Although
the three series The Fall is about
the capture of a brutal serial killer of young women in Northern Ireland as the
series reached its conclusion it emerges that the killer had been placed in
children’s home where he had been selected to be sexually abuse every day for
year until another victim was selected and in a situation where the boys had to
strip at assembly masturbate themselves and the staff. I became interested in
the series only recently when I recognised that the lead female role was being
played by Gillian Anderson who made her name in the over 200-episode TV series
the X Files along with David Duchoveny and which led to one off cinema films
and a short season (11) resurrection 14 years later of six episodes earlier
this year.
Gillian
plays an investigative senior police office heading a special task force on the
track of Paul Spector played by Jamie
Dorman and from the episodes viewed there is an emotional and psychological
intensity which is powerful and extraordinary in the two lead performances and also the head of
special psychiatric unit in which the killer is placed in very secure condition
in order to establish if he is faking
short term amnesia allegedly caused by being shot when in police Northern
Ireland custody and being transferred. The series is very disturbing and not
for those likely to be triggered by scenes of great physical violence. Jamie
Dorman is brilliant at communicate a man who is adored by his daughter supported
by his wife, able to attract the obsessional devotion of a teenage girl who
assaults a young woman claiming to be in a relationship with Spector, who is
also able to gain sympathetic attentions from medical and nursing staff who
save his life hospital, and sympathetic attention for a female lawyer assisting
someone who revels in the opportunity to represent the killer and beat the
state. For her persistence in proving he is faking his memory loss he made to inflict
physical pain and damage on the senior police woman, kills someone at the
secure unit who he manipulates to cause a riot so he can almost kill the
psychiatrist in charge who has also penetrated his psychological defences.
Spector can cheat years of imprisonment, psychological probing and having to
face the reality of himself by committing suicide.
There
is no single response in terms of later behaviour by those who have been sexual
and physical abuse in childhood with Spector at one end of the spectrum. To be
able to get around the alleged memory loss, the team are provided with
information about a crime he has committee several years previously and for which
someone has confessed and imprisoned. The explanation for this extraordinary behaviour
is that the individual in question had been with Spector in the home and when
Spector was asked to select the next victim to replace himself he had walked passed
and selected another, although the boy new he was the likely target. He owed
Spector in a way only victims who have been in similar situations can
understand and akin to those in the Nazi concentration camps who could survive
by assisting in some off the chores involved in the camp which included harvesting
hair, gold teeth, spectacles. and anything of value from the prisoners before
their extermination.
In
complete contrast, I consider very funny in a healthy kind of way, the Comedy Series
Damned set in the Children’s Services Department of the fictional Elm Health
Council with Jo Brand and Alan Davies among others coping with the realities of
their own lives. Jo’s mother has psychotic severe recent memory loss, there is
a receptionist straight out of the Vicar of Dibley, a questionable acting
senior and a team head under constant pressure from them above.
Damned is shown well after the watershed at
10pm which is welcomed and deliberate because of the understanding Jo has about
triggering. Jo Brand is the daughter of
a social worker and she studied for a combined social science degree with
mental health nursing and practiced for ten years before becoming a stand-up
comedienne, writer and starring in TV shows, a personality and a minor national
institution for her acerbic put downs of those who take themselves too seriously
in terms of attempting to project an only one sided presentation of themselves.
Her republican views and open support for the Labour Party means she is
unlikely to graduate into a major institutional figure. She visited South
Shields before David Miliband decided to leave Parliament and the UK to give
his annual” lecture” to Party members.
She
is perfectly partnered in the series which ends this evening (November1st) by
her co-writer Mokwena Banks and Alan Davies, another with stand-up comedy
experience, best known for his role as Jonathan Creek and a permanent member of
the QI team. I was reminded that their
strength is acting as mirrors to funny side of human frailty while watching a
splendid TV biography of the Mr Stand-up himself the unique and brilliant Peter
Kay, another who writes, plays and directs his work and continues to live in
the lace(Bolton) where he was born with his family.
However,
the short series of damned is unlikely to change the need for a radical think
again about how we provide child protection on behalf of the state but is does
gently draw attention to the dangers of overreaction and the limitation of the
case conference with its inherent problem of bring together people with a range
of abilities, understanding and training and whose everyday focus is very
different and at times incompatible. In
one episode, a teenage girl admits to having made up accusations against a
teacher for media cash while the police want to engage the anti-terrorist squad
when girls disappeared and it is the Vicar of Dibley innocent who works out the
that the text of a note found t at the home of one of the girls is that of a
current song of band and where the girls are identified from CCTV waiting to
get into a concert after Alan Davies uses the Internet. There
is a splendid last series episode with a wonderful outburst at the impact of a
hundred George Osbornes on the ability of the department to cope with all the demands
being made. The boss scares a teacher at the son’s school who texts him
inappropriately and the mother forgets where she puts down her child in the
supermarket from tiredness is given a warning (being middle class).
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