This article was originally published in The Courier on 24 November 2018.
THE INTERROGATION OF
TONY MARTIN: Sunday,
Channel 4
DAVID CASSIDY: THE
LAST SESSION: Friday,
BBC Four
On
the night of 20 August 1999, farmer Tony Martin shot and killed teenage burglar
Fred Barras. Martin always claimed he acted in self-defence, despite the intruder being unarmed. Martin shot Barras in the back. He eventually served three years
of a life sentence, after the original murder charge was reduced to
manslaughter.
This
case became a political cause celebre. Right-wingers were generally supportive
of Martin’s right to protect his property. People capable of more nuanced
thought patterns were dismayed by the notion of a binary society in which
violent vigilante justice is considered acceptable.
Was
Tony Martin a victim? Of crime, certainly. Were his actions justified?
Absolutely not. However, what do we really know about him? The claustrophobic
factual drama, THE INTERROGATION OF
TONY MARTIN, sought to reveal more about this infamous figure via verbatim
transcripts of his police interviews.
Largely
set within the confines of an interrogation room, it began on the day after the
crime took place. Martin (a mesmerising performance from Steve Pemberton)
initially came across as a lonely, frightened, confused and vulnerable man
experiencing a waking nightmare. He seemed quite sympathetic.
One
of Pemberton’s greatest gifts is his unerring ability to imbue ostensibly
off-putting characters with traces of ambiguity and pathos.
Martin
tried to explain his fearful personality – in the words of his mother, “My son
is very highly strung and has a tendency to worry about things.” – by
tentatively discussing the sexual abuse he’d suffered as a child. Since then
he’d shut himself off from the world in a remote farmhouse shrouded in
darkness.
He
claimed he’d been burgled several times, but eventually stopped going to the
police as he felt he wasn’t being taken seriously. He slept every night, fully
clothed, with an illegally-owned shotgun under his bed.
As
the drama progressed, my initial impression of Martin changed. His account of
that night was vague and contradictory. He came across as arrogant and blasé.
When the police eventually picked his slippery story apart, he seemed genuinely
astonished that he’d been charged with murder.
To
this day, he maintains that he did nothing wrong. How do we know this? The man
himself appeared in a chilling coda, during which he returned to the farm for
the first time in 19 years. Unrepentant, he said he’d do the same thing again
without hesitation. Does he regret killing Barras? Not in the slightest. Tony
Martin isn’t a well man. He needs help.
This
discomfiting drama won’t have changed anyone’s mind about Martin’s crime,
but it did deliver some insight into his damaged psyche.
A
raw profile of a man nearing the end of his life, DAVID CASSIDY: THE LAST SESSION followed the reluctant teeny-bop
idol as he struggled with dementia and other serious health issues.
With
admirable candour, the frail Cassidy invited a documentary crew to record his
struggles. He reflected on a life during which he battled with alcoholism for
many years, while recording what would prove to be his final tracks - poignant pre-rock tributes to a troubled showbiz father with whom he had a strained relationship.
The
programme also featured rare extracts from an in-depth audio interview he taped
at the height of his fame in 1976. Even at that age, he came across as an
intelligent and introspective man.
This
was the tragic saga of a manufactured idol, a typecast fantasy construct,
battling with the cruel vicissitudes of real life. It was terribly sad, but
never voyeuristic or exploitative. A sensitive tribute.
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