Vanessa Engle: ‘I have no doubt Carl Beech's story was completely untrue’

‘Everyone agrees that something very bad probably happened to Carl Beech,” says Vanessa Engle. But after a year spent making a devastating documentary about the former NHS paediatric nurse’s claim to have been sexually abused by a VIP paedophile ring in the Seventies and Eighties, Engle has “no doubt his story was completely fabricated”.

I’m pushing her on the topic because more than a year after Beech was found guilty of fraud and perverting the course of justice and sentenced to 18 years in prison, some people still believe the allegations he made against establishment figures, including former head of the British Armed Forces Lord Bramall, former Conservative MP Harvey Proctor, the former Conservative home secretary Lord Brittan and former prime minister Sir Edward Heath.

One of my oldest friends – a therapist who works with abuse victims – continues to find him as credible as the Metropolitan Police did in 2014 when his allegations sparked the £2 million police investigation called Operation Midland. She says that his accounts of the rape, torture and murder of young boys by “The Group” fit entirely with the stories she hears in her practice. She feels Beech has been shamed to prevent other victims coming forward.

“Wow,” says Engle when I tell her this. A famously direct interviewer, she has an instant question: “Is your friend an abuse victim? I was nervous about telling the story of a liar at the expense of genuine abuse victims. But I think it’s incredibly important to say that what Carl Beech says happened to him has not happened to him. We know now that he never met any of the high-profile men he accused.”

Speaking from her home in north London, the 57-year-old filmmaker – best known for her revealing documentaries on a disparate range of subjects, from Left-wing activism to Harley Street doctors – tells me that “if we worry about victims, we need to worry about people falsely accused. Their lives have been destroyed. I bumped into people while making this film who said: ‘No smoke without fire.’ That’s an abomination.”

Engle is the first filmmaker to get Lord Brittan’s widow, Diana, on camera to talk about the impact the investigation had on her and her husband, who did not live to see his name cleared.

“In fact,” Engle tells me, “the police didn’t even bother to tell Lady Brittan that the investigation was over. She read that in a newspaper. And she is a magistrate. “If that’s what happens to her, then heaven help the rest of us. But I admire her bravery in talking to us. It wasn’t an experience she relished. But it was important for her to give her testimony.”

One of Engle’s gifts is her eye for detail. When she was making a film about British attitudes to money, she continually asked interviewees if they took a packed lunch to work. In the Beech film, she sought out the Brittans’ housekeeper to ask about the emotional impact of police searches and learnt “the thing that hurt the lady more than anything is, they took his slippers”. “Were they nice slippers?” Engle asked. “They were pretty awful, to be honest,” said Lady Brittan. “No monogram.”

The other female victim given a voice in the show is Beech’s ex-wife and the mother of his son. The nurse, who was married to Beech for 18 years, is shown reading some of his poetry aloud: “Electrocution and drowning were some of the tools / They used when I broke the rules. They used snakes and wasps / And left me out to die in the frost.” Having initially believed and comforted her husband when he first spoke to her about being abused, she now has nothing but contempt for him: “Well, he obviously didn’t die, did he, because he’s still alive and in prison, for f---’s sake!” she tells Engle. “Her emotions around it all are very raw,” says Engle. “To discover the father of your child, a man with whom you shared a bed for nearly 20 years, has some of the worst category of child abuse images on his computer… I don’t know how you deal with that. I suppose that’s one of the questions I’m asking: how do you deal with that?“

The bigger questions are for society. Engle says that the Beech story “could only have happened in contemporary times, and I think it’s important to reflect on what it tells us. We’ve seen waves of awareness around child sexual abuse following Savile. Then a wave around MeToo and now Black Lives Matter. These are incredibly important movements for anybody interested in progress. But when these big waves of social consciousness well up in all our minds, it changes the context in which we see things. We can get swept away and it affects our judgment. Beech exploited that.”

These are the kinds of big ideas that have driven Engle’s work since she started out making arts documentaries for the BBC in 1988. Back then, she says, “a lot of the money, intellectual excitement and experimentation was in arts”. From 1989-93, she worked for BBC Two’s The Late Show. Her three-part series about the UK’s Young British Artists, Britart, was commissioned for the launch of BBC Four, and was followed by a profile of Charles Saatchi in 2003 and the glorious Art & the 60s in 2004. “But then,” she says, “the mood shifted, arts took a back seat, and documentaries took over, so I changed lanes.” After years spent making films about painters and novelists – “always in the service of somebody else’s creativity” – she felt “freed up to find my own creativity”.

Driven by a deep curiosity about what makes her fellow humans tick, Engle has never appeared on screen in her own films. But her clever, often mischievous, questions and observations from behind the camera have become a trademark, along with her keen-eared use of pop music. Her compelling 2019 film about art swindler Michel Cohen was buoyed along by swirling retro jazz pop that echoed the soundtrack to The Thomas Crown Affair (1968). Her devastating 2015 film about domestic violence – naming all 87 women killed by their partners in 2013 – was backed by elegiac synths and pianos.

Writing for this paper a few years ago, Engle said she had quite “a dark view of human nature”. But today she doesn’t remember saying that: “How interesting. What film was I talking about? Walking With Dogs [2012]? Oh well. Everybody in that film had some sort of issue in their life, and the dog was playing a therapeutic role.

“Life is hugely challenging, isn’t it? Most people are dealing with very difficult things in their lives. It’s a theme I return to over and over again. It’s one of the mysteries of capitalism, in a way. That one’s actual experience of life is very dark and difficult, but the picture of capitalism that we’re constantly exposed to is one in which everybody is having a lovely time, and driving a lovely car, loving their families at lovely barbecues. “I find it funny how pervasive that is, because those moments are very rare. Once in a while you might have an afternoon that feels that way. I’m not a pessimist, but it’s very difficult to accept the anxieties when they’re not acknowledged around you.”

She pauses and then adds: “But I think I have high levels of trust and confidence in people. I don’t think I could do the job I do if I didn’t have compassion and empathy for people. Curiosity is always the watchword.”

Apart from six months’ maternity leave, Engle has “directed non-stop for 32 years”, but she says she has only been able to achieve this by “stealthily pitching ideas that meant I didn’t have to travel. It’s only now that my children are 20 and 23 that I can confess that’s what I was doing. Back then I could never have said: ‘I’ve chosen this subject because it means I can still be a good mother.’ I don’t think that would have gone down very well.

“It can be a challenge, working in the UK, where the scenery is so familiar. The motorways, the signs and the cars are so familiar.

“I want my films to be entertaining, so I’m always foraging for fresh imagery. But if you look at what’s under your nose, it’s extraordinary what you will find.”

The Unbelievable Story of Carl Beech is on BBC Two at 9pm Aug 24