The Long Shadow
ITV1
★★★★☆
Pete Doherty, Who Killed My Son?
Channel 4
★★★★☆
The word “Ripper” was reportedly dropped from the title of ITV’s drama about Peter Sutcliffe’s serial murders at the request of Richard McCann, the son of Sutcliffe’s first victim. Good. It’s a repulsive word, fetishising female mutilation and mythologising the killer. The Long Shadow is better than that. I welcome the fact that Sutcliffe is treated as a minor character in this drama. It is completely uninterested in him as a person.
Putting the focus solely on the victims means we see everything from their perspective, not just as silent black-and-white mugshots in a wretched gallery. Crucially we did not see Sutcliffe attacking the women. There was one shot of Wilma McCann’s body lying on playing fields near her home; when it came to the murder of Emily Jackson, it used only the power of suggestion. Jackson got into Sutcliffe’s car and its tail lights disappeared.
Murder victims shouldn’t need humanising but the sad fact is that, initially, some police officers saw some of these women as “only” prostitutes, distinguishing between them and “innocent” victims. George Kay’s drama underlined the poverty that drives women to sex work. McCann was a single mother of four children aged between seven and three. Jackson and her husband were so in debt they agreed between them that she would go “on the game”, him waiting in a nearby bar, getting by far the better end of the arrangement.
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Katherine Kelly was excellent as Jackson, a dignified woman in a smart coat prepared to sell her body at age 42 for £5 a time to pay the bills and give her children a good Christmas. What a powerful scene in which her husband, Sydney (Daniel Mays), broke down saying, “I can’t take it any more.” She slapped his face. “You can’t take it?”
Toby Jones is convincing as the slightly awkward workaholic DCS Dennis Hoban. We got only a taste of David Morrissey as ACC George Oldfield, who later took over the investigation (and became convinced that the famous “Wearside Jack” hoax tape was genuine), but he’s already a hefty presence. For women in the north in the 1970s and 1980s these murders left a deep scar on the collective psyche. Whether we needed a drama about it in 2023 is debatable, but those poor women are at least treated with respect.
The impressive Pete Doherty, Who Killed My Son? left me increasingly stunned with every minute. How could the Metropolitan Police have watched that CCTV footage of Mark Blanco falling like a deadweight from a balcony in 2006 and thought for a moment it was suicide? As an expert said, there was no “defensive” action, no instinctual kicking of limbs; it was as if he was already unconscious.
Mark’s campaigning mother, Sheila, believes he was murdered and forensic analysis of the film suggests another person was on the balcony. Police incuriosity over this death during a party at a flat attended by the drug-using singer Pete Doherty was baffling. Officers didn’t even cordon off the scene properly so, 37 hours later, Mark’s mother found his spectacles lens on the ground.
Later, when Doherty’s “minder” confessed to killing Mark but retracted the confession, this was accepted. The Met has hardly covered itself in glory lately. The least it can do is reinvestigate this murky death fully and give Sheila Blanco some peace.
