Ironically, Mark Williams-Thomas became a TV personality by savaging the reputations of other small-screen stars. His investigation of Jimmy Savile’s sex crimes, which was sensationally screened in ITV’s Exposure series in 2012, was followed by Rolf Harris: Dark Star.
While viewers may suspect that many TV presenters secretly see themselves as detectives, teasing out clues and confessions, Williams-Thomas, a former cop from Surrey, offers the police the opposite fantasy: becoming a TV star. His fingerprint on the screen increases tonight with ITV’s The Investigator: A British Crime Story.
It reopens the case of Carole Packman, a Bournemouth woman who disappeared in 1985. Her body has never been found, and yet her estranged husband, Russell Causley, has been in jail for her murder for two decades. The show’s premise is that Carole and Russell’s only child, Samantha, has asked Williams-Thomas to find out what really happened.
The show comes from Simon Cowell’s company, so it’s no surprise that Williams-Thomas cuts a showbiz figure. He updates us on the case while driving a sleek black BMW, a chunk of Rolex showing above the left hand on the wheel. There’s a sticky moment when a witness gives as an example of a murderer’s flashiness his penchant for show-off watches.
The glamour factor is helped by the fact that the trail rapidly leads beyond Bournemouth to Montreal, where Carole was reportedly seen after her disappearance, and Guernsey, the destination of Causley’s sailing trip with another woman.
MWT (as Cowell surely hopes he will soon become known) talks to old neighbours and retired English and Channel Islands cops and Canadian mounties who worked the original case.
If you devised a drinking game around the number of times MWT says “but events were about to take another dramatic twist”, you’d be pissed by the first ad break. But the revelations really are surprising and the only moment when we feel the hand of Cowell on his shoulder is when he asks Causley’s daughter: “Did you hate him?” More of a Piers Morgan question than a detective’s one.
MWT’s series follows a long trail of footprints. The mastermind of the TV crime genre was Edgar Lustgarten, who fronted two ITV series in the middle of the 20th century, Scotland Yard and The Scales of Justice, in which an actual crime was dramatised. Lustgarten’s catchphrase – “But it was then that he made his fatal mistake” – was designed to warn viewers that killers always gave themselves away.
His successor was John Stalker, a retired deputy chief constable of Greater Manchester. After becoming a public figure through his brave investigation of an alleged “shoot-to-kill” policy of terrorists in Northern Ireland, Stalker presented various true-crime and cold-case series, including Crimestalker and Inside Crime.
Revealingly, all these UK series have been produced by commercial TV. The BBC has tended to worry more about questioning or compromising the legal system. Its own viewer-as-cop franchise, Crimewatch UK, has been carefully framed as a public service since 1984 – TV helping the police out with its inquiries.
Former host Nick Ross’s famous sign-off to viewers not to “have any nightmares” reflected a BBC concern that this kind of TV makes the world seem more dangerous than it is. Crimewatch also carefully differentiates the professional TV presenters – Ross, Jill Dando, Kirsty Young – from the investigating detectives. Shockingly, in 1999, Jill Dando became the only known true-crime presenter to have her murder investigated by her own show.
But the sleuth-host is largely an American invention. The first major show MWT made was an English version of the US hit To Catch a Predator, in which a paedophile is lured to a confrontation live on screen. In the US, cops and lawyers are almost as likely as sports stars to have a second career as a TV pundit.
Listings are filled with franchises such as Unsolved Mysteries, Cold Case Files and Solved, while a more recent transatlantic model for The Investigator is clearly the radio hit Serial and TV shows such as Making a Murderer, which forensically re-open a crime file.
The Investigator’s subtitle, A British Crime Story, surely reflects Cowell’s desire for global sales. Based on the evidence, it seems likely to be a come-on to true-crime fans in the UK and beyond.
The Investigator: A British Crime Story starts tonight at 9pm on ITV.
