On 20 August 1999, 55-year-old Norfolk farmer Tony Martin shot two burglars who had entered his home, wounding one and killing the other, 16-year-old Fred Barras. Three days later, Martin was charged with murder.
The case was a perfect lightning rod for a wider debate about self-defence and the right to protect one’s property, or at least it seemed so for a time. Politicians and the media weighed in. The Interrogation of Tony Martin (Channel 4) is an attempt to get at the particular circumstances that made Martin, among other things, a less-than-ideal champion for armed householders everywhere.
David Nath’s script, taken verbatim from the police interview recordings, made for a hermetic drama – grey, dimly lit, with barely a word spoken by anyone but the three principal actors: Steve Pemberton as Martin, and Daniel Mays and Stuart Graham as his interrogators. The bulk of the action – if action is the right word – takes place in a single featureless interrogation room.
“I really don’t want to talk about it,” says Martin in his first interview. He is by turns pitiable, self-righteous and evasive. Although clearly shaken by the events of the previous night, he is not forthcoming about what happened, or even about what he recalls. From the beginning, there is a sense that Martin is a man who feels wronged by life, and that the shooting may have been, in some way, retribution for wider injustices.
“I wish I was in China,” he says. “They’d put a bullet in my bloody head and I’d be finished, out of the way!” His interrogators look on in perfect bewilderment.
In his next interview, Martin is accompanied by his lawyer, several pages of notes and a newly combative approach. “I’ve had many threats over the years, on my own property, minding my own business,” he says. “I stopped reporting them to the police because I felt that I was not being taken seriously.” He claims to have been burgled twice in the previous year and cites childhood abuse as the source of his problems.
“I’m not strange,” he says, but it quickly becomes clear this is not wholly true. At his home – called, appropriately enough, Bleak House – he has removed the top and bottom of the staircase to make life more difficult for intruders. He is in the habit of sleeping fully dressed, boots on, with a shotgun (for which he possesses no licence) under the bed. There’s no question he lives in fear; only whether that fear is justified.
The Interrogation of Tony Martin is not a quest for truth, exactly; it’s more an attempt to add some psychological context to events that will probably always be clouded by muddy perceptions of intent and counter-intent. Was Martin merely fearful, or was he also angry? Did he mean only to defend himself, or did he gun down a fleeing 16-year-old?
Verbatim drama has the advantage of being “real”, but if anything this only heightens the sense of artifice. Characters are pinned to words taken from the public record, like puppets to strings. When there is nothing to say, they are eerily silent. This is undoubtedly effective – the actors, Pemberton particularly, are up to the considerable challenge – and it’s a lesson in how people actually talk: vaguely, discursively, repetitively and, in Martin’s case, with a constant, simmering frustration.
And, of course, the outcome could never be in doubt. Martin was convicted of murder, later reduced to manslaughter on appeal, on the grounds of diminished responsibility (he was said to suffer from paranoid personality disorder). The real surprise ending here came with an appearance from the actual Tony Martin, now in his 70s, walking around the boarded-up, ruined Bleak House on his first visit since that fateful night, prickly and unrepentant as ever.
I’m not sure of the purpose of this rather jarring addendum – which sort of undermined Pemberton’s efforts to capture Martin – but I can think of a few possibilities. It does give the sense that Martin has signed off on this retelling of the story, even though he doesn’t say so explicitly. Or it could be that the programme-makers wanted to demonstrate that Martin really was as opaque as he seemed, and that there was always going to be a limit to the amount of insight this experiment could provide. If it ultimately shed little light, it was still a fascinating glimpse into the shadows.
