Darlo Dean, texting in to today’s Daily Star, asks the paper to show a picture of Fiona Bruce, commenting: "Did anyone else see how cracking her legs were on Crimewatch?"
The paper obliged, but I have to admit it wasn’t Fiona’s legs which struck me during Crimewatch on Monday – I was more bothered about the way it’s veering from factual, public-service offering to crime-fuelled docu-drama.
Take the case of a 16-year-old who was raped. Her attacker hasn’t been caught so it had made the cut for Crimewatch. A reconstruction was needed, to help jog peoples’ memories. But surely the point of that is jog memories of the bits people might have seen?
So was it really necessary to show the bit after he’d dragged her through a bush and pushed her to the ground? The bit where he stopped kissing her face and started working down her body? What purpose did that serve in the crime-solving sphere? Especially when the CCTV footage they had of the suspect must have spent no more than five seconds on the telly.
And then we moved on to a builder who was shot several times at home. We didn’t just hear the gun go off. We saw the bit inside the house, the bit where he lurched around his hall and collapsed, dying. We saw that several times. In slow motion and from different angles. I thought for a second Alan Hansen would appear and do a bit of analaysis on what the victim had done wrong.
Seeing as only the victim and the killer know exactly what happened that night, it’s fair to say the dramatic licence was being pushed to the limit.
Then there’s Rav - who the BBC is proud to boast is the programme’s first English/Mauritian presenter – the replacement for Nick Ross. Now I know Nick Ross’s ‘don’t have nightmares’ line was a bit corny, but at least it brought with it an air of responsibility. Handsome Rav, or ‘bloody sexy’ as my girlfriend put it, is a copper, and although he talks a good crime, he does it in rather a copper-like manner.
In a nutshell, it’s all wrong. Crimewatch is meant to help solve crime, not provide cheap pseudo-drama reconstructions and easy-on-the-eye candy for those who are counting down the hours to the next Hollyoaks repeat.
And with so little information given over in the rape case, I suspect the only way they’ll catch the ‘maybe foreign’ suspect is if he watched it and rang in to say ‘it didn’t happen like that.’
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