This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 3 December 2016.
RILLINGTON PLACE: Tuesday, BBC One
STORYVILLE: THE CULT
THAT STOLE CHILDREN – INSIDE THE FAMILY: Tuesday, BBC Four
Few
figures in history have encapsulated “the banality of evil” more than notorious
serial killer John Reginald Christie.
With
his bald bonce, tortoiseshell spectacles and mousy demeanour, he was outwardly
nondescript in every way. And yet between 1943 and 1953 he murdered at least
eight women in his sepulchral abode at 10 Rillington Place in North-west
London.
Such
was Christie’s infamy, his squalid saga was dramatised in a classic 1971 film
starring Richard Attenborough.
That,
seemingly, was the last word on this insidious monster. However, writers Tracey
Malone and Ed Whitmore beg to differ with RILLINGTON
PLACE, a grimly absorbing three-part drama starring Tim Roth as Christie
and Samantha Morton as his conflicted wife, Ethel.
So
how does it differ from the Attenborough film? Well, it began by focusing on
Ethel as a kind of tragic identification figure. By viewing Christie from her
perspective, it provides a chillingly claustrophobic sense of what it must’ve
been like to live with him.
It
also means that his murders take place off screen – at least for now - as Ethel
never witnessed them. Instead we receive terrifying hints – a blood-stained
mattress, a suspicious suitcase containing unknown horrors, Christie digging in
the garden and skulking around at night with a hammer – while downtrodden Ethel
gradually twigs that her shifty husband is more than a “mere” philanderer,
thief, voyeur and liar.
Episode
one also fleshed out their backstory. It ended as the events of the film began,
i.e. the arrival at Rillington Place of doomed neighbour Timothy Evans, who
would eventually be hanged for one of Christie’s murders.
Roth
and Morton are extraordinary. With his flat, whispered Yorkshire tones and
eerie self-containment, he’s like a sinister Jon Ronson disguised as Arthur
Lowe. His steadfast calm being broken by a sudden physical attack on Ethel was
particularly disturbing, revealing as it did the psychotic violence lurking
beneath that apparently pathetic veneer.
Meanwhile,
Morton’s subtly expressive face captures Ethel’s perpetual tug of war between
hurt, suspicion, anger, disgust and denial. The writers suggested that she
covered for Christie on at least one occasion, presumably out of misplaced
loyalty to the only man she’d ever been with. To troubling effect, Morton nails
this complex ambiguity.
Suitably
mired in a dank, shabby, weak tea haze of gloomy wartime and post-war misery, Rillington Place excels on every level.
Despite the lurid subject matter, it’s an admirably restrained yet gut-punching
study of everyday evil.
Likewise,
the sad and angering Storyville
documentary THE CULT THAT STOLE
CHILDREN: INSIDE THE FAMILY examined the harrowing psychological toll of
lives destroyed by mentally unstable captors.
In
1963, Anne Hamilton-Byrne founded an Australian sect comprised of supposedly
respectable adults and children either sired by followers, or stolen from
vulnerable young mothers.
Believing
herself to be Christ incarnate, for over 20 years this charismatic psychopath
oversaw a despicably cruel regime in which children were starved, beaten and
fed LSD. The programme featured testimonies from “her” children, all of them
unimaginably scarred by their ordeal. Even the police officers investigating
the case were traumatised.
She
got away with it by exploiting draconian attitudes towards unwed mothers, while
securing/manipulating friends in high places. When finally apprehended, all she
faced was a fine for falsifying adoption documents. Today she resides in a
retirement home, her memories vanquished by Alzheimer’s.
The
Australian justice system and society at large failed these abused children. It
was a scandal beyond your darkest nightmares.
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