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In interviews, Prebble and Piper — credited as the co-creator — have made no bones about following in the recent tradition of programmes like Fleabag and I May Destroy You, where all decorum is abandoned in favour of darker truths about the female id. At times, this perhaps leads to a certain self-consciousness about its own boundary-breaking. (Behold! See our fearlessness!) Nonetheless, I Hate Suzie is still a fine piece of work that convincingly, often hair-raisingly and presumably knowledgeably paints showbiz life at its most luridly weird.
With luck, The Unbelievable Story of Carl Beech (BBC2) will leave future generations utterly bewildered by how unhinged British society must once have been. Then again, it’s hard not to be utterly bewildered already, just a few years after the events it depicted took place.
In 2014, you may remember, Beech’s allegations that he’d been systematically abused as a boy by a random coterie of establishment figures made the lead on the BBC news, were enthusiastically endorsed by Tom Watson MP and declared ‘credible and true’ by the Metropolitan Police, who vowed to ‘follow the evidence wherever it led’. Which turned out to mean that they’d raid Leon Brittan’s house a few weeks after he died and take away his collection of Morse videos, but not that they’d notice Beech had none of the many injuries he’d claimed to have received and owned a computer full of child pornography.
The programme’s maker Vanessa Engle, an old documentary hand, could possibly have gone in harder on the people who’d given Beech credence. Nonetheless, by letting the story speak largely for itself — with the aid of some powerful interviews with the relatives of the falsely accused (and, in a definite coup, Beech’s ex-wife Dawn) — she left us in no doubt about either the pain he caused or the sheer absurdity of it all.
Still, those future generations might also be a bit surprised about how even serious documentaries of the 2020s couldn’t resist the use of flippant little TV tics, however out of place. How else to explain, for example, the use of Charles and Eddie’s cheery pop song ‘Would I Lie to You?’ over the closing credits? Or, far worse, the comic clips of Pinocchio that were interspersed throughout the programme?
Because you read about bbc
Also by James Walton
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