It’s a testament to the power of Raoul Moat’s story that thirteen years still feels too soon to make a drama about him.
In 2013, Moat was released from prison and went on a rampage that resulted in the death of his ex-girlfriend’s new partner and two police officers. It ended with a national manhunt, where he ultimately killed himself.
The newspapers feasted on every moment; Moat, with his shaven head and unrepentant violence (one victim describes his “roid rage”), was a horribly fascinating embodiment of the type of toxic masculinity that manifests today in online influencers like Andrew Tate.
And now, the whole sordid affair has been dramatised for ITV in a three-part series so tense that it almost requires you to hold your breath the entire way through.
The cast are all relatively little-known, but their performances are solid across the board. Matt Stokoe puts meat on Moat’s bones, giving him a hulking physicality and a simmering rage that boils off the screen; on the outside, Sally Messham is self-contained and fearful as his ex-girlfriend Sam, who reaps the tragic consequence of that fury.
“He can’t accept anything that isn’t exactly how he wants it,” she tells new boyfriend Chris (Josef Davies). And indeed, in the unbearably tense scene between Sam and Moat in HMP Durham’s waiting room, Moat cycles between disbelief and fury as she tells him she’s moved on.
“I’m going to break his f***ing back,” he growls, before making good on that promise and then some.
Fortunately, the focus in this first episode is very much not on Moat, but on the people that he wronged. The first ten minutes focus on establishing the relationship between Sam and Chris; though no murders are shown, we do see police telling Chris Brown’s family about his death and their disbelief – as well as Sam’s – is raw and heartbreaking.
As new of Moat’s rampage filters out, we also get the view from inside Northumbria police station as the police first fail to act on a warning about Moat, then rush to respond to the shootings. And all the while, journalists are circling like hawks, whipping the nation up into a frenzy.
Tension is the watchword here. It underpins every moment; simmers in every scene, particularly the ones featuring the killer. When the frenzy begins, midway through the episode, it feels like a thunderstorm breaking; the last two episodes will be slower, exploring the ramifications of that frenzy and the grief of the people impacted.
The whole thing has been sensitively done; there’s no question of glorifying Moat’s actions here. Still, nothing exemplifies his creepy pull like the scene at the start, which uses shaky camcorder footage from the noughties to show people laying flowers in remembrance of him. For some people, he was clearly a hero; that is the scariest thing of all.
