No gratuitous blood, just a gripping tale elegantly told
The Pembrokeshire Murders ITV, Monday-Wednesday The Truth About Getting Fit At Home BBC1, Wednesday
The true- life crime drama The Pembrokeshire Murders was not a whodunnit, as we knew who done it (John Cooper), and it was not a whydunnit, as we knew why he done it (psychopath, enjoyed killing), but it was, more interestingly, a whatdunnit, the question for the police being: how do we prove whatdunnit done it? This sawn-off shotgun. That’s whatdunnit. But where’s the ‘golden nugget’ of forensic evidence that’s so desperately needed?
This was slowly, slowly, catchy, catchy as the detectives built their case – ‘Every contact leaves a trace… you just have to be clever enough to find it’ – but it was kept wonderfully taut over the three nights and also threw up an episode of the 1980s TV game show Bullseye. It just got more and more fascinating.
The opening scene i ntroduced us to DCS Steve Wilkins (Luke Evans) meticulously ironing his shirts. This was, I think, to show us how methodical he is, how he pays close attention to detail – and it meant we saw him in his underwear, which was fine. It is Luke Evans, after all.
Anyway, it is 2006 and Wilkins has moved back to Wales from London and is about to reinvestigate the killing of Peter and Gwenda Dixon, shot and robbed on the coastal path in 1989. Wilkins quickly connects that case to two others: a pair of siblings murdered at their farmhouse in 1985 and a violent attack on five teenagers in 1996, one of whom was raped. He’s on the hunt for a serial killer.
Enter John Cooper, played by Keith Allen, an actor who practically has ‘sinister’ markerpenned across his forehead, whatever. Cooper is in prison for a number of burglaries but his modus operandi for those crimes was the same as that used for the killings: balaclava, gloves, sawn-off shotgun.
He was questioned about the murders but his wife, Pat (Caroline Berry), always provided alibis. We see Pat visiting Cooper in prison. He’s a right old charmer. As he ogles a pretty girl at another visiting table, he says to her: ‘You need to make more effort. You look like an old woman.’ She is obviously terrified of him. And interweaved carefully throughout is the unbelievably shocking and painful story of their son. Oh, boy.
Meanwhile, back at police HQ, the tension keeps mounting. Cooper is due for parole and Wilkins is convinced he’ll kill again if this is allowed. The powers that be are always threatening to close down the investigation. So there’s all that hanging over Wilkins as he and his detectives sift though boxes and boxes of evidence, and because DNA testing is expensive, they must work out what to send to the lab via Cooper’s twitches when they interview him. (Cooper has an interesting way of dealing with questions he doesn’t like.)
I can’t go into every detail here, if only because it would be spoilery if I did, but there’s a single thread from a sock, and a pair of khaki shorts, and Cooper’s appearance as a contestant on Bullseye a few weeks before the Dixons’ murder, which said something about his hair – this is weirdly important – and that sawn-off shotgun. Every contact does leave a trace. And, ultimately, they were clever enough to find it. (You’ll have to watch to find out exactly where.)
This was elegantly well told, without ITV’s usual sensationalism. There were no bloodsplattering flashbacks, for instance. The only gratuitous scene was Evans in his undercrackers but, as already established, no one is going to object to that. Instead, it was sombre and careful without ever being boring. Evans held it all together with not only his granite-like physicality but also a sense that, underneath, compassion ran deep. I should also add that, aside from Bullseye, this also included the line: ‘ He always watches Wales Tonight.’ Fascinating, like I said.
The Truth About Getting Fit At Home is one of those mainstream science programmes usually presented by Dr Michael
Mosley, but he was absent on this occasion, possibly because he was hosting 782 similar programmes elsewhere. So our guide was ‘influencer’ and broadcaster Mehreen Baig, who opened by saying that five million of us had downloaded the Couch To 5K app during the first lockdown. Yes, and having completed it, how many of us would have immediately downloaded the 5K To Couch app, had it existed? As it happens, I managed to complete 5K To Couch without any help at all. I’m a self-starter, you could say.
Anyway, while the programme sometimes stated the obvious – ‘having strong muscles gives many benefits’ – and the approach was scattergun, covering everything from protein powders to sports bras, from HIIT to yoga, it also included some useful information of the kind I like. That it takes only six minutes a week to exercise all your major muscle groups is exactly the kind of information I like, for example. In fact, I liked that a lot.