In the Footsteps of Killers, review: how did this staggeringly ill-judged show ever get made?
True crime documentaries reached a new low with In the Footsteps of Killers (Channel 4), a staggeringly ill-judged piece of television. In this new series, a duo conduct cold case reviews of unsolved murders. One half of this pairing is Emilia Fox, the actress. Yes, because she plays a forensic pathologist in Silent Witness, Channel 4 considers her sufficiently qualified to investigate real murders.
She is paired with Prof David Wilson, a criminologist and television regular whose association with Channel 4 goes back to his days as a consultant on Big Brother. Together, they behave as if they’re in a second-rate crime drama. They pin pictures of the victims on the wall and scribble things on whiteboards. Fox goes through the files and reads out bits of her “research” (local newspaper articles) while Wilson paces up and down. Sometimes the camera just rests on Fox as she looks concerned and sad about all the things she could have found out in much shorter order simply by conducting a Google search.
The case at the heart of this opening episode was an awful one: two boys, Patrick Warren and David Spencer, who disappeared from Chelmsley Wood in Birmingham on Boxing Day night, 1996. The police were slow to investigate, dismissing the parents’ worries because the boys were “streetwise” and had been involved in the odd bit of petty crime. David’s family are still angry and grief-stricken, desperate for a breakthrough.
From the families’ point of view, anything that puts the case back in the limelight is welcome. But they deserved better than this. Awful, melodramatic music played over everything. The scenes between Fox and Wilson felt so staged, it was possible that Fox believed herself to be in a Silent Witness spin-off. The pair are also launching a true-crime podcast (called, ickily, If It Bleeds It Leads) and that sounds preferable: at least it can’t include the sight of them striding towards the camera in moody black and white. Actually, podcasts could be to blame for this show: they have created a landscape in which anyone feels able to pick a serious subject and share their thoughts on it, regardless of whether they have anything useful to say.
The most unforgivable thing was how disingenuous it felt. Fox “revealed” that the prime suspect, Brian Field, had previously been convicted of a double kidnapping. Wilson stopped, looked shocked and said: “I want to know more about that offence,” as if it was the first he’d heard of it. But a quick internet search will take you to a 2016 BBC News report in which Wilson discussed this very detail. Towards the end, he announced grandly that they would pass on their findings to the police. Yet they discovered nothing that the police don’t already know.
