A Year of British Murder, review: a deeply empathetic look at life after murder
O death, where is thy sting? The defiant extract from Corinthians is a popular bromide at funerals.
You didn’t have to look hard for death’s sting in A Year of British Murder (Channel 4). In two hours this palimpsest of grief visited the random stories of 11 of the 768 victims of murder or manslaughter in 2017.
Where other documentaries about murder might forensically reconstruct the crime or the prosecution, or ask hand-wringing questions about public policy, this deeply empathetic film derived its power from a less inquisitive approach. Unobtrusively it watched relatives deal with the irreversible paradigm shift of the sudden absence of a loved one.
The helplessness for some parents was channelled into the proactive pursuit of justice, and taking the camera crew back to the scene of the crime. Others endured paralysis. One parent articulated their bereavement as “a very strange TV episode that I don’t have the script for – I don’t know what I’m meant to say or do”.
Some deaths made the national news, others not. There was no pattern to these vignettes, each assuming its own shapelessness, and yet themes recurred: local councils being iffy about shrines; the symbolic value of a cuddly toy or a tissue imprinted with lipstick. In every case that we heard – women killed at home, young men caught in the wrong place – the killer was male.
The common denominator for those left behind was the isolation, especially upon the death of an only child. And allies would vanish. The son of a popular fast-food restaurateur sat alone in the trial of his killer.
The father of a murdered teenager watched his friends cross the street to avoid him. “They don’t know what to say to me.”
The director Ben Anthony kept himself out of it; we didn’t hear the questions fired from behind the camera. In between each story were bald statistics (“children under the age of one have the highest rate of homicide in Britain”), and artful images of the indifferent year growing old in town and country. Fireworks saw 2017 in at the start, and bookended it at the finish when the first murder of 2018 betokened a fresh cycle.
