Under Suspicion: Kate McCann (Ch5)
Rating: 4/5
Set aside the unanswered questions for a moment, the moral judgments and the media frenzy, and let’s start by concentrating on just one aspect of Under Suspicion: Kate McCann.
Laura Bayston — what a performance.
The sheer depth of her grief, the rawness of her anger, all the frustration, disbelief, torment, disillusion and horror that poured out of her for an unrelenting 90 minutes, was awe-inspiring.
Her portrayal of this shell-shocked, bereaved mother, still clinging to hope that her missing three-year-old daughter will be found even as the police accuse her of the child’s murder, was as powerful a piece of television as I’ve ever seen.
It’s all the more extraordinary because Bayston, though a regular on screen with minor roles in thrillers such as Slow Horses and Killing Eve, has not made an impact in a leading role before.
That’s going to change: she will have impressed a lot of people in the industry with this one-off, true-crime dramatisation.
But a lot of people will be less than impressed that the show was made at all. It’s 19 years since little Madeleine McCann vanished from Praia da Luz, Portugal, where her family were on holiday with a group of friends.
Writer Philip Ralph focused entirely on the marathon interview across two days by Portuguese detectives, four months later.
The sheer depth of Laura Bayston’s grief, the rawness of her anger, all the frustration, disbelief, torment, disillusion and horror that poured out of her for an unrelenting 90 minutes, was awe-inspiring, says Christopher Stevens
Laura Bayston (pictured centre) ‘will have impressed a lot of people in the industry with this one-off, true-crime dramatisation’
The script, based on police reports and official statements, assumed that everybody watching would know the context.
There was no preamble, no reconstruction of the events leading up to Madeleine’s disappearance.
The police were depicted as sexist, contemptuous bullies, unmoved by Kate’s agonies and interested only in trapping her into a confession, with techniques close to torture.
The lead interrogator, Inspector Joao Carlos (Hugo Nicolau), never let his smirk slip. Even the translator (Joana Borja) was openly hostile.
Ralph has said he agreed to write the screenplay on condition it would make clear there was ‘no truth’ in accusations that Kate and her husband Gerry were involved in the crime in any way.
But the interview amounted to a catalogue of the circumstantial evidence against them, all dragged back out into the light.
Some of this inevitably remains unexplained, such as the behaviour of the ‘cadaver dogs’ trained to react to the scent of a corpse, or the traces of Maddie’s blood and DNA that police claimed to have found behind a sofa (the McCanns’ legal team hotly disputes this).
Gerry McCann, played by James Robinson, barely appeared and, when he did, he had scarcely a line. The reasoning behind this wasn’t obvious.
A caption at the end appealed for information but made no reference to the leading suspect, German rapist Christian Bruckner.
We were left with the impression that the very idea of Kate McCann’s guilt was unimaginable and obscene – yet also that the Portuguese police had good grounds to suspect it. Very odd.
