It’s hard to imagine better television – more dignified, more noticing – than The Sixth Commandment, which began last week on BBC1.
Mostly, I loathe true crime. To make entertainment of the horrifying acts of a Dennis Nilsen or a Jeffrey Dahmer isn’t just gratuitously exploitative; it can only bring more pain to those who loved the men they killed.
But this drama about Peter Farquhar, a retired schoolteacher who was murdered in 2015 by Benjamin Field, a man about 40 years his junior, is of a different order altogether. More interested in Field’s victims than in his crimes – he also preyed on Farquhar’s elderly neighbour, Ann Moore-Martin – its screenwriter, Sarah Phelps, attends fully to the loneliness of old age, and by doing so, asks difficult questions of us all.
But there’s something else. In a series replete with brilliant actors – Anne Reid and Éanna Hardwicke are astonishing as Moore-Martin and Field – Timothy Spall’s turn as Farquhar, a closeted gay man, stands out, not so much a performance as an inhabitation. It is extraordinary: beautiful, and moving. Here, you think, is an actor who can do just about anything, his empathy a kind of skeleton key, there to unlock even the most complicated human being.
Will this role, for which he’s surely destined to win awards, drive a decisive nail into the coffin of the fashionable conviction that actors should only be cast as characters whose sexuality matches their own? I hope fervently that it will.
Every line Spall speaks stands as a reminder that finding an affinity with another person, however different they may be from yourself, is what both acting, and leading a decent life, are all about.
Potshots at Gove
In York for the weekend, I visit the city’s art gallery to see Wall of Women, a new display whose title is self-explanatory (of 675 potters in the collection of its Centre for Ceramic Art, 40% are female). There’s a lot to look at, and all of it great, but the work that speaks most loudly to me on the day is Karen Thompson’s GOVESHY, a piece based on a traditional coconut shy, with Wedgwood-blue busts of the MP Michael Gove where the hairy fruit would usually be.
I’ve been hard at work on a piece about what the Tories have done to culture in Britain, and it’s briefly therapeutic to see one of those complicit in so much destruction reduced to mere sherds himself.
Seaside suspense
Scientifically speaking, 30% of the joy of a holiday lies in its anticipation. The better to stoke this, I’ve spent weeks honing – curating, you might say – the pile of books I’ll take with me to France, and now I’m finally there.
This year’s list has a mid-century theme, and will comprise: Faber’s reissue of Uncle Paul by Celia Fremlin, a tale of seaside suspense that was first published in 1959 (Fremlin may be the nearest thing Britain has to Patricia Highsmith); Daunt’s new edition of Pamela Frankau’s coming-of-age novel, A Wreath for the Enemy, which is set in a Riviera hotel and originally came out in 1954 (the same year as Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, a book I pray it resembles); and A Different Sound, a collection of short stories by post-war women writers edited by Lucy Scholes (among them my beloved Penelope Mortimer and Elizabeth Taylor).
I don’t charge for this service, but add to these a contemporary masculine wild card – Mark O’Connell’s investigation into the mind of a murderer, A Thread of Violence – and I believe that your satisfaction, like mine, is guaranteed.
• Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
