by Allan Fish
NB: while I have a shorter version of this, I decided to just repost the longer version first posted here in 2010.
p Simon Lewis d Philippa Lowthorpe w Stephen Butchard ph Chris Seager ed David Thrasher m Peter Salem art Tom Bowyer
Jaime Winstone (Anneli Alderton), Natalie Press (Paula Clennell), Eva Birthistle (Annette Nicholls), Aisling Loftus (Gemma Adams), Kierston Wareing (Nina), Ruth Negga (Rochelle), Sarah Lancashire (Rosemary Nicholls), Juliet Aubrey (Maire Alderton), Ian Hart (DCC Stewart Gull), Lisa Millett (PC Janet Humphrey), Sean Harris (Brian Tobin), David Bradley (Patrick Palmer), Kate Dickie (Isabella Clennell), Joseph Mawle (Tom Stephens), Anton Lesser (Dr Nat Cary), Lauren Socha (Dawn), Vicky McClure (Stacy Nicholls), Christopher Fairbank (DCI John Quinton), Holly Grainger (Alice Clennell), Jo McInnes (ACC Jacqui Cheer), Chris McCalphy (Steven Wright),
There’s always a sense of the distasteful about using contemporary cause célèbres for dramatic purposes. Not only does it recall a million dire disease/murder of the week TV movies on Hallmark and its ghastly ilk, it recalls the events themselves. Remember Warner Bros indefinitely postponing the VHS release of Natural Born Killers in the UK after the Dunblane massacre or the delay in the release of Gone Baby Gone in the UK for fear of parallels being drawn to the Madeleine McCann case. Or remember how Warners had to postpone the last episodes of Buffy‘s third season when one of the episodes, ‘Earshot’, was too close to the bone in light of the Columbine tragedy. Even several years after the event, many found United 93 an impossible watch. So when the BBC announced that it was dramatising the events of October to December 2006 in Suffolk, I have to admit to a deal of uneasiness about the enterprise. I still remember Paula Clennell speaking to Anglia TV reporters only days before her death about the fear of getting in cars, but having to do it for the money, or Anneli Alderton on that fateful train CCTV footage back to Ipswich and her imminent death. I didn’t watch it immediately when it was broadcast, and it’s perhaps unusual I am writing it now.
As I write it’s less than a week after events in the west of my home county which even now seem to beggar belief, of the already infamous Derrick Bird’s gun spree, of 12 victims whose lives were ripped from them almost without them knowing it. It’s been a hard year in Cumbria, our own house nearly went under to the rising flood waters, while several people were killed and thousands made homeless. Perhaps, however, conversely, it’s in such a sense of disbelief that these events are best witnessed, for Five Daughters, as the BBC’s drama was called, aimed to take a different stance to the usual police dramas with their cop clichés. Unlike say Zodiac or its like, which focused on the investigations, or films about Jack the Ripper, which either follow the killer or the police, Five Daughters was most concerned with the real tragedy at hand, the victims and those they left behind. To people watching the daily horrors unfold in Suffolk just before Christmas 2006, it’s too easy to just pigeonhole the victims as chav prostitutes who, if they didn’t deserve what was coming to them, were at least criminals and not ‘decent people’. Just faces in a montage. Yet they were always more than that, and writer Stephen Butchard aims to remove the girls from the purgatory of statistics, ticked boxes for criminal profilers.
For the killer, Steven Wright, there’s nothing for him but the periphery, the margins of the essay. The text, as it should, is about Tania Nicol, Gemma Adams, Anneli Alderton, Paula Clennell and Annette Nicholls. 122 years ago, when five other women were murdered in Whitechapel, we knew virtually nothing of them. They were all prostitutes, but doing it to survive, and to fund drinking habits. Yet they were, with the exception of the unfortunate Mary Kelly, all in their forties and past their prime. The oldest of Steve Wright’s victims was 29, the youngest 19, these were young women who could have had a future but were denied even the chance. Easy to dismiss as prostitutes, it doesn’t effect you as much that way and, besides, humanising them doesn’t sell papers. The gutter press, effectively invented in 1888 as a result of Jack’s atrocities, were still around in their tasteless hordes, circling around the homes of victims’ mothers, like parasites seeking another food source. And when the DCC announces the finding of two bodies, the reaction of the press is not one of shock but of speeding for the exit to get the news to their offices in time for deadlines. Technically, it could be seen as a cliché, and yet it’s a deserved swipe on behalf of the victims’ families. Likewise, the fact that the girls were all doing it to fund a drugs habit is one that is highlighted, for in the end, the prostitution is merely a means to the end of a score. Doing something to stop prostitution and it’s like punishing someone for not mopping up a leak spillage on the floor. Better to stop the leak, better to get the girls off the drugs. And if the depiction of the Iceni centre and its councillors may seem like the voicebox of the writer by proxy, we can forgive them that, for the writer has earned the right to preach, not on his own behalf, but on behalf of the girls left behind afterwards. The only other possible complaint is the killer’s vehicle, cornering round to its next victim like a hearse, with music swelling to sombre highs as if to say “it’s him”, recalling indeed the spooky piece used to accompany the killer’s coach in the 1988 drama about Jack with Michael Caine.
