder Trial, broadcast last week. But for several years the Scottish High Court, where appropriately in the public interest, has been demystifying the legal process by letting in cameras. A documentary, The Murder Trial, won a Bafta in 2014. Now The Push: Murder
on the Cliff (Channel 4) has met the same high standard.
In two measured episodes it followed last year’s trial for murder of Kashif Anwar, accused of pushing his pregnant wife Fawziyah Javed off Arthur’s Seat in 2021 when they visited Edinburgh from their home in Leeds. There was no forensic evidence to draw on so Alex Prentice KC (who also appeared in The Murder Trial) had to construct the prosecution from other material.
That he did so was almost entirely down to the enterprise of the victim. Javed, a solicitor, found within months of marrying that she was subject to coercive control. So she used her legal training to record every abuse, and as she lay dying made sure to tell the police officer who found her that she’d been pushed.
With the camera often on Anwar in the dock, this might easily have felt voyeuristic, but judge, barristers and witnesses set a sober tone. It feels worth mentioning that The Push was commissioned, produced and directed by women, which perhaps explains why Javed’s dignified mother, Yasmin, gave of herself so openly.
To fill in the back story, the film visited Leeds, where Javed’s doting uncle said he had his doubts about Anwar from the start. “She was like a Bentley Continental, one of my favourite cars,” he said. “He was like a Nissan Micra.” Anwar’s family and supporters, filmed outside the court, came across as cold at best, at worst intimidatory.
Carefully aware that multiculturalism was also on trial, The Push concluded in a mosque that towers over a standard terrace in Leeds. Inside, an imam told the assembled that domestic violence has no place in Islam. Chillingly, Anwar thought otherwise. “You’re not a man,” Javed recorded him shouting. “Start behaving like a woman. You’re not being that British woman, it’s not going to work.” He’s now doing life, having taken hers and her unborn baby’s.
How the BBC Began (BBC Two) began in 2022. For the centenary, the national broadcaster assembled many a grizzled old hand to recall some seismic moments from its history for two feature-length documentaries. Clearly much was left on the cutting-room floor because here was another episode. With a nod to the tricky skill of observing impartiality, it was subtitled Shooting the Rapids.
It didn’t seem to know which rapid to shoot first so, without so much as a cleared throat, it jumped in with Suez. In 1956, Anthony Eden was all set to address the nation about the looming crisis from Downing Street but, camera-shy, first sought advice on what to say from David Attenborough, a very junior producer he’d once played tennis with, whose best advice was to rest before the broadcast.
Before and since, from the General Strike to the Troubles, most politicians have preferred telling the BBC what to say, not the other way round. None was more illuminatingly petulant than Harold Wilson, who huffed and puffed when David Dimbleby had the temerity to ask how much he’d earned from a book deal. He was forever barred from meeting Wilson again, but remains jauntily free from remorse.
The presenter Tony Bilbow, on the other hand, has had 50 years to atone for the cheerful way he once squeezed a female colleague’s breast. He could even remember it was her left one, and that even his victim laughed.
To get anywhere back then, even dauntless Women’s Libbers had to navigate men’s libidos. Joan Bakewell, in a lively recollection of Late Night Line-up, frankly conceded that her advancement “had to do with the fact that I was quite a pretty girl”. She added with a hint of a twinkle that working on it was “not strictly appropriate always”. Other female veterans recalled avoiding certain gropers and lungers in lifts and taxis in an era when the BBC, like other employees, turned a blind eye to sexual assault.
Line-up had much fun ripping to shreds programmes made elsewhere in the building. It nowadays seems enshrined in the BBC’S constitution that it must sometimes punch itself in the face before anyone else does. Ending on a plea for its own survival, this rambling tour of old controversies and internal failings persuasively suggested that the BBC has always on balance got more right than wrong.
The Push: Murder on the Cliff ★★★★★ How the BBC Began ★★★★