There is a proud tradition of British television shining a spotlight on recent history and confronting subjects powerful people would rather remain hidden. That isn’t at all the case in Ireland, where our TV dramatists are merrily uncurious about the sins of the Catholic Church, the crimes of politicians or the blackening of the reputations of those with the temerity to confront the status quo. Given the choice between speaking truth to power or another round of cops and robbers, Irish TV will pick the latter 11 times out of 10.
But it doesn’t have to be that way, as demonstrated by Jeff Pope’s Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes (Disney + from Wednesday) – a scripted interrogation of the July 7th, 2005, terrorist attacks in London and the subsequent shooting of de Menezes, an innocent Brazilian electrician, by trigger-happy police. The first three of the four episodes are horribly riveting, while the final instalment gets bogged down in frustrating red tape as the family of de Menezes are rebuffed at every turn in their seeking of justice.
Above all, it is a maddening indictment of the wickedness of institutional power. It is baldly stated that many senior figures in the London Metropolitan Police were aware from early on that the force had shot an entirely innocent man who had done nothing more suspicious than leave his rented accommodation and take the underground on his way to work. But rather than admit they had got it wrong, they obfuscated. Worse yet, their blank denials were followed by attempts to blacken the victim’s reputation and to punish a whistleblower who had leaked the truth to ITV.
The searing series is also honest about the terrible crimes of the Islamists who claimed 52 lives with their co-ordinated attacks on London public transport and of the copycat extremists who attempted further bombings on July 21st. It was in during the frantic manhunt for these bombers that de Menezes was wrongly identified as a suspect. The scene in which plainclothes officers rush a train and, without warning, shoot him multiple times at point-blank range is distressing – as it should be.
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Pope has previously delved into Jimmy Savile’s evil deeds in the uneven Steve Coogan vehicle The Reckoning, which was unflinching about Savile’s crimes while also enjoying the 1970s nostalgia a bit too conspicuously. There are no such errors of judgment here, and Suspect pulls few punches in depicting the police as unprofessional and reactionary. Edison Alcaide plays de Menezes as a normal person getting on with life; Emily Mortimer is brilliantly brittle as the future police commissioner Cressida Dick. Best of all is Antrim-born Conleth Hill as Ian Blair, the stuffed-shirt head of the police at the time of the killing.
It is a rich irony that an Irishman should play the senior figure in a British police force accused of stitching up an innocent man in the wake of a terrorist attack. If only Irish drama displayed the same willingness to unpack our own scandals and dark secrets – rather than looking down on TV as an idiot box that serves no useful purpose beyond passing the time.