The police aren’t ignored in the process, we got to see the always reliable Ian Hart and his team go about their daily work. Some criticised the depiction as mundane, and yet is that not what police work is really about, doing the mundane things to narrow the search. If it were not based on real events, the writer would have been accused of the biggest deus ex machina since Russell T.Davies’ Doctor Who finales when, just like that (one half expected the cop to come in in Tommy Cooper’s fez), they get an incontrafutable DNA match for the killer. Yet that’s the disturbing thing, but for the DNA, the police were no nearer to catching Wright than they had been to finding Peter Sutcliffe before his car was pulled up by chance. In Jack’s day there were no forensics, no DNA, heck, not even fingerprints. Even postmortem photography was new. Jack killed five women inside 9 weeks, here five bodies had been found over 10 days, the biggest manhunt since Sutcliffe, a small constabulary stretched to breaking point. A feeling of hopelessness got over in a truly upsetting opening sequence where, having been alerted to having found a body 20 feet from the roadside, the helicopter surveying the scene hours later shows up another corpse only a few hundred yards away; two horrific discoveries for the price of one.
The title is what matters here, however, these are five daughters, though it could just as easily have been five mothers, sisters or friends. The last three victims knew the dangers, but addiction cannot be just put into a corner. Tell an alcoholic another drink will kill him, most of the time he won’t stop. These girls needed the money, some for heroin, others just to pay off debts of pimps wanting their vile cut. We are shown four of the girls in total (one, Tania Nicol, is never seen), and all are fully rounded characters, perhaps stereotypes in some ways, but flesh, blood and very much alive. This drama tells the story of not just how they were killed, but rather why they were taking the risks in the first place. One had been released from prison and seemed to be going straight, until the news of the death of her friend sends her spiralling back into her hardcase, smackhead shell. Another is struggling to keep up payments to her pimp and is about to be evicted from her home. Her only solace is a notebook of musings and poems she spills out her soul onto. Then there’s one living in an abandoned flat with another prostitute, having lost her three children to care and continuing to take heroin simply to forget the pain she’s caused.
By the end of the piece, one is left numb. There may be an uplifting final caption, telling of how street prostitution has been all but wiped out in Ipswich and how Rochelle and Nina have turned the corner, got off drugs and started new lives. There may even be hope that by telling their stories it may prevent others following suit, and the likes of Cathy Come Home and Hillsborough have both shown the power of television drama to make a difference to public perception. Yet that doesn’t make it any less numb. The shots of parents expecting the worst but finally breaking down when it becomes fact – the next time someone tells you to prepare for the worst, they may as well ask you to jump the moon because you cannot prepare for that moment when all hope is lost. One especially recalls the moment when Aubrey identifies her daughter in the mortuary chapel and breaks down and Lancashire’s numbed shock, just wanting to see her daughter’s body but prevented from doing so by police procedure of preserving the crime scene in situ. “She’ll be cold“, she protests, and our hearts sink.
It would be easy to praise the performances of the cast, and doubtless they’d feel uncomfortable receiving any praise in the circumstances, but beyond the obvious surface dramatics, there’s a purpose to their work, to portray the plight of these girls and their families and support workers, as not merely names in print. This they all do faultlessly, from first to last. As a triptych of victims’ mothers, Sarah Lancashire, Juliet Aubrey and Kate Dickie are astonishing, while there is also superb work from David Bradley and, especially, the ever-blistering Sean Harris as a kindly but exasperated drugs’ councillor (complete with an accent which was praised for its authenticity at a time when many portrayed those from East Anglia as if they came from the west country). His casting and that of Joseph Mawle as a suspect recalling earlier portrayals of monsters, of Harris’ Ian Brady, of Mawle’s one-scene Sutcliffe in Red Riding. And then there’s the girls, with Loftus haunting in her few scenes as Gemma, the first to be found, Wareing, Negga and Socha (remember her as the disaffected teen in The Unloved?) as the ones lucky enough to escape, Press as raw as an exposed nerve as Paula, Winstone (Ray’s daughter) never better than as Anneli, literally transforming from a considerate girl into a brash, loud monster, simply by dying her hair and adopting a persona as apposite as could be imagined. If one remembers anyone, though, for me it’s Birthistle as Annette, her poems (or rather those Butchard put into her mouth, for her family wouldn’t let the writer see her real notebook) providing the dimming heartbeat of their soon to flat-line existence.
