In the past couple of years, ITV’s commitment to adapting any British true-crime story has taken them from the sombre gravity of Stephen, about murdered schoolboy Stephen Lawrence, and Des, a look at the capture of serial killer Dennis Nilsen, to the more eccentric: Hatton Garden, about a gang of old-timers robbing London’s diamond district, and their hit show, Quiz, the tale of the coughing major on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Where will this creative obsession end? A horrifying feature-length reconstruction of the life of the bloke who shoved a flare in his arse at the Euros final? A forensic six-part series about the origins of the cat bin lady?!
The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe is the latest instalment in ITV’s campaign to dramatise every crime committed in the United Kingdom, however quotidian. It tells the story of John and Anne Darwin, played by top TV talents Eddie Marsan and Monica Dolan, a Hartlepool couple who made headlines through the 2000s after John faked his death in a canoeing accident. John is a dreamer, a man who, in the words of his wife (who narrates proceedings throughout), would “buy a Range Rover he couldn’t afford, and then spend £3,000 on a personalised number plate; all before we’d got the gas connected”. But those aspirations land him in hot water – and then the very cold water of the North Sea – as the debts mount up and his options dwindle.
