Sarah Phelps and Saul Dibb have made a true-crime drama that keeps its eyes on the people who were killed rather than on the man who killed them. Timothy Spall and Anne Reid are superb; the back half, once the police arrive, is ordinary by comparison.
Most true-crime drama is about the killer. He gets the close-ups, the actor with the awards reel, the scenes in which he explains himself to a detective. Sarah Phelps, who wrote all four episodes of The Sixth Commandment, has gone the other way. The first two hours belong to Peter Farquhar and Ann Moore-Martin, two elderly people in an English village who took a lodger into their homes, and the man who did it to them is kept at the edge of the frame for as long as the story allows. It is a serious, careful, upsetting piece of television, and we would recommend it with one reservation, which is that it is only half as good once the victims are gone.
Timothy Spall plays Peter as a man who has spent sixty years being polite about his own unhappiness. He reads aloud to himself, he writes to God in his diary, he straightens the cushions after a visitor leaves. When Ben Field (Éanna Hardwicke) moves in and begins to pay him attention, Spall lets a kind of giddiness into the face that is almost unbearable to watch, because we know what the character does not. The scene that horrified us is one in which nothing happens: Ben pours Peter a drink at the kitchen table and sits and watches him drink it. Saul Dibb holds the shot. Hardwicke does not move. We wanted to shout at the screen, which is not something we say often.
Hardwicke’s Ben is the quietest monster we have seen in some while. He is pleasant, tidy, good with old people, handy at church. Amanda Perryman dresses him in soft jumpers and open collars, the uniform of a young man who helps with the chairs after a service, and he never raises his voice. Phelps declines to explain him, and Hardwicke declines to hint, so that for four hours we are looking at a blank and the blank is looking back. That is honest. It is also, by the third episode, a problem, because a story that will not get inside its villain has to find something else to hold the last two hours together, and the police procedure it finds is not it.
Anne Reid’s Ann is the series’ other great performance, and a different kind. Where Peter is anxious, Ann is delighted: a woman in her eighties who has been noticed by a handsome young man and sees no reason not to enjoy it. Reid plays the pleasure without a trace of foolishness, which is what makes it so hard to watch. Sheila Hancock, as her friend Elizabeth Zettl, and Annabel Scholey, as the niece who smells something wrong and cannot get anyone to listen, give her two scenes of ordinary village friendship that do more than any speech could. Gemma Randall’s production design fills both houses with the right clutter, Peter’s with books in piles and Ann’s with photographs and china, and Rik Zang shoots them in flat grey daylight, close on the faces, so that we are kept inside the two houses with them and never allowed out.
Then the police arrive, and the series becomes the one we have seen before. Jonathan Aris is decent and unshowy as DCI Mark Glover, and Peter Sullivan is good in court as David Jeremy, but episodes three and four are interviews, files, a trial, and the familiar rhythm of a case being built. Steven Worsley and Sarah Peczek cut the first two episodes with patience that pays off; in the fourth the same patience feels like length, and 57 minutes is a long time to spend in a courtroom whose outcome the story has already made plain. Rael Jones’s score, thin strings and not much else, has the sense to stay out of the way throughout, and we were grateful for it.
Watch the first two episodes together, in the evening, with someone to talk to afterwards. Then decide whether you have the stomach for the rest. We did, and we were glad we had, but it was the kitchen table we were still thinking about a week later, not the verdict.