“I’m not a bad person. I’m not a waste of time, space or oxygen. I deserve the air I breathe.”
Geez, this really sounds like something great Mr. Fish. I heard about that Derreck Bird murder spree. It was lucky he killed himself before inflicting even worse attrocities. But I think the cops were closing in on him. Excellent writing.
http://peterreynolds.wordpress.com/2010/06/07/a-very-british-bobby/
I agree with you. I thought Five Daughters was excellent. Drama like this does enlighten and help to heal. I don’t remember anything after Dunblane or Hungerford. I saw Panorama’s reconstruction tonight of what happened last week. I wonder whether in years to come this tragic Cuimbrian story will be dramatised?
Yes, one of the underlying thrusts of my piece, Peter. I don’t think last week’s events could be dramatised for the very reasons outlined above. You could only dramatise it by filming from the killer’s point of view, which frankly is an odious standpoint. With Five Daughters the reason it worked is that it wasn’t about the killer, but about the victims.
An odious standpoint? Perhaps, but at times, it’s the only really interesting one. I recall Spike Lee’s mostly boring “Summer of Sam”, where the only scene worth watching was when the CG-assisted dog walked up to David Berkowitz and ordered him to kill (in the voice of John Turturro, no less). If only the entire movie had been from that perspective– sure, it would’ve been tasteless, offensive and all kinds of wrong, but who gives a damn? It would’ve been a hell of a lot better than the rather rote 70′s-decadence stuff we got instead.
Bob, sorry, but that’s just bollocks and fairly disturbing bollocks at that. Obviously spoken by someone with no clue as to the state of plat with such crimes in the UK. Yes, perhaps the minds of serial killers or killing spree perpatrators may be fascinating to those with morbid curiosity, but not in real life cases and not so close to the time. Imagine a film like Zodiac entirely from the killers point of view but made at the time of the killings? After all, would one do a film detailing the London terrorist Al Qaeda attacks entirely from the standpoint of the terrorists? Or how about a film in the 1970s about the Belfast bombings from the point of view of the IRA. Either would be an absolute moral travesty. Keep analyses of serial killers to fictional cases where characters are fictional and can safely be despatched to maintain ‘interest’. We have more than enough clichéd cop shows and films for that. Let’s face it, we’ll never do a film from the killer’s point of view because you can NEVER get into a killer’s mind, so any drama becomes sensationalist theory, nothing more.
So? Sensationalist theorizing has its merits, and at the same time, of course there’s an audience with this same kind of morbid curiosity– otherwise we wouldn’t have slasher flicks or the horror genre at all. Frankly, I tend to think that if we were to make more murder-films based more concretely in real-life cases, we’d see far less of stuff like the “Saw”, “Scream” and “Friday the 13th” movies, where the audience is already all-but identifying with the killer, whether or not they wish to admit it. Hell, even Hitchcock’s old saying about “shooting your love scenes like murders and murders like love scenes” has a kind of implied, perverse killer’s instinct about it.
As for stuff about Al Qaeda or the IRA, those are different kettles to call black because you’ve also got their politics to consider. This is one of the reasons why I didn’t care for any number of the 9/11 movies, like “United 93″– yes, it portrays the events more or less along the lines as realistically as they probably happened (unless you believe in the conspiracy theories) but do we learn anything new or worthwhile from it? No. Politically motivated killing is always a matter of perspective– one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter after all, and even if you don’t agree with their agenda it’s doing a disservice to simply write them off in the same category as mere murderers, and nothing else. I’m sure there were probably plenty who were shocked and outraged by movies like “Battle of Algiers” or “The Baader Meinhof Complex”, but they were made for damn good reasons.
Granted, it’s difficult to get away with stuff like this, or non-political subject matters, so close to the time it occurred. Probably one of the best works of this sort was Alan Moore’s expansive Jack the Ripper-comix “From Hell”, which provided its own, rather persuasive theorizing on the killings from any and all manner of perspectives, including the hypothetical-murderer’s very own. Naturally when it was turned into a movie it was watered down from the state of absynth to mere water with green food coloring, but there’s still potential for those kinds of true-crime accounts. Perhaps it’s easier in the case of crimes where no guilty party has been found, allowing writers plenty of freedom to come up with their own plausible stories, or in the case of crimes with conspiracy theories attached to them, which create a kind of narrative blank-slate all of their own (Don DeLillo’s novel “Libra” is a good example of this).
