So much to answer for

Final part of Granada's See No Evil: The Moors Murders on ITV1 last night. This was a controversial one, in that many still alive remember the missing youngsters and the appalling revelations of 1965, when Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were caught. (Although such connections pale next to recent TV dramatisations of the work of Harold Shipman and Beverly Allitt.) Some would say I have an unnatural interest in real-life killers. I dispute that. A few years ago, prompted by Happy Like Murderers, Gordon Burn's impressionistic account of Fred and Rosemary West, I started obsessively reading non-fiction books about serial killers, through a desire to understand what makes seemingly ordinary people kill, and kill again. The best of the books I've read have taken a forensic, criminological interest in the cases (Brian Masters writes well on this subject, he did Killing For Company about Dennis Nilsen, and The Shrine Of Jeffrey Dahmer), but this angle almost always falls down when dramatised for TV or film, partly because an abusive childhood is too easy to hold up as motivation, and insanity is difficult to portray. For instance, I've read books on Ed Gein, and yet the only direct film about him, Ed Gein, though slightly chilling and commendably restrained, had little to add, and much to subtract from a greater understanding of this disturbed individual. And Ted Bundy, which I had the misfortune to see in Edinburgh the year it came out, was played for cheap thrills and was an insult to the memory of his victims, and to the study of the criminal mind. Great if you want to see screaming girls in bikinis.

One thing the ugly Bundy film didn't attempt to do was psychoanalyse. Although See No Evil is in a completely different league - never lurid, fastidious with the facts, and most importantly done with the blessing of the victim's families (we even see the all-too-familiar photo of Keith Bennett used a prop, in a frame on a sideboard) - it similarly sidesteps any speculation about motive. We don't really know why Brady was such an appalling sexual sadist, or why Hindley aided and abetted him. She subsequently claimed it was through fear of what he would do to her family, but the public at large refuse to believe this because of her peroxide hair. What writer Neil McKay did brilliantly was to concentrate not on the unknowable, cold Brady (Sean Harris, previously seen as Ian Curtis in Twenty Four Hour Party People) or even, despite pre-publicity, the iconic Myra (a stunning Maxine Peake), but on her sister, Maureen (Joanne Frogatt) and her malleable husband David Smith (Michael McNulty, seemingly in his first role). This was its masterstroke. It wasn't about Myra, but about Maureen, who suffered enough in her own life, with her first baby dying before her sister's secret life was revealed, and then she had the stigma of being married to "the third Moors Murderer", because David had witnessed the killing of Edward Evans. David's gullibility was very convincingly done. You believed he would find Brady a thrilling character with his long words and his gunplay and talk of bank jobs. He had nothing. (Or at least, he didn't realise how much he had ie. a loving wife.)

There's no way a responsible broadcaster could show the murders of the children, but See No Evil avoided showing even a suggestion of their abduction. Only the murder of Edward Evans, 17, was shown, and only in brief flashes and bloody aftermath. The justification, dramatically, was easy to explain, if you accept that showing Brady's sadism was a necessary plank in the drama (otherwise - he's a wierdo rather than a monster). I actually doubt the necessity to show these scenes. When Brady casually confessed to Smith that he'd killed "three or four. I haven't finished yet. Teenagers mainly. Any younger, it's too much fuss," it was enough to freeze the blood. Did we need to see him with a bloodied axe in his hand?

This was by and large an intelligent and respectful drama, with wind-battered shots of Saddleworth as a fallback option at every turn (how could they not look dramatic?). The performances were spot-on, and the period was keenly captured in set design and in its washed-out layers of brown and beige - all the better to point up the red of a lipstick or the light in Brady's photographic dark room, eerily recreated when he kills the boy. The shot of Coronation St on a black and white telly was very clever, and daring, since this film sough to make a soap opera out of grisly reality (with one or two Corrie and Brookside faces among the cast). Sean Harris didn't have much to work with, and came across as a pantomime villain at times, but Peake was well-judged, bringing depth to a woman seemingly locked forever in that photograph. Looking at the Manchester Evening News message boards, it seems that people in the area are generally happy with the result, even some who had a connection with Brady and Hindley, so it's a job well done, even if we are no closer to knowing why they did it.

Take me to the Moors . . .