Criminal Justice
(dir. Otto Bathurst, Luke Watson)
BBC
Excellent thriller running over five consecutive nights on BBC1 (Mon 30 Jun - Fri 4 Jul) that manages to combine elements of prison, police and the legal system to bring a 360 sense of what it's like to be thrust into a murder trial.
Ben Whishaw (Perfume, Nathan Barley) wakes up after a wild night to find there's blood on his hands (literally), panics, and then finds himself the prime suspect in a gory murder.
What's great here is that each episode shows the experience from as many different perspectives and in as many arenas as possible. We get the full-on Oz-like terror of suddenly finding yourself in a British prison, not knowing who to trust or make deals with. There's the confusion of being grilled by the police while your brief is advising you to offer "no comment" to everything, even though you just want to explain yourself. There's the frustration of the arcane legal system, making deals behind the scenes, playing a dangerous game of oneupmanship in court. The tension of his parents who don't quite know what to believe. The desperate loneliness of a suspect who can't even fully trust himself because he simply can't remember what happened.
The top-notch cast includes Pete Postlethwaite, David Harewood, Bill Paterson, Con O'Neill and Lindsay Duncan.
Not sure how it's going to do in this format - five straight nights is probably no more commitment than catching Big Brother every night, but it's worth setting the Sky+ for or iPlayering (is that a verb yet?) it all - you shouldn't miss any of this.
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27th Jun 2008 - Tumblr
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