The BBC is to go ahead with a drama based around the disappearance of Yorkshire schoolgirl Shannon Matthews, focusing on the response of the local community rather than the abduction itself.
The two-part factual drama for BBC1, called The Moorside Project, will revolve around the women in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, who led the search for Shannon.
The schoolgirl disappeared in February 2008 when she was nine.
Shannon endured a 24-day ordeal before West Yorkshire police discovered her hiding under a bed with her mother’s boyfriend’s uncle, Michael Donovan, in a flat a mile and a half away from her home in Dewsbury.
It later emerged that her mother, Karen Matthews, who had made several tearful television appeals for Shannon’s return, staged her daughter’s disappearance and kept her captive in a ruse to collect £50,000 reward money offered by the Sun after the girl was “found”.
Matthews and Donovan were both jailed for eight years, although it emerged in 2012 that the former had been released on licence after serving half her sentence.
Last year it was revealed that the BBC and the team behind the award-winning Appropriate Adult were in talks to make a drama around the case.
Despite reports that it had been shelved the corporation has now confirmed that it will go ahead and that contrary to speculation it will focus not on Karen Matthews but on the community who came to her aid but were hoodwinked.
The BBC said the drama would give a “fresh perspective on a front-page news story we all remember, focusing not on the crime itself but on the ordinary people caught up in events, going beneath the headlines to understand the lasting impact on the community that lived through it”.
Writer Neil McKay said: “This drama tells a story of people pulling together for the sake of a child. In a world where all too often our estates are written off, this drama challenges us to think again about this. We hope the drama will have something to say not only about this community, caught up in the events unfolding on their doorstep, but about our wider society too.”
ITV Studios executive producer Jeff Pope said: “At the time the country held its breath when Shannon went missing. When she was found, the people of Moorside led the celebrations. The committed and passionate search mounted by local people had seemed to sweep away all the clichés and prejudices about estates like Moorside.
“But when the truth about what had happened was revealed, the sense of betrayal and bitter recriminations that followed threatened to submerge the estate. This truthful, unvarnished drama will take us inside the eye of the storm.”
BBC1 controller Charlotte Moore added: “Drama has the ability to tackle sensitive subjects from different perspectives and consider the impact of a crime rather than the crime itself. This was an extraordinary story of our time that rocked a community and thrust it under the media spotlight.
“As a nation, we only ever saw it from one perspective and I hope this drama will capture what it was like to be at the centre of that community; how they responded and lived through it. On BBC One it’s important to bring human stories to life and allow the audience to come to their own conclusions.”
