Police begin to realise that perhaps Natalie Hemming hasn’t just gone missing when they interview her six-year-old son, who reveals in passing that the big red rug has been taken “to Daddy’s work so it can have a wash”. The boy’s face is pixellated, but you still see his small legs swinging on the chair, his hands politely folded in his lap, as he tells detectives how he heard glass smashing and a really loud noise, like thunder, and saw his mum on the floor. The detective, who is trained in interviewing children, talks in a happy, bubbly voice, asking him (as if this is the most fun subject in the world) “to tell me about the last time you saw Mummy”. I’ve never watched a child describe hearing his father murder his mother before (unsurprisingly), and it’s as upsetting as you would expect. At the end we see him curled in a ball in the chair.
In the last minute of Catching a Killer: The Search for Natalie Hemming (Channel 4), her brother says he hopes that her death will raise awareness of domestic violence, and show “what can happen when people remain with violent and controlling partners. If just one person leaves such a relationship, then Natalie’s death will not have been in vain.” It might have been better if this line had been put right at the beginning of the hour-and-a-half long documentary, making it absolutely clear that the family positively want you to watch what happened in the days following Natalie’s murder.
Without this clear bit of consent, I was torn between being gripped by the unfolding police inquiry, and feeling very grubby at peeping in at real tragedy. The documentary holds your attention like the best police dramas, with all the vital elements: the mother racked with grief, exhausted detectives scratching at their stubble, beautiful shots of forests where police officers are poking at the undergrowth, and finally the white body bag being carried out of the woods.
There’s no morbid entertainment to be had in watching real siblings discuss the best way to tell their nieces and nephew that their mother is dead and you can’t help wondering if the family really want fly-on-the-wall cameras dipping into their misery as they wrestle with the logistical fallout of murder. It’s only once you know it’s all done out of a desire to extract something positive from Natalie’s death that it begins to feel a bit less ghoulishly voyeuristic.
The filmed interviews with Paul Hemming, lying brazenly, hopelessly, about what happened on the night of her death, have moments of grim humour. He suggests, optimistically, that bloodstains around the room might well have been caused when he grazed his finger on the coffee table. He is evasive from the beginning, refusing to be interviewed at home until he has dashed out of the room to “get some socks on. Bit cold ... ” He puts on a good show of being heartbroken in some of the police interviews, pulling the sleeves of his jumper down over his fists to wipe away tears, but grainy CCTV shows him in his police cell, relaxed and casual, kicking off his slippers, flicking through the paper.
I’m not sure that watching this will make people walk out on abusive partners. Does poking around in other people’s unhappiness give such simple life lessons? But with one woman in England and Wales killed every three days by a current or former partner, it’s a subject worth confronting.
More cheerful was Frank Skinner on Muhammad Ali (BBC1). I loved hearing Skinner’s description of how, when he was five or six, his dad would tap at his bedroom door in the middle of the night, waking him up so they could listen to boxing matches being broadcast on the radio from America, sitting together in the kitchen – but not too close, because his dad was shadowing Ali’s moves as he listened, absentmindedly cuffing anything in reach.
Skinner smiles all the way through, clearly thrilled to be filming this tribute, and his focus is more on Ali’s comic timing than his boxing skills. The fighter’s civil rights speeches are full of jokes; he even manages, retrospectively, to raise a laugh out of being refused service in a whites-only restaurant in segregated Louisiana – a moment that made him so furious that he hurled his newly-won Olympic medal into the Ohio river.
I had to watch the increasingly unwise post-retirement comeback fights from behind clenched fists – they were so painful in every way. But Ali’s optimistic determination remained. His response to Parkinson’s? “I’ll whip this thing!” If only.
