The early 1970s are remembered as a blur of shag carpet, brown wallpaper and men in smoke-filled pubs being sexist. There is some truth in this. Yet the caricature has also been hammed up by popular culture. One of the guilty parties is the BBC series Life on Mars, which celebrated the period as a gloomy journey in the back of a clapped-out Ford Capri.
Now the Life on Mars star Philip “Gene Hunt” Glenister is back – but for a very different look at the decade the colour spectrum forgot. He plays a careworn copper, DCI Paul Bethell, in Steeltown Murders (BBC One, Monday, 9pm), a riveting true-crime drama that chronicles the hunt for a serial killer in south Wales across 30 years.
We are introduced to Bethell in the early 2000s. A new century has dawned, and advances in DNA have made it possible to revisit unsolved crimes. Among the cold cases reopened is the killing in 1973 of two Swansea teenagers, Geraldine Hughes and Pauline Floyd.
Their murderer – “the Saturday Night Strangler” – was never caught. At the time a young Bethell (Scott Arthur) was convinced their deaths were linked to the assault and killing of another young woman, Sandra Newton. Three decades on, he can finally put that theory to the test and, he hopes, achieve justice for the victims.
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True crime is a murky genre: it’s easy to stray into exploitative storytelling. Just look at what it has done to podcasting or Netflix. But Ed Whitmore, Steeltown Murders’ writer, adroitly walks the line between entertaining the viewer and respecting the victims, as he previously did with Manhunt, about the murder in London of the French student Amélie Delagrange, and Rillington Place, about the killer John Christie.
He is careful not to lay on the weren’t-the-1970s-rubbish? schlock too heavily. In flashbacks to 1973 we hear Mott the Hoople on the radio and are invited to bask in the majesty of the younger Bethell’s sideburns. Yet the thing that cuts through is the agony inflicted on the family of the victims – Lily Allen’s father, Keith, plays a grieving dad in a later episode – and of Bethell’s quiet resolve to one day track down the killer.
By all means enjoy the 1970s anti-nostalgia. But what Steeltown Murders is really about is the long hunt for justice and the importance of technological advances – in this case DNA science – in making the world a better place.
