Television
Roger Lewis
Though people thought of him as avuncular and twinkling – the biggest luvvie who ever lived – the late Richard Attenborough was particularly good at creepy villainy. There’s nothing very nice about him as Pinkie in Brighton Rock. He was a revelation as the wheezy, asthmatic, twisted, muffled Reginald Christie in 10 Rillington Place, the film released in 1971. Why, therefore, when watching this new three-part drama about the serial killer – now called Rillington Place, as if the entire neighbourhood was involved – did I find myself chuckling ? Because Tim Roth, bald and bespectacled, morose and put-upon, played Christie as the spitting image of Peter Glaze, the music hall comedian best remembered for Crackerjack, a poor boob given to expostulations of rage when Leslie Crowther squirted a soda siphon in his face. Here, Roth blew up when his wife, Samantha Morton, got on his nerves.
In the Attenborough film, the stooge, Timothy Evans, who was hanged in a notorious miscarriage of justice, was played by John Hurt. Bumbling and terrified, Evans wasn’t only a simpleton, he was Welsh. In the new version, Evans, played by Nico Mirallegro, was far too dashing – the outrage of the police extracting a false confession from an innocent man who is suffering from what we’d now term special needs was quite lost. Instead, attention was lavishly paid to the decor – the shadows and fog of Fifties London, where every interior was permanently damp and drab, with grey peeling wallpaper concealing the corpses. The lighting cameraman lovingly gave every shot the colour of catarrh. You could virtually smell the leaking gas and the foul drains. You need to be a multimillionaire to live in Notting Hill today. There were more concealed corpses in
The Missing. Stretched over eight weeks, the series taxed my ability to recollect what was what, who was where, and why. The time scheme flashed about from past to present, from this country to that. We were in Iraq, Switzerland, Paris, German forests. The police detective, Tchéky Karyo, had a limp and a shaven bonce. Then he was hairy with a beard, and spoke in French. Roger Allam was a forthright brigadier, and in the next scene he was gibbering in a care home – and he’d also acquired a beard, which came and went when the chronology leaped around. Meanwhile, David Morrissey, who occasionally sported scars received when the garden shed blew up, confused me massively by announcing, ‘Eleven years we’ve waited.’
Eleven years ago his daughter was abducted, but now she has reappeared – or has she ? ‘That girl was not Alice Webster!’ It transpired that a madman in Brigadier Roger Allam’s regiment had been kidnapping girls and keeping them locked up in his cellar. After eight episodes there were so many loose ends, psychological inconsistencies, unanswered questions, missed clues, careless or non-existent forensic searches and botched interrogations, there was nothing for it but to wrap matters up quickly with a shoot-out in a wood. We ended with the detective in the operating theatre, going under the knife for a brain tumour. I know that he survived, however. My son saw Tchéky last week in the street in Petersfield, Hampshire.
I finally watched The Fall, yet another show about blood and sex, the erotics of murder and hospital pornography. The lingering shot of a bed smeared with puddles of gore was like an installation at Tate Modern. The psychopathic Paul Spector, played by the alarmingly handsome Jamie Dornan, who not quite incidentally plays a similar role as the bondage devotee in Fifty Shades of Grey, was now in custody, but his ingenious defence was that he’d clean forgotten everything he’d ever done, everyone he’d ever met, including, allegedly, his own wife and children.
I was hoping for a legalistic drama,
something rhythmical and relentless, as the layers of Spector’s fantasies were peeled back by the experts. Unfortunately, the psychiatrist they wheeled in, played by Krister Henriksson, was straight out of a classic black-and-white Universal horror picture, complete with a thick gothic accent – Bela Lugosi crossed with Jonathan Meades. He gave the killer every sympathy and told Gillian Anderson (she of the plastic face and whispery voice) about the genuineness of ‘severe retrograde amnesia’. At the finish it was explained that Spector was the victim of sexual abuse in a Catholic children’s home, so he went on the rampage and most people ended up dead or severely wounded or weeping in the back of taxis.