UK Edition
Review
A Confession, episode 1, review: A sad, riveting account of murder and misjudgement
Jeff Pope has written so many engrossing true-crime dramas it was all but inevitable that A Confession (ITV) would make for riveting viewing. It didn’t hurt that the ever-sympathetic Martin Freeman was playing the lead role of Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher, the Wiltshire murder investigator who took his duty so seriously that he broke the rules to get at the truth. And paid for it by being effectively drummed out of the force instead of being celebrated for taking a predatory serial killer off the streets.
We began with the dawning horror, in March 2011, of Swindon woman Elaine Pickford (Siobhan Finneran), that her 22-year-old daughter Sian’s failure to come home after a night out might be down to something more sinister than sleeping off a hangover at a friend’s house.
That same pain of realisation crept over the rest of Sian’s family, and her boyfriend Kevin (Charlie Cooper), as their phone calls to everyone she knew came back negative time and again, and their concerns grew deeper. Amazingly, the police took the matter seriously almost from the outset – because the disappearance was so out of character. From the beginning DS Fulcher’s focus was, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the possibility that Sian could still be alive.
As such this first of six parts concentrated on the initial search for Sian, the discovery of a signal placing her phone miles away in the Savernake Forest in the early hours of the morning, the huge social media assisted search, and piecing together her movements in the early hours. Familiar material for a crime drama, but more compelling for being achingly real. Also layered into the drama was the parallel story of another Swindon local Karen Edwards (Imelda Staunton), whose daughter Becky had gone missing eight years previously. The very absence of any obvious connection, yet, made one automatically fear for Becky, too.
The episode closed on the discovery of CCTV footage of what appeared to be Sian getting into a car. Was it perhaps a taxi? Many viewers will have already known the case details, not least for what happened for Fulcher subsequently – a seeming injustice that made headlines around the world. But A Confession was never going to be a drama of tease or surprise. This was simply a terrifically well written and acted, and terribly sad, drama that gripped with the inescapable pain experienced by everyone involved in the case.