Human cost of age, deception and murder most horrid

The Sixth Commandment is the latest respectfully made story of not only murder but the way that age so often defines and diminishes people.

Liz Zettl (Sheila Hancock) and Martyn Smith (Conor Macneil) in The Sixth Commandment

Dramas about real-life murders remain highly popular, regardless of the often-asked questions about the ethics of delving into shocking stories of those who suffered, while their grieving relatives are still alive. Surely, many ask, the emotional security of these people, real-life victims, shouldn’t be ignored or exploited, often without their consent? And what about true-crime dramas which appropriate the stories of others, particularly when they won’t (or can’t) participate in the new telling of it.

Recently though, we’ve seen several ethically based dramas from the UK, which respect the grief, regret and sometimes guilt, not of murderers, but of those left behind. Dramas such as The Pembrokeshire Murders and The Steeltown Murders created with the consent and inclusion of families of the victims, ensuring the depiction of crimes are as respectful as possible. And no less absorbing.

The Sixth Commandment from the BBC is the latest beautifully, and respectfully made series. It’s a story of not only murder but the way that age so often defines and diminishes people, passing without a glance from passers-by, unwanted outsiders in society withdrawing into isolation.

It tells not only how a calculating, deceiving young man tricked and inveigled his way into the spotlight, manipulating people as if it were a game, but also the human cost of his deception.

The four-part series is inspired by the critically acclaimed and BAFTA nominated documentary Catching A Killer: A Diary From The Grave. And The Sixth Commandment tells the story of how the meeting of an inspirational teacher, Peter Farquhar, played with mesmerising empathy by Timothy Spall, and a charismatic young student, Ben Field, a totally convincing Éanna Hardwicke, bonded over their love of books and involvement with the Church of England. Or did they?

Several months after Field moved into Farquhar’s three-bedroom detached cottage in the quiet village of Maids Moreton, in Buckinghamshire, he was dead.

In acts of malicious calculation and premeditation, his younger boyfriend had plied him with gin, whisky, poteen, bioethanol, hallucinogen 2C-B lorazepam, flurazepam, plus others, to felicitate a strictly planned program of mental torture. Field received his victim’s estate, a large sum of money and a share of Farquhar’s home.

Then he turned his attention to Farquhar’s neighbour, a retired school principal, 79-year-old Anne Moore-Martin.

The series is a Wild Mercury and True Vision Production and is directed by Saul Dibb (The Salisbury Poisonings), also an executive producer. It’s written by Sara Phelps, responsible for those enthralling adaptations of Agatha Christie novels for the BBC. In those shows she pulled the books apart, dispersed the fragments only to put them back together with her own additions, abandoning, she argues, little of Christie’s intent. And what Phelps delivered was a piece of enthralling psychological suspense in which portraits of guilt and innocence, self-righteousness, and self-doubt, were mixed with the baroque ingenuity of the drawing room mystery.

Her writing here is just as forensic, sombre, chilling, beautifully detailed and emotionally empathetic. From the start Phelps, her director and her producers worked closely with the families of Peter Farquhar and Ann Moore-Martin, determined to illuminate their experiences as victims and most of all, honour their lives.

Phelps was instantly taken with the fairytale quality of the tragic story. “It’s about an English village into which walks somebody who is entirely predatory but who quickly becomes absorbed into the life of the village – the university, the church, and he was so good at camouflage that nobody saw the wolf’s clothing,” she says in an interview on the BBC’s Media site.

“It felt like one of those Hans Christian Andersen or The Brothers Grimm fairy tales which everybody thinks are really cute but they’re not – they’re terrifying. I felt that there was something quintessentially English in this dark, dark fairytale in the sense that you could live in this ordinary place, where everybody knows you, you’re surrounded by good neighbours, and yet you could slowly die in front of them, and nobody would know what was happening or say anything.”

That was the story she wrote she says, building on that tension between public respectability and private yearning, “a sexual desire that you can’t speak about that’s at war with your religious beliefs. All those elements drew me to the project.”

