Showing a considered approach to complex subjects ... The Bill
There has been something of an outcry - or at least an article in the Daily Star - over the fact that The Bill is to tackle a story "based on the murder of James Bulger". Leaving aside the most obvious question - what on earth am I doing paying attention to the Star? - let's look at the second most obvious question: is The Bill really planning such a story?
According to the press office, The Bill is indeed to tackle the difficult subject of a child killer in a storyline that "will involve a 10-year-old boy who kills an eight-year-old girl". But based on the murder of James Bulger? Hardly. Children who kill children existed before the awful events of 1993, with Mary Bell being the most infamous incident. But, due to the tabloid obsession with the Bulger case - which I'm not denying was horrendous - it remains a touchstone and the yardstick by which all dramas about children who kill children are measured. And by measured, I mean criticised.
You'll recall a similar outcry when the brilliant Boy A, which recently won three awards at the Bafta craft awards and also landed Andrew Garfield a best actor Bafta, was broadcast last year. It dared to present the human, vulnerable and damaged side of a child who killed a child, albeit one who'd grown up and was trying to get on with his life. Given The Bill's recent considered approach to subjects such as child pornography, paedophilia and gun crime, I imagine the treatment of this issue will be similarly sensitive - as it should be. Which means, I'd also wager, that when the story is broadcast in October, The Bill will come under fire for not painting the killer in the darkest of shades.
And this shrill tabloid tone when it comes to what drama should and shouldn't tackle infuriates me; not least because it's utterly hypocritical. The papers that profess indignation at terrible crimes are also the papers that use the grim details to shift copies. Such prurience perhaps reflects the bloodthirsty squeamishness of the public as a whole.
When See No Evil: The Moors Murders and Longford were broadcast in 2006, the tabloids again kicked off and elicited an incensed response from Winnie Johnson, mother of Keith Bennett, the little boy who was killed by Myra Hindley and Ian Brady but whose body was never found. As if the poor woman hasn't suffered enough, the tabloids come knocking every time they fancy selling more papers on the back of the Moors murders.
Why we're fascinated with such real-life cases and why we're so enchanted with serial killers with gruesome methods - based on bits of the Bible, Renaissance poetry or whatever - is a subject for another day. But to return to The Bill, that it has decided to tackle a difficult subject is to be commended, not condemned. Of course it's motives aren't entirely altruistic - it's a cop show on a commercial channel, after all - but neither are they evil and wrong. Television drama is there, in part, to examine uncomfortable subjects and ask questions that we'd rather not face. Isn't it?
