Stephen Merchant and Sheridan Smith star in the BBC’s mind-boggling story of the murders by serial killer and rapist Stephen Port … and the egregious police failures that followed
We’re getting to the point, surely, where television drama could be named the sixth estate. In the last year alone, we have had Deceit, probing the police ethics around the Rachel Nickell investigation, Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s Stephen, about the ongoing mishandling of the Stephen Lawrence case, Jimmy McGovern’s look at the prison system’s failures in Time, and Jack Thorne’s Help, telling, almost in real time, the story of care homes abandoned by government policy and the inhabitants left for dead as a result. All brought terrible injustices by those supposedly sworn to uphold the law and protect us – risibly old-fashioned though such phrases feel – to greater public prominence, and hopefully add to the pressure for holding to account those whose dereliction of duty at best, and corruption at worst, does society so much harm. Anne, a drama about the mother who fought through police denials and obstructions for the eventual unlawful killings verdict for the Hillsborough victims, is currently airing. And there are surely more in the works – perhaps on the murders of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman and the two officers sent to guard the scene, who took photos and shared the images on WhatsApp, or the murder by another officer of Sarah Everard (possibly including the breaking up of a peaceful vigil for her thereafter). The thin blue line refuses to run unerringly straight.
And so to Four Lives (BBC One), about the murders of four young men by serial killer and rapist Stephen Port (a fine and chilling performance by Stephen Merchant) and a police investigation so fundamentally flawed that an inquest jury recently found that it probably contributed to three of the four deaths.