A version of this article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 8th November 2014.
Broadmoor:
Wednesday, STV
Frankenstein
and The Vampyre: A Dark and Stormy Night: Saturday,
BBC Two
Paul
Whitelaw
Given what we now know about Jimmy
Savile, ITV's claim that Broadmoor has “unprecedented
access” to the high security psychiatric hospital feels like an
unfortunate boast.
Nevertheless, it's true that, for the
first time in its 150 year history, this secretive institution has
allowed a documentary crew to film within its walls. Home to
notorious serial murderers such as Peter Sutcliffe and Kenneth
Erskine – neither of whom chose to participate, much to the
surprise of no one – Broadmoor tends to be viewed in the popular
imagination as a terrifying cauldron of criminal violence.
While this sobering two-part series
doesn't quite seek to reverse that reputation, it succeeds in
presenting a more balanced, responsible and humane view of
Broadmoor's patients. The abiding theme of episode one was
encapsulated by Clinical Director Dr Amlan Basu, who observed that,
despite their horrendous crimes, these men are also victims.
“It's very easy to see somebody as
either the perpetrator or the victim. It's much more difficult to
understand that somebody might be both.” That the programme set out
to do just that is hugely commendable.
We were introduced to patients, their
identities concealed for obvious reasons, whose severe mental health
disorders were the tragic by-product of childhoods scarred by
repeated psychological and sexual abuse. One psychiatrist claimed,
almost with a rueful smile, that he could easily identify future
patients if he'd met them as children.
Eventually greenlit following five
years of careful negotiation, Broadmoor is necessarily
compromised at times. While the vigilant staff were candid to a point
– for want of a quiet life, they rarely tell people where they work
– certain subjects were firmly off limits. Forbidden from filming a
restraint procedure on a patient who refused to return to his room,
the crew were also banned from showing a reluctant patient being
forcibly injected with anti-psychotic medication.
But rather than harm the programme's
integrity, these enforced omissions actually heightened its carefully
handled tone of detached compassion. Images of self-inflicted scars
on a suicidal patient's arms were all we needed to see. Anything more
would've been gratuitous. Wisely, the ever-present threat of violence against
staff was implicit.
Graced with sensitive narration from
actor Eddie Marsan, Broadmoor is neither prurient
nor exploitative. Uncomfortable, sad and challenging, it offers no
easy answers. It's intelligent enough to realise that life is too
brutal, too complicated, for that.
Part of a BBC season devoted to all
things Gothic, Frankenstein and The Vampyre: A Dark and Stormy
Night was a suitably melodramatic documentary recounting the
unusual circumstances which led to Mary Shelley creating her horror
masterpiece.
Literally the stuff of nightmares,
Frankenstein came to her one evening during a sensual lakeside
holiday in Geneva with her bohemian husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley,
randy old Lord Byron, and an aspiring yet hapless writer named
Polidori.
High on wine and ether, as freak
storms raged outside, this tempestuous group challenged each other to
write a ghost story. The twist in the tale was that the little known
Polidori, belittled as a joke by Byron in particular, eventually
wrote the first published modern vampire story. His fiendish
inspiration? None other than that aristocratic rake, Lord Byron
himself. It was revenge of sorts.
With articulate contributions from
talking heads such as Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood, this handsome
reconstruction of a weird, dazzling summit was a late Halloween
treat.
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