There have been a number of films about true life killers in recent years – Ed Gein (2000), Dahmer (2002), Ted Bundy (2002), Gacy (2003), Monster (2003), The Hillside Strangler (2004), Zodiac (2007) etc. But See No Evil has an entirely unique method of telling its story that none of these others have. It’s an approach that is almost entirely designed to wring out the slightest interest one might have in finding anything out about the crime. First of all the focus of the series is not on the characters of the two killers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, but rather Hindley’s sister Maureen and brother-in-law David Smith who only feature as supporting characters in the Moors Murders case. There is no effort made to get inside and dramatize the actual events (which is almost certainly what any person sitting down to watch the mini-series’ would have) with the only murder depicted being (very briefly) that of the final victim Edward Evans. In fact, all the actual crimes classified as the Moors Murders are over and done with by the point that the mini-series’ timeframe starts. The first half of the mini-series is almost mundanely dull with nothing other than a few domestics and Sean Harris’s Brady introducing Michael McNulty’s David Smith to his schemes to rob a bank. The series top-bills the moderately well-known and rising Joanne Froggatt – who also appeared in two other British true-crime mini-series Danielle Cable: Eyewitness (2003) and Murder in the Outback (2007) – but the considerable surprise is that she is not cast as the central figure Myra Hindley but the completely unknown figure of her sister. And aside from that, the two lead actresses have been outfitted with two of the most ugly and obvious seeming wigs that the costume department appeared to be able to find.

Things perk up somewhat during the second part where we get to police investigation and the attempts made to break Brady and Hindley’s silence in jail, followed by the trial. Certainly there is no doubt that See No Evil has made an authentic attempt to get all the details of the Moors Murders case down right – as the opening credits note: “Some scenes have been created for the purpose of dramatisation but what follows is based on extensive research.” Only very briefly does the series deal with all the drama that occurs after Myra Hindley’s imprisonment – her extensive pleas of innocence, her efforts to obtain parole, her subsequent admission where one of the bodies was and her conversion to Catholicism, while nothing at all is made of her attempts to escape jail. Although this is presented in a rather false way where the character of Myra’s brother-in-law David Smith improbably turns from the no-hope plonker he has seen throughout most of the series to a mouthpiece suddenly able to pull apart the logic holes in Hindley’s claims. (The mini-series also tends to somewhat whitewash the character of David Smith who in reality had several convictions for violent assault and a reputation as a thug).

There are certainly some pluses to the show. One of these is the presence of Sean Harris as Ian Brady who emerges as a sophisticated fop and plays through an indecipherable accent but charges the show with his presence whenever he is around. Without any doubt, Brady was the dominant figure in the quartet but with the twisted logic that See No Evil seems to operate he is given the least presence of any of the four central cast. The other one who emerges quite well is George Costigan, who was considered a British heartthrob back in the 1980s, and stalks about with a fierce intellectual determination as the police officer determined to make the case.