The Stage

TV review

Published Monday 22 May 2006 at 11:50 by Harry Venning

See No Evil - the Moors Murders opens in 1964 with teenage parents Dave and Maureen Smith living in condemned housing and struggling to make ends meet. Maureen enjoys a close relationship with her sister Myra but the price the Smiths pay for Myra’s love and support is having to socialise with her sinister, intense and intimidating boyfriend Ian. However, they make the effort “for the sake of the family”. It is from this most mundane and unexceptional starting point that the horrific story of the Moors Murders slowly unravels.

Seen from Maureen’s perspective, moving from disbelief, through denial to despair, See No Evil gave a human face to Brady and Hindley and was all the more disturbing for it.

But this was no lurid horror story. It was an intelligent, powerful and thoughtful film that conveyed the atrocity of the crimes without ever resorting to sensation or gratuitous violence. Apart from the final, frenzied murder, Hindley and Brady’s victims appeared only on police posters or in frames on the walls and sideboards of the bereaved. The film’s sensitivity couldn’t be faulted.

The acting was also excellent. Sean Harris’ terrifyingly convincing portrayal of Brady’s may have screamed psychopath but it also showed him as charismatic and persuasive, a malevolent influence that the impressionable and immature Dave Smith struggled to resist. Maxine Peake’s Hindley was enigmatic but fundamentally sympathetic until the full extent of her crimes became apparent. Exactly how a woman could genuinely grieve the death of her own niece, yet torture, sexually abuse and murder the children of others was a question the film didn’t even attempt to answer.

The Line of Beauty looked fabulous, was immaculately acted and boasted a very groovy soundtrack of eighties hits. But apart from some furtive gay sex in the bushes, not a lot happened in episode one. We were introduced to Nick Guest, just down from Oxford, where he had recently graduated in having floppy hair and looking wistful and we were shown round the luxurious Notting Hill mansion that Nick had been invited to housesit. We met the owner, a Tory MP, and his mentally ill daughter who was great fun when she wasn’t self-harming with her knife collecion. This being 1983, we heard Mrs Thatcher being mentioned a lot, which made the blood run cold.

It was all very handsomely mounted, so to speak, but largely uneventful. I’ve got nothing against a slow build up but there are only two episodes to go and nothing dramatic has occurred yet.

Doctor Who slipped through a crack in time and found himself in a parallel universe overrun by his old enemies the Cybermen. They proved every bit as scary as I remember them.

In a thrilling two-parter, we discovered that Cybermen comprised living tissue within a metal skin, connected up to an emotion inhibitor. This stopped the occupant realising just how awful his/her existence was. Once disinhibited the Cybermen came over all emotional, which was actually rather poignant.

Its imaginative writing like this that makes Doctor Who such compulsive viewing. That and the great shots of Rose in a short skirt climbing a rope ladder.

DETAILS

See No Evil - the Moors Murders ITV1, 9pm, Monday, May 15

The Line of Beauty BBC2, 9pm, Wednesday, May 17

Doctor Who BBC1, 7pm, Saturday, May 13