After the brutality of murder, the calm dignity of a little girl’s grief

THe most moving and shocking interview shown on TV in a long time was screened last night: a five-yearold girl calmly describing how she had been f orced to witness her mother’s killing.

Maisie Gardner’s story was told in the simplest words, in an undertone so low that subtitles were needed to spell out what she was saying.

This could have been horrible and exploitative, but The Murder Workers (C4) remained sensitive and respectful, by building gently to her story.

It drew viewers in. We were shown dignified grief rather than lurid tragedy. Victim support counsellors were shown visiting families in Kent, essex and Devon. Their job was to help people work through their loss and pain, and to start putting their lives back together.

These families were going through hell, but the support workers made their hell more workaday, more calm, somehow normal. They had forms to fill in and protocols to observe. It was banal but therapeutic.

‘Your son’s bank account will have to be closed,’ one worker explained to a devastated mother. ‘Would you like the final statement sent here or via me?’

In the same way, a counsellor called Kate helped five-year-old Maisie to start talking about what she had seen. She took the family album and started to turn the pages.

every time Maisie saw her father’s face, she covered it with her thumb. ‘All the pictures with Mum — they’re my favourites,’ she said. ‘ But not with Dad. Because he killed Mum.’

Her older brother Kallum, 14, had witnessed their father Gary’s violent assaults on their mother, Natalie. Sometimes he had tried to intervene — and taken a beating for his courage. But on the day Natalie died, Maisie was alone with her.

After a long time spent looking at the photos, the story came out: ‘I was stuck in the house and I saw it. Mum and Dad, Daddy holding a knife, and Daddy phoning the police and blaming it on Mummy. Daddy stabbing Mummy with a knife.’

Behind her, on the family sofa, brother Kallum sat with his knees drawn up and his face covered by his hands.

Later, when he could talk again, Kallum told the therapist that he wished he could have saved his mother, that he could have taken a knife and killed his father first.

At that moment, even the counsellor seemed to be holding back tears.

It felt inappropriate to switch over to the gallows humour of Murder On The Home Front (ITV). This evocation of the Blitz was truthful enough: people did have to become hardened to the deaths of strangers, in a city under nightly bombing raids.

But the callous flippancy suddenly seemed very superficial — not entertaining, just immature.

‘If he’s not dead, he’s giving the performance of his life,’ remarked the hero, as he inspected the body of an actor in his dressing room. At least the murdered man didn’t have to listen to dialogue like that.

The mordant wit of workers on the London Underground heard on The Tube: An Underground History (BBC2) seemed more real, and much more amusing. Train driver Dylan Glenister suggested the Circle Line would work better if it had just one string of carriages, stretching all the way round.

Better still, the Tube bosses could replace the trains with a conveyor belt — commuters would just wait for a gap and step on. Or the tracks could be covered over with laminate flooring, and instead of buying tickets people would hire roller skates.

Meanwhile, the microphones caught station supervisor Iain MacPherson grumbling as he trudged along the above ground tracks at Farringdon, i n the pouring rain, looking for faulty points beside a live rail sizzling with 630 volts: ‘This is the worst shift ever,’ he muttered.

He didn’t mean it. MacPherson loved his job. He was still bubbling with pride f rom the day he welcomed Charles and Camilla to his station.

It’s the everyday that helps us get through life — whether you’re counselling a heartbroken family, or simply shunting commuters around London.