A chilling tale of monsters and Victorian vainglory
The Franklin expedition of 1845 was Britain’s most terrible polar tragedy: 129 men lost on a mission to find the Northwest Passage. Trapped in the Arctic ice, they waited 19 months for a thaw that never came before setting out in a doomed bid to reach safety over land. Reports that they were reduced to eating their fallen comrades, dismissed back in England as the basest of lies, were proven more than a century later through analysis of bones. Yet alongside that was evidence that the crew maintained the bearing of English gentlemen to the end: when the remains of two unfortunate souls were found in a lifeboat years after the disappearance, their supplies included scented soap, silver cutlery and a copy of The Vicar of Wakefield.
It is a story ripe for drama, and The Terror (BBC Two) tells it well. Ridley Scott is an executive producer and there’s a fine cast, led by Ciarán Hinds as Sir John Franklin and Jared Harris as Franklin’s second-in-command, Francis Crozier. There is tension between the two men, with vainglorious Franklin dismissing Crozier’s warnings about the dangers they are about to face. “It is my belief that God and winter will find us in safe waters by the end of the year,” declares Franklin, and when characters say that sort of thing, well,
it’s not going to end happily.
Adding a supernatural element to this is unnecessary, but the drama (made by US network AMC) is based on a novel by Dan Simmons in which the crew are stalked across the ice by some sort of monster. Yes, I know it’s a metaphor or what have you, but don’t these poor men have enough to deal with?
There are two flaws in the production. One is the dialogue: this is one of those dramas that is best watched with the subtitles on, because in places it is difficult to make out what the characters are saying. The other is the fact that the whole thing was filmed on a soundstage with the landscape created through CGI. It has an air of unreality, which may be deliberate – the men are in an alien landscape – but hampers your ability to truly believe what you’re seeing. In a drama about characters trapped in a freezing environment, it helps if they look cold. This lot look as if they could strip down to their pants and not feel a chill.
But the creeping sense of unease is excellently done. I mean it as a compliment when I say that I’m not sure I can stick it out for all 10 episodes, knowing what’s to come.
One aspect of the Jane Andrews story I had either forgotten or never noticed at the time was that this “aide to the Duchess of York” had actually left royal employ several years before she killed her boyfriend, Thomas Cressman. At the time of the crime, she was working in a jewellery shop. But what made this story sensational was its proximity to royalty, something that Fergie’s Killer Dresser: The Jane Andrews Story (ITV) was keen to exploit.
At the outset, the documentary said it would ask whether Andrews would have been convicted of murder if the crime happened today – now that coercive control is recognised as an offence (Andrews argued at her trial that she was in an abusive relationship, something that the prosecution and Cressman’s family rejected). But it had little interest in that idea, although friends of Andrews spoke from the heart about their belief that Andrews was a domestic abuse victim.
Instead, it revelled in the details that had us all hooked at the time: Andrews’s journey from Grimsby to Buckingham Palace. The film revived the claims that Andrews was obsessed with her boss, copying her dress sense and her mannerisms in a Single White Female sort of way. “I think Jane probably started to think she was Fergie,” said Ingrid Seward, royal commentator, adding that Andrews was “almost like a stalker”. Perhaps this was true but no evidence of it was included here. However, the Fergie stuff did give the programme opportunity to bring out the old toe-sucking photos.
Regardless of the royal element, it was a striking crime: a “middle-class murder” by a woman who went on the run. Despite the protestations of Andrews’s friends and an unconvincing contribution from her psychiatrist, the programme was heavily weighted in the CPS’S favour: the prosecution barrister who described Andrews as “playing the victim harder than I’d ever seen it being played” during her trial; the victim’s brother, with a harrowing description of identifying Cressman’s body; the detective who concluded that, “Any man who gets into a relationship with her needs his head testing.” If the documentary was trying to suggest this was another Sally Challen case, it did a poor job.
The Terror ★★★★
Fergie’s Killer Dresser: The Jane Andrews Story ★★