It’s often hard to separate the two perspectives that drama-documentary combines, some amount of problematic artifice always necessary in the development of the narrative to fill in the gaps. And Phelps makes this clear at the start informing us in a disclaimer that while this is a true story based on extensive research, interviews and published accounts, that some scenes have been created for the purposes of dramatisation.

And it starts like a fairytale too, superbly realised by Dibb, one of the most affecting first episodes we have seen this year. (The structure is in four acts, first Farquhar’s story; after he dies, Ann Moore-Martin’s; then the police, and then the lawyers and the courtroom.)

As we begin, the camera rather haphazardly wanders into the village of Maids Moreton, almost like an intruder sizing up the place, looking for opportunity.

“Can you hear me?” a voice asks. “Good, because if I’m going to speak, I want you to listen.” It’s the quietly coercive voice of Ben Fields. He talks of the codes and principles devout Christians practise, “believers in God’s holy word”. There’s something sententious, judgmental, about this narration, the voice of a superior being. “I want us to consider the commandments; now I’m thinking of one specifically. Can anyone guess which one? It rhymes with Thou shall not … thrill.”

We are introduced to Peter Farquhar as he prepares for his day, on his way to his farewell ceremony, where he addresses his former school with his customary scholarship and wit.

He’s obviously popular but that night, alone as usual, he looks though pictures of fit-looking men in shorts on his computer. Later when he meets his confessor, Andrew (Jonathan Slinger), he admits it’s a pathetic habit, that he’s a man of hidden, repressed desires. “Even my deviance, is pathetic,” he says. “Looking, craving; I should be punished, such a squalid witness for Christ.”

His vulnerabilities are openly displayed, the human need for intimacy, the terror of becoming helpless, for the love of another person, whatever their age. He’s a man living in self-loathing and grief, even if his face to the world is that of a good man.

Then, while lecturing in his class, a young man named Ben Field walks in and quickly impressed the elderly teacher with his knowledge and sense of vocation. (“I’m looking for a church to call home,” he says.) Before long, Ben proposes to Peter, and the elderly teacher was happier than he’d ever been.

A poignant scene, superbly acted by Spall, both emotionally affecting and oddly ominous, shows them sharing a bed for the first time. “I’ve never had a double bed before in my whole life,” Farquhar says. “I don’t want sex. I just want to be held.”

But soon, the troubles, and the gaslighting, start, Farquar beginning to question his sanity and his powers of reasoning.

It’s often hard to separate the two perspectives that drama-documentary combines – some amount of problematic artifice is always necessary in the development of the narrative to fill in the gaps. And Phelps and Dibbs make this clear at the start, informing us in a disclaimer that while this is a true story based on extensive research, interviews and published accounts, “Some scenes have been added for dramatic perspective.”

But they let this powerful, tragic story largely speak for itself. Ramping it up purely for dramatic effect would have been unnecessary as well as morally wrong, though in other hands it’s easy to see just how titillating it might have become.

Dibbs’s direction is faultless. He says he took as his reference the brilliant psychological thriller Gaslight from 1940 and its overwhelming sense of dread.

“They don’t mess about – the first shot is of a flickering candle on the wall of a house, so you understand immediately that something’s up,” he says.

“So, it was important for me that the first thing you see is Peter putting the kettle on – throughout the series there’s a continual sense of this very English thing – what better way to carry poison into the hearts of Middle England than through cups of tea. It builds a kind of tension. More and more cups of tea are drunk and then they start to be made by Field.”

It’s a beguiling, if harrowing, production, Dibbs and Phelps quietly but inexorably developing layers of horror in the story of Peter Farquhar, the intensity of suffering superbly conveyed by Spall. It’s hard to imagine a better memorial to the good, and truly good they were, Peter Farquhar and Ann Moore-Martin.

The Sixth Commandment is streaming on Foxtel.