Philippa Lowthorpe’s three-part drama about the Rochdale grooming scandal keeps its camera on the girls and on the adults who should have listened. It is patient and hard to sit through, and Molly Windsor and Maxine Peake carry it without once asking for our sympathy.
Nicole Taylor’s script makes one decision in the first ten minutes and holds it for three hours. The camera stays with the girls and with the adults whose job it was to protect them. The men who did the abusing are barely characters at all: a face behind a takeaway counter, a car pulling up, a hand refilling a plastic cup. Some viewers will find that a dodge. We think it is the point. The series is not interested in why these men did what they did. It wants to know why, when three children said so, nobody with a warrant card cared.
Molly Windsor’s Holly arrives sullen and new, and Windsor never lets her become a symbol. She wants friends, a laugh, somewhere to be that is not her parents’ front room. Ria Zmitrowicz plays Amber loud and brittle, the one who knows the men’s names and thinks that makes her in charge. Liv Hill’s Ruby is younger and slower and does what her sister does. The first episode does not spare us what happens to Holly, but Philippa Lowthorpe films it from her face, in a room Melanie Allen has furnished with a mattress and almost nothing else, and the camera never goes where a tabloid would.
What horrified us was not that scene. It was the one after it, in a police station, where Holly tells a detective what was done to her and he writes it down in the tone of a man taking a lost-property report. Úna Ní Dhonghaíle holds these interview scenes far longer than television usually dares, so we sit through the pauses, the pen, the tape being changed. A police officer calls what is happening to these girls a lifestyle choice, and the series lets the phrase sit there without underlining it. We were angry, and we were meant to be.
Maxine Peake plays Sara Rowbotham tired, quick and rude, a woman who has sent the same report so many times she has stopped expecting a reply. It is not a showy performance and it does not need to be; the rawness is all in the young cast, which is where it belongs. Once or twice Taylor hands Sara a speech that says what the scene has already shown, and Peake is good enough that we noticed the script doing it rather than her. That is the closest the series comes to lecturing.
Matt Gray shoots Rochdale in flat overcast daylight, handheld and close, and the takeaway under strip lighting the colour of weak tea. Emma Fryer puts the girls in tracksuits and scuffed school shoes, so they look like what they are, children, and not the young women the paperwork calls them. Natalie Holt’s score is mostly a single held string note, and it knows when to stop. Nothing here is pretty and nothing is dressed up to be ugly either.
The later episodes bring in Lesley Sharp’s DC Margaret Oliver and Ace Bhatti’s Nazir Afzal, and the drama moves into offices and interview rooms. The air goes out of it a little; watching adults finally do the paperwork properly is not the same as watching a child in a takeaway, and the third hour is the most conventional. Sharp is given less room than she deserves. Lisa Riley’s Lorna is drawn with a thick pencil, a mother who cannot be bothered, though Riley finds a flicker of shame in her. Paul Kaye and Jill Halfpenny, as Holly’s parents, are decent, baffled people who keep asking the wrong question, and Kaye’s Jim is the only man in the series we are asked to understand.
British television makes a lot of dramas from real cases, and most of them reach for a tidy shape by the last episode. This one runs three hours across three parts and leaves the shape untidy on purpose. The men are not explained. The institutions are not forgiven. The girls are not healed for our benefit.
Watch it in one sitting if you can bear to. The second hour is the hardest, and the third is the reason to stay.
