Car Crash: Who’s Lying? is a gem, and I highly recommend you catch it on BBC iPlayer if you missed it. It takes a single fatal road traffic accident and tells the story of how the police managed to determine who was responsible, and why. It’s a mundane, if tragic, tale, but given such a suspenseful and delicate treatment that you just have to watch.
A Nissan Almera spins out of control at high speed, on a dark country road outside Portsmouth. When the police turn up, one young man is, bizarrely enough, perched cross-legged on top of the overturned car. There are two passengers, both in the back, which is odd. One dies of his injuries; the other is in a coma, close to death. So there is only one witness, and he is already unreliable. Dazed and confused he initially tells the police alternately that he is, and is not, the driver. He is sober. They smell a rat. Was there a fourth person in the car? Who, in fact, was driving it at 80mph backwards into a tree?
Ten hours on, under interrogation, the still mixed-up Dannylee Ross-Barringer gets real, and grasses on his cousin, Zax Ross-Harris. But Zax has a solid alibi, down the pub, and Danny seems very flaky. Meanwhile, Luke Fletcher is dead, and Sonny Wedge is still unconscious.
The arrival of universal police bodycams, a side effect of tougher stop and search laws, as well as filmed police interviews, blanket CCTV coverage and other surveillance methods – mobile phones, bank cards – means two things. First, that the police can find it easier to solve crimes (though the sheer volume of digital data can overwhelm then). Second, that talented filmmakers can, as here, and with sympathetic interviews with witnesses, detectives and the victims’ family and friends, gather enough material to produce a “drama” and a sobering morality tale for our times.
In the end, the driver, badly drunk, was caught by forensic evidence of the fibres of his clothes which fused with the seat belt at the moment of impact. It was Zax, and he got eight years, one for every pint he drank; Dannylee got six for abetting.
There will, I predict, be many more “true-life” dramas like this one with the rich new harvest of police and CCTV footage. Car Crash: Who’s Lying? sets a high standard for the emerging genre.
