Our obsession with telly crime seems to be getting hotter and hotter and I’ve found myself caught up in the frenzy.
I had the pleasure of sitting next to TV crime queen Melissa Mayne at the UK’s Broadcast Awards – with Jeremy Clarkson at the table behind just to add to the surreal nature of the evening.
Melissa has produced and directed scores of true crime documentaries and series.
Her hits include The Killer Nanny: Did She Do It? for Channel 4 and the first series of In the Footsteps of Killers – which I featured in and explains why we are sitting together looking uncomfortable in our “evening” clothes.
I asked Melissa the obvious question – why is there so much true crime on TV at the moment? And she is pretty certain it has more to do with just crime –and is more about what crime can tell us about the times we are living in.
She believes that murder stories really can open up a window about a place, or a period of time and expose the culture, stresses and strains of the era when the murder took place. She cites a recent BBC documentary about Bible John – I’m always surprised that very few people in England know about this case.
She said: “The case tells me a lot about Glasgow, gender and the politics and popular culture of Scotland in the 1960s. Good true crime tells us something about ourselves – in a way that is much more accessible than academic history.”
However, Melissa also believes that the amount of true crime around means the quality of the output is variable.
Some documentaries simply re-tell the story of a murder – often rather gratuitously, by stitching together bits and pieces of old news footage, without offering anything new.
Others are trying to push the genre into new territory and find different ways to let the narrative unfold and Melissa said this was true of In The Footsteps of Killers, inspired by Scandi Noir drama.
Another consequence of the explosion in true crime TV is whether some programmes can potentially re-traumatise the surviving family members of the murder victim. Melissa said: “There is a danger of that but you have always got to keep the victim at the heart of what you are doing. You’ve got to have a reason for wanting to tell a story – perhaps new info has come to light or, as time has passed, you have a different way of understanding what had happened.
“Sometimes though, it really is better not to tell a story if you’ve got nothing new to say – you’ve got to walk away.
“You can never take the audience for granted and the audience for true crime is actually much more informed and sophisticated than many people imagine – they can sense if you are simply trying to fill the schedules.”
Judging by the emails and letters I receive, that seems true.
The zeitgeist seems to be for the audience to become involved in trying to solve crimes, which may have been prompted or inspired by true crime podcasts – a general phenomenon sometimes dismissively described as “armchair detectives”.
One such amateur sleuth recently got back in touch with me. He’s written a book about Bible John and now has a series of theories on the Alistair Wilson case, the Nairn banker murdered on his own doorstep.
That case could certainly benefit from the Melissa Mayne treatment – but whatever she does next, I promise you it will be well worth watching.
The judge at the Broadcast Awards opens the envelope and pulls out a card. The winner in Best Original Programme is Krept & Konan: We Are England”. Our programme has lost. We all politely applaud but secretly hope that we win next year.
As if to pour salt in the wound, on my way out I pass Jeremy Clarkson clutching his Broadcast Award for Best Popular Factual Programme for Clarkson’s Farm.
Some guys have all the luck.
It is only in telly land that killers spill the beans
Ian Stewart was convicted last week of murdering his first wife Diane at their home in Cambridgeshire in June 2010, and six years later would go on to kill his second wife, the author Helen Bailey, and was serving a Life sentence for that murder when the police began to re- investigate the death of Diane.
Most of the people who have followed the case have asked me about the footage of Stewart being interviewed by the police about Diane’s murder.
In particular they have commented on the fact that the female police officer asked Stewart 21 questions about what happened to Diane, but Stewart didn’t reply to any – he simply sat silently, looked at his feet or around the interview room, and on one occasion half-heartedly shrugged his shoulders.
In my experience of speaking with murderers – especially those who are suspected of, or have been convicted of multiple murders that’s not so unusual.
This type of murderer attempts to keep control of the interview by being silent and uncommunicative, and offers nothing, or very little by way of explanation about the crimes that they have committed.
Harold Shipman, our most prolific serial killer, even turned away from his police interviewer and stared blankly at the wall.
Frankly, it really is only on TV, or at the movies that, when faced with a persistent interviewer, the killer breaks down, and admits after all “it’s a fair cop guv”.
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