Hm. All of this is reminding me of one of the more controversial items in my main passion of game design– the hotly debated “Super Columbine Massacre RPG” game, which I’ve never bothered to play. At any rate, I still contend that “Summer of Sam” would’ve been a hell of a lot more interesting if it had been purely about David Berkowitz and his attempts to satiate the bloodlust of John Turturro the dog.
I should also point out, since I mentioned Hitchcock above, that the only movie of his that I really enjoy anymore is the superb “Rope”, which is not only based on a real-life crime (Leopold & Loeb) but also told almost exclusively from the killers themselves, and in a cinematic method as ambitious and audacious as their very crime itself.
I’ll ignore the Hitchcock heresy, Bob, given as it’s an insanity of yours that has been well discussed, but re From Hell, I agree, the film was like lime cordial compared to the real thing. Mind you, Moore and Campbell always said it was never meant to be a serious examination of Jack, simply choosing the option that gave them more dramatic license. The film From Hell was fun, though, and the sets were the most accurate we have yet had thanks to Stewart Evans’ input.
Likewise, it doesn’t help that the most likely suspect for me has never been seen in any Ripper dramatisation. But then again, I have always felt the Ripper crimes cry out to be done not from the point of view of the police but the gutter press, for they to all intents and purposes invented Jack.
“After all, would one do a film detailing the London terrorist Al Qaeda attacks entirely from the standpoint of the terrorists? Or how about a film in the 1970s about the Belfast bombings from the point of view of the IRA. Either would be an absolute moral travesty.”
Fish this seems incredibly unthoughtful for you, not that I expect you to champion terrorism or its practitioners, but this seems to be arguing from a definite moral position when there isn’t one (and never is one). Generally this isn’t the stance I’ve ever seen you take. Just curious.
Isn’t the film PARADISE NOW (2005), about terrorists, from a terrorist perspective, and interesting/worth-telling? I think so.
I also think the Sartre quote on terrorism is always worth telling here to: “(Terrorism) is a terrible weapon but the oppressed poor have no others.” We must always consider all facets of an action even when they seem atrocious to us personally.
and I won’t add any of the countless splatter films about killers that came in the wake of PSYCHO as I know I am the sole fan of this slasher craze in the room. But there are countless examples.
Jamie, there are some slasher flicks that I can appreciate (the “Nightmare On Elm Street” series especially), so go ahead and speak out if you like. As for “Psycho”, that would be a truly great film, except Hitch fucks it all up in the third act by refusing to identify with his killer in earnest.
An interesting sub-text here is that the humanity of a prostitute is somehow dependent on how much we can mitigate her ‘crime’ by reference to a drug habit or that she wrote poetry etc.
As a society are we perhaps complicit in the despicable crimes of a deranged mind, who perhaps sees himself as some sort of avenger? To this extent do we not have an obligation to at least explore the motivation of the killer?
The release in the UK tomorrow of the graphically violent ‘The Killer Inside Me’ directed by Brit Michael Winterbottom and based on the 50s pulp novel by Jim Thompson, is relevant here, as it takes the viewpoint of a serial-killer.
But that’s a novel, Tony. Fiction you can do what you want with, it never happened. with real life accounts, a bit different, especially so close to the event.
As for complicitness, to a degree you’re right. These crimes are borne out of our society. Same with the gutter press. Remember we’re a race who not so long ago attended public executions for sport. Now we let the media supply us with our sensations.
THE KILLER INSIDE ME opens here on June 25th or something, I can’t wait… one of my more anticipated releases this year.
Yes I agree with your analysis of the morality of dramatising such events.
I’m surprised to see no mention of the latest dramatisation of war on your site:
http://peterreynolds.wordpress.com/2010/05/18/the-pacific/
I’m waiting for the Blu Ray, Peter. Others may well tackle it sooner.
With the deletions this thread is dis-jointed, and a good example of what censorship does to a text. Either delete the full discussion or leave it alone.
I respect Allan’s views on fact vs fiction, and in contradiction have little time for the explicit gore and violence of modern cinema, but I don’t see that a fictional portrayal is essentially different from a characterization based on fact. The issue is integrity: why is slasher trash acceptable and a filmic treatment of an horrendous real event not?
Is this telefilm available on Blu-Ray or DVD?????
Yes, Dennis, but only on DVD from Sweden Region 2. So come the New Year…Sam has a DVDR, but good luck finding it.:-)
One of the most interesting perspectives I’ve ever come across years ago was by Philip K. Dick in relation to his novel ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’ and it’s been born out by numerous pieces of psychological data from a vast variety of books. It concerns evil. For Dick, evil was a lack of empathy and what made us humans was the ability to empathise with another’s plight.
America, with its huge prison population – 5% of the world’s people with 25% of it’s incarceration is a mess.