Longford

Now this was tv for grown ups, with twists of ethical view, complications, and a genuine attempt to see into the heart of a real human being (Longford, rather than Hindley). It was a thoughtful presentation of Lord Longford's involvement with Myra Hindley, from shortly after she was imprisoned to a couple of years or so before they both died.

The bad things about it first: sometimes Longford is drawn in strokes that are really too broad. This is a problem at the start, as the director seems to grapple with the idea that Longford has personal ambition as well as spiritual beliefs; later on this dissolves into much finer portraiture (to extend the worn out metaphor). Ian Brady gets all the best lines, and there is a twenty minute stretch of the film where the eponymous character barely gets a mention and we get involved rather too deeply for my liking in Myra Hindley's personality. But then I suppose, without that, Longford's commitment to the woman makes less sense, or has less pathos.

Jim Broadbent gives a performance of depth, quite unlike the other old man for which he won an Oscar, John Bayley (Iris). His speech mirrors his soul: doubting, uncertain, but determined to press on, inventing conviction as he proceeds. Broadbent's Longford is naive, and knows it, but he sees himself as part of a wider spiritual truth, that of forgiveness; and he makes it his task to secure forgiveness for someone seen as one of the most evil people alive. We don't get very long to try and get to grips with the sense that he has wasted his life after Hindley's reversion in the 1980s - for though he insists that he does not regret anything, the pain of personal betrayal is there - because the narrative skips to 1997 and a more genuine relationship founded in mutual experience and something resembling truth between the two (in the face of death - whether this is the easy option or not I don't know).

This is one of the great subtleties of the film: Longford grapples with a sense of betrayal that he knows is self-absorbed, or self-pitying, and at the same time it is this sense of betrayal that almost pathetically opens his eyes to the real suffering Hindley had caused - which he realises he had not given enough thought to. It retrospectively justifies his actions and faith in her, but allows him to forgive on a more realistic level - ie it is a process, not an act, and is more difficult to do than to say.

On a less portentous note, that bloke who played Goering in the recent BBC2 Nuremburg documentary is at it again, playing Harold Wilson as a cross between a bluff Yorkshireman and scheming southern politician,which made me smile. I do think the bloke out of May to December would have made a better Denis Healey than Willie Whitelaw.

This shows what tv can do when it isn't written or produced by people who think adults are just teenagers with a slightly lower sex drive and shorter attention spans.