Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
No matter where you look on television or in the book stalls and shops of Britain, there is always the chance you will come across a programme, factual case or long line of fiction dedicated to the murder. The British seem obsessed with it, so much so that no Sunday night would be the same without one of Agatha Christie’s plots giving the viewer a challenge to find the killer before the spinster or the Belgian and no trip to a book shop would feel the same without picking up the latest crime thriller. Dr. Lucy Worsley’s latest historical series delves into the mind set of our island race’s preoccupation with the despicable act and looks at some cases of the deed in A Very British Murder.
Taking the viewer back to the time of the Ratcliff Highway murders at the very start of the 19th Century, Dr. Lucy Worsley showed the rife speculation that gained pace in a changing Britain as the word of new media took hold on the public consciousness. The murders became in essence the first celebrity murders of their age as cheap papers went over every detail to a more and more insatiable readership.
The two gruesome murders captured the imagination of a new type of reader and from there the new obsession was born.
As an historian of incredible repute, Dr. Lucy Worsley certainly throws herself into her programmes and there can be faulting her passion for the subject she presents, no matter the angle or theme; she gives her upmost to show that history is interesting, tangible and full of vigour, not the type of subject that many growing up in a certain era of pre and post war Britain would be used to. Whilst perhaps glossing over some of the more gruesome aspects of murder, the programme was captivating in a way that would have made sense to those that lived in 19th Century Britain as to those who the idea of murder and crime has become a seemingly daily diet 200 years later.
Eminently watchable, Dr. Worsley’s style of presenting is to be admired and enthralling as she makes history something to treasure and not held at arms’ distance.
Ian D. Hall