Once in a while a drama gets under the skin so deeply it stays with you. No, in you. Frame after searing frame. The Sixth Commandment, written by Sarah Phelps and directed by Saul Dibb, was the most gut-wrenching example of the year. Perhaps the decade. In four harrowing, nigh-on unbearable episodes it took a genre often prurient, insensitive and morally dubious, and gracefully upended it. The Sixth Commandment was true crime that focused on the victims, though even to use that word feels like a thoughtless reduction. What it gave was a dignity rarely afforded, neither on screen nor in life, to people whose lives are destroyed by crime.
Those people, primarily, were Peter Farquhar (Timothy Spall), a retired Stowe schoolmaster, and his neighbour Ann Moore-Martin (Anne Reid), a retired headteacher. One after the other, in 2014 and 2017, they were befriended by a young churchwarden, Ben Field (Éanna Hardwicke), who inveigled himself into their lives. He read bible verses with them. Helped in the garden. Cooked for them. Moved in. Then he told them he was in love with them. After they had changed their wills in his favour, Ben proceeded to gaslight, humiliate, mentally torture and poison them. He murdered Peter, and attempted to murder Ann. After a Thames Valley police investigation and criminal trial in 2019, Field was sentenced to life imprisonment.
