Deceit, review: slick, propulsive procedural slides murkily into true-crime prurience

Film-makers contemplating a British-set remake of Silence of the Lambs will have devoured episode one of crime drama Deceit (Channel 4), most likely with fava beans and a nice chianti. Starring Niamh Algar as a tomboyish cop in over her head and Eddie Marsan as her creepy criminal psychologist mentor, it crackled with the same baroque brio that sparked between Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins in Jonathan Demme’s classic thriller.

Problematically, however, Deceit was based on a real story with a real victim. In July 1992, 23-year-old Rachel Nickell was on Wimbledon Common in south-west London with her two-year-old son when she was sexually assaulted and stabbed to death.

The police were soon convinced they had the culprit – a local loner named Colin Stagg (played here by Sion Daniel Young), who had been walking his dog in the vicinity of the Common the day of the killing. Twenty-nine years later, Channel 4 was now giving the case a prurient binge-watch reboot.

As in the actual investigation, the Metropolitan Police’s plan was to extract a confession from the (entirely innocent) Stagg via an elaborate honeytrap plot, named Operation Ezdell, at the centre of which was a 30-year-old undercover detective. Given the codename “Lizzie James”, she was identified here as Sadie Byrne (a contrivance by the show to protect the officer’s identity).

With a grin and an eye-roll, Algar played Lizzie/Sadie as a hard-knock anti-hero who always got her man. Her mission was to forge an emotional relationship with Stagg by posing as someone who shared his violent sexual fantasies (which experts believed had motivated him to kill and would do so again).

Advising her was forensic psychologist Paul Britton, played by Marsan. Marsan is always riveting but in Deceit he has been asked to reimagine Britton – again, a real person – as a hammy creep. It came across weirdly.

Deceit scored full marks for its evocation of the early Nineties. An early nightclub scene, in which Sadie was entrapping a drug dealer, felt like an outtake from a Prodigy video. And in the sequences in which Sadie (or “Lizzie”) and Stagg corresponded by letter, there was a reminder this was the decade when the art of setting your feelings down on paper would finally be supplanted by the instant gratification of the text message.

Algar anchored the action as a woman initially full of confidence but who soon realised that, in trying to get under Stagg’s skin, she was dangerously out of her depth. And Marsan was thumpingly good value as her ghoulish guru. There was also a thinly-drawn part for Line of Duty’s Rochenda Sandall as Sadie’s best mate in the Met’s male-dominated undercover unit. And Harry Treadaway (last seen as Princess Margaret’s bit of rough in The Crown) popped up as the detective desperately hunting Nickell’s killer.

The tale played out as a tension-packed caper. But the fact that all the fun and games centred on a real crime and a devastated family wedged in the craw. Deceit was styled as a slick, propulsive procedural. Given the awful subject matter, however, it failed to fly either as true crime or as escapist thriller. In the end it was really just fooling itself.