Something vital’s vanished from TV: grubby reality

IT’S a sensitive issue, writing about the abuse and murder of young women. I should know. In December 2010, after the news that Jo Yeates, then 25, had been murdered, I had the bright idea of retracing her last steps for an article. I started off in the Bristol bar where she’d spent her last evening, with its mis-spelled promotion for bottles of ‘Lauren Perrier’ champagne. I took her last walk: past Waitrose, the uni. I popped into Tesco, bought the same upmarket pizza Jo had purchased. I turned the corner on to her leafy road, imagining how her heart must have lifted as Christmas approached.

Earlier, I’d visited the spot where Jo’s body had been found. It was ugly, and no policeman guarded it. Cars didn’t even slow as they passed. I wrote that the flowers weren’t prolific; only one card, with no message. Only a dog-eared poster, with that lovely face.

The backlash to my piece was enormous. I was taken to the then regulatory body of the press, the PCC. Demands were made for my sacking. How dare I look down on the bar where Jo spent her last evening? How dare I moan about Tesco, and the spot where she was dumped?

When young women die, it turns out you can’t be subtle. I should have spelled out that I’d wanted Jo’s last evening to be magical: at Claridge’s, maybe, ferried home by unicorns. It makes me wonder, then, how drama series such as The Missing, which reached its climactic finale last week, escape censure when they have all the nuances of a hippo in Harrods.

Please read no further if you are saving the series to watch later on iPlayer – a Christmas holiday treat, perhaps. But in the week we had revelations of widescale child abuse in football, here was a show that featured child abduction in the Army, by a man presumably suffering from PTSD, who ‘loved’ his victims, who took them to a magical log cabin in Switzerland, who kissed them on the lips.

We even had one scene of a victim reclined on a sofa in agony from appendicitis, wearing a wet T-shirt, her breasts heaving mounds as the men stood around her, licking their lips lasciviously. That a woman moments from death is portrayed with swollen lips parted, back arched, is a fantasy, and a very dangerous one.

I would welcome a drama where abuse is shown as it really is: unattractive men with little boys or girls in tears in toilets and changing rooms. Certainly not what we saw in BBC2’s The Fall, where the killer, played by Jamie Dornan, is so handsome he makes the detective chasing him, played by Gillian Anderson, a woman who really is old enough to know better, drool.

THE role later saw Dornan cast in the movie Fifty Shades, nicely reinforcing that what all women really want is to be tied up in a cellar and beaten. Both TV series were written by men, but I wonder if the women who star in them didn’t wrestle not just with their on-screen foes, but with the script. Why was Keeley Hawes, who played the mother of the abducted girl in The Missing, portrayed without make-up, drab in a bob and a cardigan? Was it to spell out that no wonder her burly military husband cheated on her after their daughter disappeared?

Why did his feisty mistress, played by Laura Fraser, who was brave enough to join the Army, who now knew her father was complicit in child murder, offer to become his full-time carer once he developed dementia? Is that all women are – comely victims, drab mums, devoted daughters, deserving of punishment?

Gillian Anderson took to the airwaves last week to reject accusations that The Fall was misogynistic titillation. I wish I shared her certainty.

These shows might be entertainment, but to garner them with awards is to reassure us these things are rare in real life, they won’t happen to your family, and if they do it will all be done with lovely lighting, a moody score, trees and snow. Or perhaps even with a serial killer as handsome as the male model that Jamie Dornan used to be.

In a world where we learn child abuse has lain hidden in plain sight for decades, does TV not owe it to the victims to be a little more honest?

I once thought all these stories of abuse can’t be true, not so many, not so blatant, surely. But then I had lunch with a retired policewoman. We talked about Jimmy Savile, and I raised my eyebrows. She told me she never let her children join the Brownies or Scouts, a choir, go to church or stay after school. She never let her children out of her sight, and trusted no one.

How did she think actual police work compared with the TV dramas? ‘It’s never glamorous,’ she said. ‘It’s always grubby.’

That’s what was missing from The Missing.