Rillington Place review – there are nightmares here, but they are real

Reg Christie advises his wife Ethel to see a doctor about all these hallucinations she’s having. About him leaving the house in the middle of the night and picking up prostitutes at the local pub.

If only she were hallucinating. If only he were just leaving the house in the middle of the night and picking up prostitutes at the local pub.

But Ethel’s Reg is John Reginald Christie, and he lives at 10 Rillington Place. There are nightmares here, but they are real. In last night’s opening episode of Rillington Place (BBC1), the new three-part drama about one of Britain’s most famous serial killers, Reg and Ethel are back together after a long separation (during which Reg has been in and out of prison for various unspecified crimes) and are trying to make a new start. They move from Sheffield to Ladbroke Grove in London and, once war breaks out, he becomes a policeman. He brings jewellery and contraband chocolate to her in their dank and dismal flat, but they do not quite offset his vicious flashes of temper or obscure the suitcase full of awful possibilities under the sofa. He is beaten up by men who think he is having an affair with a colleague’s wife. Wrongly accused again – “Just like at the post office,” says Ethel.

The sheer menace of the thing is extraordinary. The interiors are tiny, dark, oppressive. The script is minimal, elliptical. “Shall I keep you company?” asks Ethel when Reg says he doesn’t want to leave the kitchen and come to bed yet. “No thanks,” he says. “That would defeat the purpose.” Tim Roth as Christie is an ocean of malevolence packed into one small, unassuming frame. And Samantha Morton as Ethel, upon whom the impossible truth slowly, almost imperceptibly dawns, is a world of pain entire. When he – already a murderer – finally lashes out at her, half-strangling her at the sink after she embarrasses him in front of a guest (who will become his second victim), it is almost a relief. We all get some respite when she goes to live with her brother. When she returns to the marital home, under a compulsion to try and normalise things, there is a bloodstain on the mattress and a missing woman’s coat in the hallway. By the time we leave them, it is 1948 and she is watching Christie spy on new arrivals at the lodging house from a peephole in their kitchen door. Options, agency, humanity have been pared away. It is too late for any of them now.

Obviously it is a tale that has been told many times before. But the limning of the manipulation, the entrapment, the complicity without blame, the forced compromises, and the black misery spreading from one man’s evil has surely rarely been better done.

Storyville: The Cult that Stole Children – Inside The Family (BBC4) brought the black misery and evil theme up to date with a documentary about “the Family”, a cult founded in 1960s Melbourne by Anne Hamilton-Byrne and Dr Raynor Johnson. The latter was the master of Queen’s College at the city’s university and gave a veneer of respectability to what really was the exercise of Hamilton-Byrne’s messiah complex. She and her husband Bill acquired, by various illegal adoptions, 28 children whose hair they bleached so they all looked alike, and whom they brainwashed, had beaten almost daily, starved and dosed with LSD (as part of the initiation rite into the sect), amid various other psychological abuses. In the Family’s compound by Lake Eildon, Anne – the daughter of a railway yard worker and a woman with paranoid schizophrenia – was worshipped as a living god and discipline was enforced by “aunties”. “I viewed all adults as extremely dangerous people,” says former Eildon child Anouree.

The compound was raided in 1987 but Hamilton-Byrne’s influence stretched too far into the judiciary and elsewhere for the investigators to build a case against her, and their request for a royal commission went unacknowledged. The Hamilton-Byrnes were eventually extradited from the US. A year-long legal fight ended in them being fined just $5,000 each for making a false declaration.

The detective in charge, Lex de Man, still cries when he remembers it. Ben, another child from Eildon, (his mother was a sect member) remembers the suicides, the children’s lives destroyed and thinks, “You have to look at the effect of [her] power and I have to say it is demonic.” Bill died in 2001. Anne is 95 and living, by all accounts peacefully, with dementia in a care home. Her voice from a radio interview after the trial is the last one we hear. “I don’t understand,” says the children’s living god and enduring devil. “It was love. Just love.”