David Tennant brilliantly smokes out this monster
Des ITV, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday
DCI Peter Jay (Daniel Mays) fires up the first of the approximately gazillion cigarettes we will witness being smoked by various characters during the next three hours of serial killer drama Des. ‘I thought you were giving up?’ says a police colleague. ‘I am,’ replies Jay but we can tell already it’s going to be a losing battle. The early 1980s are another country and they do things differently there – perhaps most noticeably in their truly heroic consumption of what were fondly known back in the day as ‘cancer sticks’.
Jay smokes. His colleagues all smoke – and not just on the steps outside the station and down the pub but in the office and even outside the courtroom. So too, of course, does the drama’s anti-hero Dennis Nilsen (David Tennant), the serial killer who murdered some 15 young men, either strangling them to death with his ties or headphone wire, or drowning them in his bath. We see cigarettes smoked in anguish, in exultation, as a way of emphasising – Nilsen’s speciality – a cocky, blackly comic one-liner. Some viewers, I know, found this a distraction but to me it was a badge of authenticity and integrity. Though we remember them now as the bright and breezy era of Loadsamoney and Duran Duran’s Girls On Film video, the 1980s’ values, mores and social customs were probably closer to those of the Second World War than to our own age of rainbow flags, relentless virtue signalling and compulsory ‘woke’.
This was certainly the case where homosexuality was concerned. We saw this in the courtroom scene where the plummy-voiced defence counsel sought to discredit one of the witnesses by declaring, with barely disguised contempt: ‘You are a drag act. You are a female impersonator.’ Today, such a witness would probably get extra deference and respect as a member of the vibrant trans community. In 1983, when Nilsen was tried and convicted, it’s a signal to the jury: ‘I think we can take what this pervert says with a huge pinch of salt.’ Which may be one of the reasons Nilsen got away with his five-year killling spree uninterrupted. (In fact, we learned, it only came to an end when he effectively shopped himself by reporting the dismembered bits of corpse blocking his drainage system). He preyed on young, mostly gay, some homeless, men with drink and drug problems, whose loss probably wasn’t noted so keenly as it might be today.
Then again, Nilsen was a crafty swine who would have eluded easy detection in any age. An ex-soldier and ex-copper (thrown out for an inappropriate sex act in a morgue), he was also intelligent and quick-witted – with the kind of pleasantly innocuous face and friendly demeanour that led his colleagues at the North London Job Centre where he was executive officer to swear blind he couldn’t possibly be the sort to keep half-burned human bodies buried in his back garden.
Nilsen was a monster, but in Tennant’s performance – among the best of his career – he is also dangerously beguiling. He talks in his agreeable Scottish lilt about his crimes as if he were a benign onlooker, mystified that anyone could do such a thing, apparently eager that his victims should be memorialised as named individuals not faceless victims, curious as to whether the jury will decide ‘Am I just bad? Or outrageously bad?’
He also has a callous, mordant wit. Asked how many bodies he kept in his house, he quips deadpan: ‘Well, I never did a stock check.’ Later, he muses on his poor cooking skills: ‘If it was the omelette that killed him or me I’m not so sure. But omelettes don’t leave red marks on the neck, do they?’
If these sick jokes were dramatic licence, they might feel too tasteless for comfort: but it’s probably accurate. Des was adapted from Killing For Company, based on 52 exercise books’ worth of interviews with Nilsen in prison, conducted by Brian Masters, who was a consultant on the show and who appears as a character. Masters (Jason Watkins) is fascinated – as are we – by this dichotomy between the seemingly normal, unobtrusive civil servant and the nature of his crimes. Was Nilsen mad? Or was he a cynical, mendacious, meticulous stone-cold killer fully aware of what he was doing all along? ‘I think he’s just evil’, replies Masters’ screen boyfriend, speaking for most of us, I suspect.
I still wonder whether spending three hours inside the head of a murderous creep and – thanks to Tennant’s brilliance – almost getting to like him, wasn’t a slightly tainting experience for the viewer. But all credit to this production for handling this material with such intelligence, honesty and attention to period detail. Particularly brave, I thought, was the heroic superabundance of white, middle-class, middle-aged men – the police officers, the solicitors, the barristers, etc. Accurate and realistic for that era, certainly: but had it been made by the BBC, you just know the casting would have been diversified and feminised for politically correct reasons. Congratulations to ITV for maintaining the old standards.