I have noticed – and I feel it must be true, as life battered the wishful thinking out of me some time ago – the beginnings of a welcome trend in television drama, whereby the suffering of women is taking up more narrative time and space. Without being fetishised, as has most often been the case until recent years, I mean. Instead of using a rape or murder or some other awful violation as a mere plot point – often allowing a jaded detective to shrug off his detachment and enter the sleuthing fray anew – increasingly these horrors are given due weight, their impacts on the victim and their loved ones explored. They are more and more often (from one-offs such as Doing Money to series such as the recent I Am … trilogy) the subject itself. The likes of The Handmaid’s Tale, Big Little Lies and Fleabag get much of the glory and most of the headlines, but it is this more subtle but still seismic shift that offers hope that there has been a change in the attitude towards which stories are worth telling and which are not.
ITV’s new venture, the six-part drama A Confession, is an unexpected addition to this new order. It is, after all, the dramatisation of a true story that would play perfectly as a tale of manly heroism: how Det Supt Steve Fulcher chose to breach police protocol to catch a serial killer and in doing so sacrificed his own career and reputation.
Instead, Jeff Pope has written something so much more shaded and satisfying (and that honours the experiences of those who lived it better than a lesser piece, however well-intentioned, would have). A Confession foregrounds and fleshes out the missing and their families, while Fulcher and his team’s painstaking policework gradually assembles the horror that will soon consume them all.
By the end of the opening episode, we do not know that there has been a murder at all. But we know everything about the ratcheting up of fear and dread in a family when a loved one goes missing. We watch the gradual escalation of efforts to find 22-year-old Sian O’Callaghan, from the moment her mother takes the call from her son telling her that Kevin, Sian’s partner, is worried because she didn’t come home last night, through the ring-round of friends, the calling of hospitals, the official report of a missing person to the police and the eventual searching of CCTV and Savernake Forest. And we see the gradual, remorseless closing down of avenues of possibility and hope. No news from the friends. No news from the hospital. A torn pair of knickers in the forest and her figure walking past a car on CCTV and into oblivion.
And we know about Becky Godden and her family, too, who live with a different order of uncertainty and fear. Becky has gone missing before and her mother, Karen, hopes she will come back for her birthday. She pins her hopes on alleged sightings reported by her grudging ex-husband and visits – with sandwiches – to the local street prostitutes to try to keep any lines of communication open. “She’s a tiny thing,” she tells them. “Only 4ft 11. But she’ll tell you she’s 5ft 3!” All of a mother’s love and desperation in a single line – as written, but also as delivered by Imelda Staunton as Karen. Staunton blends rolling grief with a hint of the fortitude she will show in the months to come as it becomes evident that her daughter has not just run away this time, and as she supports Fulcher after his pivotal decision.
Staunton is part of a stellar cast comprising actors who specialise in bringing ordinary characters to extraordinary life. Martin Freeman plays Fulcher with quiet authority, digging deeper into himself with every twist of the case. Siobhan Finneran as Sian’s mother, Elaine, shows us the uncommon courage of people in uncommon circumstances, as a woman who deals solely in reality without ever flinching from it. (“We’re going to be that terrified family,” she notes, when they are asked to do a public appeal for information.) And Charlie Cooper as Kevin gives a fine performance that channels the role in This Country that made him famous without repeating it.
It is a sad, ruthless dramatisation of ruthlessly sad events that asks – especially in later episodes – profound questions about how we want to – and how we should – obtain justice for the murdered and missing. But they have their presence, too, and this is how it surely should be.