Rillington Place (BBC1) | iPlayer
Modus (BBC4) | iPlayer
The Missing (BBC1) | iPlayer
Imagine: The Women Who Write Crime Fiction (BBC1) | iPlayer
A man in a caravan in snowy woods. A man in a dark log cabin in glowering and sinister woods. A sinister man with no woods but dark moods. To leaven our own darkling mood in these hunched early December days, it was indeed fortunate that all three were riotous romcom musicals.
Hang on, though – that was just the old DVD I had to watch last night in order to nudge the muscles necessary ever to smile again. The other three were, by and large, unremittingly bleak. And borderline brilliant.
Bleakest of all, and not just for being true, was of course Rillington Place, something of a landmark address in the geography of criminal minds. Like Cromwell Street in Gloucester (West), Ybbsstrasse in Amstetten (Fritzl), it has since been bulldozed from history, and it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving street.
In a particularly (even for the 1940s) nauseating rat-infested part of London’s Notting Hill, between boarded, bombed, bring-out-your-dead huddled terraces and what I murkily assumed to be faded billboards for distemper and rickets – not the treatments, just adverts for the diseases – John Reginald Halliday Christie murdered at least eight women in the 1940s and 50s, including his own wife. The first episode of this three-part drama, and particularly Tim Roth, brought out the quite startling seediness of those times, of lurching sirens, sly greed, scabby broken pubs: the spirit of the blitz had somehow elected to skirt W11 and its wall-to-peeling-wall grime. I kept having to remind myself this wasn’t in black and white. There were splashes of vibrant dun.
Christie, a lousy little man, had served time for such handsome crimes as filching postal orders. While other men fought. Cometh the hour, cometh the man, they say: and Roth lived down to all our expectations: literally down-at-heel, overlong trousers rucking unhappily as his slug-slow footfall slapped through lavishly puddled misery.
Goodness, it was grim. And will just get grimmer. Christie, of course, will go on to murder, and in quite the nastiest of circumstances, as a botcher of back-street abortions, and with coal gas and a bulldog-clip. It’s redeemed by two things alone. The immense quality of the acting is one. Despite Roth’s look, character and piggy-eyed intent, we are somehow convinced that, back then, he was just enough of a catch to lure back wifely Ethel, silver-tongued enough to lure back prostitutes and vulnerable desperate women. He was many things but he wasn’t a stupid man. Samantha Morton, as Ethel, as ever, excels: baggy carpet-cardies jostle with jealousy and savagely conflicted morals, and you see it all in flashes from those haunted eyes.
And the fact – clasp this to your chests, children, when Christie comes to call, from under the bed with his bulldog clip – that some good came of the whole unconscionable tale. The unhappinesses delivered to young Timothy Evans would help result in abolition of the death penalty, albeit in 1965. Well done, BBC, for daring to step on such an ugly grave. And well done Glasgow, where most of this was filmed. Though the tourist board possibly won’t thank me for mentioning that.
The caravan in the snowy woods in Modus belongs to Richard Forrester, possibly the first impishly handsome serial killer entrusted to screen. Marek Oravec plays gay-slayer Forrester like a surly Ewan McGregor, possibly vexed by his own homosexuality (Richard, not Ewan). This latest (and terrific) Scandi-noir, too, is dark (clue’s in the name), but softened by occasional humour, intriguing politics and the occasion flash of low winter light. It’s no The Bridge – yet –though produced by the same team.
Nominally an investigation into midwinter slayings in Stockholm and Uppsala, Modus, from the bestselling novels of Anne Holt, is starting to grip rather badly, by which I mean well. There are allusions, in the title sequence alone, to Blake’s great red dragon, to balls of hair, to squirming microbes, and I hope, nay demand, that all three are eventually explained. There’s also a wonderfully sinister cult of American evangelists. The strands threaten to separate: I suspect they’ll lead discretely to dark family secrets and religious hypocrisy but chiefly to the dilemma of modern Sweden, having formally embraced high liberalism so many years ago yet still waiting for truculent Morlocks to catch up.
Two bonuses: I learned a new phrase, and not even in Swedish. The “dark tetrad” turns out to be an, um, improvement, on the classic “dark triad”. Added to narcissism, machiavellianism and psychopathy – usual triple-whammy of serial killers – comes sadism. Which presumably makes the serial killers even less nice. Sigh. Like Hitler and his vegetarianism, the more you learn about these guys, the less there is to love. Also: for anyone who misreads the title as Domus, there’s also some wonderful interior Scandi-decor.
So: did Julien Baptiste, in the pinioning, gut-punching finale to The Missing, give a hint of more to come, counting off his final-scene anaesthetic down to a murmured Gallic “trois”?
Well, I care, because it’s been scampering, confusing, haunting, mesmeric, infuriating, searing, the tour de force of the year – and all eventually, superbly, wrapped into a toothsomely plotted bundle, which exploded at the last with answers and resolutions. And I, we, want more, even more than we did after the first series. The only question remaining, apart from niggles about DNA in the shed and the (still bothers me) toy monkey/credit card conundrum, is: precisely which level of “dark triad/tetrad” territory did Adam Gettrick inhabit? I’m genuinely intrigued. Oh, another question: can Keeley Hawes’s acting get any better? She’s only 40. If she goes on like this, they might as well cede every Bafta until about 2056.
Professor Sue Black might be able to tell me about the triads and the tetrads. She’s only up the road in Dundee. She featured in a fine Imagine strand about women who write crime fiction. Dr Black, apart from choosing Dire Straits in her desert island discs (Romeo and Juliet? Come on), can do no wrong: hers is one of those rare minds to which I would happily attribute the overused term genius. Val McDermid soaks up her insights, garners plots from them: I in turn soak up Val, and thus can sleep safe in the knowledge that nightmares lie in Bembo font between hard backs on my bedside table, occasionally wrapped with rubber bands to keep them in.
Women write, and read, crime fiction, and in record numbers, to keep the nightmares out, because women are usually victims, and because men are men. As Alan Yentob, always by a yard the dullest thing about this series, eventually gleaned.
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