Andrew Haydon
posted 1 November 2006

One-off television plays about a serious moral subject are a rare enough beast that when one turns up it seems churlish to carp about its shortcomings. However, Channel 4's Longford, a dramatisation of the campaign by Frank Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford (Jim Broadbent) for the release from prison of Moors murderer Myra Hindley (Samantha Morton), did have its problems.

TV dramas about real people are increasingly the fashion, it would seem. As with the current public preference for biography over fiction, audiences appear to prefer their dramatic action to be based on the lives of actual people rather than the airy speculations of some writerly sort. But, real lives are not orderly, well-structured narratives with an easily identifiable metaphysical message, or neatly-framed speculation on some moral problem. As a result, dramas based on 'real-life' personages often suffer as a consequence. Longford is no exception.

The first twenty minutes or so contained a preposterous barrage of information-disguised-as-dialogue, laid out in a manner suggesting that the author did not wholly trust the viewing public to comprehend any of the points being made without careful underlining and repetition. Of course, simplicity has its virtues and thanks to this method it was very easy to see what the writer was up to. The story offered is a simple one: Lord Longford, a committed Catholic who is head of the prison visiting trust, goes to visit the most reviled woman in Britain, Myra Hindley, who tells him of her own lapsed Catholic faith. It is suggested that it is this admission which galvanises Longford into his campaign for her parole, rather than the more general principles of due legal process and parity as well as his Christian belief in forgiveness and compassion.

Curiously, the narrative structure used here seems at times to have more in common with a romantic film than any sort of life-as-it-is-lived. There is a scene later in the film in which Hindley informs Longford that she no longer wants him to campaign on her behalf, and suggests that his campaigning thus far had done more to hinder than help. The scene is played out over the sort of music generally reserved for break-up scenes in romantic weepies. What is this, 'Longford, Actually'? Another set-back in the case for making real lives fiction was presented by the scenes in which Lord Longford meets Ian Brady (played by the excellent Andy Serkis, more famous for his roles as Gollum and King Kong - a fact which seemed oddly hilarious given the circumstances). Here it was not the pressure to distort real life for the purposes of drama that was the problem, so much as the responsibilities to real life getting in the way of what was easily the most interesting dramatic area. Making Ian Brady into a mesmerising Scottish Hannibal Lecter may or may not have served verisimilitude as best it might have done, but it sure as hell made for better television. It was suddenly a great pity that this wasn't just made-up so that there need be no concern about whether what was being shown was accurate, and one could have simply enjoyed the story.

For all these gripes, Longford made a pretty decent fist of presenting the basic facts of the case, alongside a well drawn, if simplistic look at the moral questions, with each side being given a hearing - even if, at all times, it was quite clear where the writer's sympathies lay. The real question being asked was 'Was it worth it?'- should Lord Longford have effectively sacrificed his reputation for a woman who played a significant role in the murder of five children? What makes Longford commendable is that it dares to argue, that given Lord Longford's principles and beliefs, of course it was 'worth it.' Moreover, there isn't even a question that he could have done otherwise in the face of a case where a woman was imprisoned for 36 years - approximately three times the length of the average 'life sentence' served by prisoners - largely as a result of public opinion. Of course there are those who will still argue that just over seven years per child can never be enough - Hindley herself asks in the final scene whether it wouldn't have been better if she and Brady had simply been hanged (the death penalty was abolished while the pair were still on remand). Longford replies that it would have denied him the privilege of having met her - and of having his belief in the need for human compassion tested. It wasn't the greatest bit of writing television has ever seen, but it seemed remarkable enough to be watching such a sentiment so baldly put on a terrestrial British channel.

One suspects that the shrill denunciations or wilful misreadings of the programme by the tabloid press will do nothing to aid the cause of a sober, rational, humane judicial process in Britain, but is it something that the arguments are still being presented.