The Nobody Zone: Interview with an Irish Serial Killer (RTÉ One, Monday, 9.35pm) is a strange film – not pulpy enough to qualify as true crime and arriving with a sheen of subterranean weirdness that makes it feel like RTÉ's take on David Lynch. Some of that eccentricity comes from the decision to tell the story from front-to-back rather than chronologically: there’s an assumption at the outset that we are at least vaguely familiar with the case of Kieran Patrick Kelly, an Irishman in 1980s London suspected of a number of murders. If the story is new to you, good luck – you’re on your own.
A large number of viewers will, however, be already up to speed, having listened to the 2020 RTÉ podcast, The Nobody Zone. The tale told by this documentary is more or less the same – of how, in 1983, a down-on-his-luck Irish labourer in the UK confessed to a series of killings going back to the late 1950s, when he claimed to have pushed a friend under a speeding underground train.
Kelly had spent decades in and out of employment and battling alcoholism. When he was arrested by London police on suspicion of jewellery theft, he murdered another man in his police cell. That act of violence unleashed something: he immediately confessed to a string of earlier murders. How many were real or imagined is hard to say. Kelly seems to have delighted in leading the police on a merry dance – and to relish the power he felt his confession gave him over the authorities.
The interviews were recorded, and episode one of this two-part documentary intersperses the voice of the real Kelly with a hokey re-enactment by Ned Dennehy (who, confusingly, also plays a hired killer in the new Disney+ heist series, Culprits).
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Kelly claimed to have killed dozens of people. In 2015, a London detective, Geoff Platt, published a book in which he stated Kelly may have murdered as many as 31 people – which would make him Britain’s most prolific serial killer. However, in 2019′s The Secret Serial Killer: The True Story of Kieran Kelly, author Robert Mulhern says the figure is closer to five or six.
There is a vogue in crime television to focus on the victims rather than the killers. The Nobody Zone doesn’t have time for that and displays a rather old-fashioned fascination with Kelly, who is presented as an arch-manipulator. That he may have just been a violent, rambling drunk is not seriously considered.
For the cops, the mission was to keep him talking. Much of what he was saying might have been fantasy – one of his claims was that he killed a man by forcing whiskey down his throat. Still, it was crucial for the police that Kelly continue to speak in the hope he might implicate himself.
“The longer you can keep talking, the more chance he can say something,” says Ian Brown, one of the detectives who grilled Kelly (we hear Brown challenge Kelly during one of the many ghoulish monologues captured on tape)
The Nobody Zone provides an incomplete portrait of Kelly. He was a hard worker and a Jekyll and Hyde figure. One ex-acquaintance, builder Brian Sliman, recalled how Kelly could deliver a perfect impersonation of Michael O’Hehir commenting on a GAA game. “He could commentate on a football match as if he was there – that was his party piece.”
Ultimately, the Nobody Zone falls down in not painting a broader picture of Kelly. We know what happened in that police interrogation room in 1983 (twice over, in the case of those familiar with the podcast). But there isn’t enough about life in London for Irish people who had gone there in the 1950s to work on the building sites and who, by the 1980s, were slipping between the cracks. Poverty and alcoholism appeared to have been rife. What about violence?
Kelly claimed to have pushed his victims to a horrible end on the underground. Were such crimes widespread? It feels unlikely that he is the only person to have ever shoved someone to their death – but The Nobody Zone fails to give us that crucial extra context.
The result is a film that was probably better off staying as a podcast. This new pass at the story has nothing to add.
