casting Sheridan Smith in the main role<\/a>. Ordinary women in extraordinary circumstances are what she does, and few do it better. Here, she elevates a workaday script that dares not take too many\u00a0liberties,\u00a0lest it be seen to dishonour the story, and makes it genuinely moving. She gets help from the\u00a0strong cast that is \u2013 again, as\u00a0ever \u2013 assembled round her.<\/p>\nSpecial mention must go to the chilling ordinariness Jack James Ryan brings to the part of the murderous Billy Dunlop, and to Daniel York Loh as Ann\u2019s husband and Julie\u2019s father, Charlie Ming, a man at first too broken to support his wife and devoid of her crusading zeal, but who digs deep to try to bring her what she needs to survive.<\/p>\n
For all its formulaic structure and the traditional beats it is careful to hit (winsome child asking poignant questions about mummy, bureaucratic nightmares and class snobbery as the doughty nurse faces down the British establishment), I Fought the Law does an unusually good job of sympathising with, rather than condemning, the half\u00a0of the partnership to whom fighting for justice does not\u00a0come naturally. Charlie would probably \u2013 like, I\u00a0suspect, most of us \u2013 prefer to\u00a0crawl into a ditch and pray for some kind of impossible peace. In its way, his quieter journey is as impressive as Ann\u2019s, and the drama takes the trouble to\u00a0show us how.<\/p>\n
The police spent the initial period of Julie\u2019s disappearance insisting that the mother of one, who saw or spoke to her mother at least once a day, must have decided to leave her son, Kevin, behind and move to London without telling anyone when she separated from her husband. After relentless pressure to investigate from Ann, a forensics\u00a0team was sent to examine the house. After five days, they had found nothing to indicate foul play. Eighty days after Julie\u2019s disappearance, Ann was trying\u00a0to trace a bad smell in\u00a0her daughter\u2019s bathroom and found\u00a0her body under\u00a0the\u00a0bath.<\/p>\n
The delay by the police in investigating and finding Julie \u2013 leaving aside the unfathomable suffering it would have saved her mother \u2013 meant that the evidence the jury heard in court about the cause of death, and other details potentially connecting Dunlop to the killing, was weaker than it\u00a0should have been. That almost certainly contributed\u00a0to the two hung juries and his resulting compulsory acquittal. He was then heard in local pubs\u00a0bragging about committing the murder, safe in the knowledge that he\u00a0could not be\u00a0tried again. Or\u00a0so,\u00a0of course, he\u00a0thought.<\/p>\n
The overturning of the archaic double jeopardy law is not a pyrrhic one for the family \u2013 it gets the violent Dunlop off the streets and will help to protect other bereaved people suffering as the Mings did. But\u00a0we are aware of how life changed for them for ever:\u00a0that their daughter (and Kevin\u2019s mother) will never be\u00a0restored to them because one man felt like killing her, could and\u00a0did. So it goes.<\/p>\n
I Fought the Law aired on ITV1 and is available on ITVX<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Is there any comfort to be had in knowing that police incompetence is not a new phenomenon? Not…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":109942,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[64,63,134,427],"class_list":{"0":"post-109941","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109941\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/109942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}