Steeltown Murders, BBC One, review: turgid true-crime drama drags us to the 70s and back again
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From the off, Steeltown Murders (BBC One) doesn’t inspire much confidence. It is yet another true-crime story, and yet another 1970s period piece wreathed in cigarette smoke.
It switches between then and the early 2000s – when the crime is re-opened as a cold case, following advances in DNA testing – with such regularity that the director has to use the unsubtlest of devices to remind us which era we’re in. Then: All Right Now by Free is playing on the car radio. Now: Babylon by David Gray, and news bulletins that mention Tony Blair.
The first episode is a mess. Working out what is going on is difficult. Eventually, the story struggles into view. A teenage girl named Sandra Newton was murdered in south Wales in 1973. Later that year, friends Pauline Floyd and Geraldine Hughes were found murdered several miles away. A junior CID detective, Paul Bethell, was convinced that the crimes were the work of a serial killer, but the investigation hit a dead end. Thirty years later (and played by Philip Glenister) he is asked to restart the case.
Writer Ed Whitmore and director Marc Evans are clearly trying to handle this story with care and an absence of sensationalism, but have ended up with four turgid hours of television – which is odd, because they had none of these problems when making ITV’s vastly superior Manhunt.
The justification for turning real-life murder cases into dramas is usually two-fold: to highlight dogged policing and to take the focus away from the killer by telling the stories of the victims. On the first count it succeeds – Bethell and his team do an excellent job. But we learn almost nothing about Sandra. Pauline and Geraldine are portrayed on screen, but as much time is given to their friend who – a BBC information pack tells me – is fictional.
There is only one character who cuts through. He is father to one of the victims, who stumbled across the murder scene and has been haunted ever since by the knowledge that his daughter had tried to flee her killer and almost made it, but stumbled over a tree branch yards from safety. We only hear from him in the fourth and final episode (the whole series is available on iPlayer). I suspect many viewers won’t stick it out.
