Nilsen Schmilsen:Des

"I didn't do a stock check" - Dennis 'Des' Nilsen when asked how many dead bodies he had stored under his floorboards.

Many of us share a macabre fascination with serial killers. Often seemingly mundane people in ordinary jobs who, away from the eyes of others, commit crimes so transgressive and so horrific they're barely imaginable. It's almost a form of role play in which we get to live out some of our darker fantasies and fascinations through the likes of Fred West or Peter Sutcliffe but these characters, and others like The Moors Murderers and Harold Shipman, aren't fictional horror creations. They're real, they lived among us, and, almost certainly, many more still do.

Dennis Nilsen (known to his friends as Des) was a particularly bizarre case. A former Metropolitan Police Officer and ex-cook for the Queen's Royal Guard who, during his time living in Melrose Avenue in Cricklewood and Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill (both north London), lured at least twelve men back to his flat, plied them with booze, strangled them, and then sat them up on his sofa to watch television with him and slept next to them in his bed before chopping their bodies up and flushing the bones down the toilet.

Why he did it was, and still is, far less clear? A severe personality disorder is obvious but many of us have such things and don't even get close to being a serial killer. Nilsen appeared to enjoy reasonably cordial relations with his colleagues in the Jobcentre at Kentish Town and his rare temper tantrums didn't seem exceptional. He liked a drink but no more than many others and he struggled to make romantic connections but that, as I can report from first hand experience, hardly makes him a unique case in the big city.

ITV's recent three parter Des, with David Tennant utterly dominating the screen in the title role, sought not to show the murders themselves (as nobody except Nilsen knew exactly what happened and he is soon proved to be an unreliable narrator) but to try to comprehend why Nilsen carried them out and, perhaps even more so, how in 1980s London people could just go missing and nothing happen.

The London of Margaret Thatcher's 1980s was, to some extent, still the London of the 1970s but just with even more homelessness. I visited often and coming in to Waterloo station from Basingstoke and crossing the river to the West End one of the first things you'd have to negotiate (after chips and beans in the Fishcotheque of course) was the huge sprawling Cardboard City where the BFI Imax now stands (interestingly, after another ten years of cruel Tory cuts, the homeless are starting to take over again - tents rather than cardboard boxes their modern digs).

It was a London, and a country, of blatant homophobia, toxic male violence, chauvinism, and punch ups outside pubs at closing times. It was a country of smoky pubs, smoky offices, Austin Allegros, Ford Fiestas, and mass unemployment and it was, London particularly - before GPS, before social media, before the Internet, a place where people could just disappear off the radar. Live out their days in an alcoholic haze in a cardboard box in a traffic island before dying decades before their time.

This was the milieu that Nilsen both despised and found himself 'operating' in and this is the milieu that director Lewis Arnold and his team have captured almost perfectly. From the hangdog faces of the police officers who don't look averse to secreting a bottle of Scotch in their desks and handing out a kicking in a cell with no CCTV to the retro Dyno-Rod van whose driver is called to unblock the drains at Cranley Gardens and finds some bones that seem to come from somewhere other than KFC, the period detail is exquisite - but the performances, importantly, match them.

Daniel Mays plays Chief Inspector Peter Jay as the good cop, the man determined to pin ALL of Nilsen's crimes on him and finds himself fighting the system as much as the suspect, Barry Ward does well in an unshowy role as Jay's sidekick DCI Steve McCusker, and Ron Cook imbues their boss DSI Geoff Chambers with just the right amount of world-weary ennui that comes with having to balance ideals off against PR while managing expectations.

An interesting, almost fourth wall breaking dimension, comes in the form of Jason Watkins' Brian Masters, Nilsen's biographer! I read Masters' book Killing For Company a few years after Nilsen had been incarcerated and I found it fascinating, a kind of British analogue to Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, but I'd never given much thought to the motivations of Masters himself.

Des didn't make that mistake. Both articulate men, we see Masters and Nilsen verbally duke it out as they both seek to get what they want from their exchanges. Masters wants to tell the true story, to comprehend (but not understand) why Nilsen did what he did. Nilsen's motivations are less clear. Even, you suspect, to the man himself. We often see him carping about being treated like a criminal and when asked if he'd penetrated the bodies of any of his victims he rages about the injustices of a society that cares more about what happens to a corpse than to a living person. 

A rage that would have been righteous if it had not been Nilsen himself who had turned that living person into a corpse. Watkins was great as the camp, learned, but actually born off the Old Kent Road, Masters but the most praise must, of course, go to Tennant who, following his superb performance in Deadwater Fell back in January, is now moving into something of an imperial phase.

Actors seem to love the juicy roles, the gangsters, the killers, and the bad guys but Tennant managed to make Nilsen believable while steering him away from ever being likeable. Tense, agitated, fuelled by a sense of great injustice but, ultimately, a weak man unable to build trusting, loving relationships and unable to suppress, or even admit to, the demons that ruined his life and ended so many others.

The subject matter was necessarily grim (even scenes of crime scene investigators in masks reminded us of the fraught Covid times we live in) but the programme was grimly enjoyable, even if it failed to really answer why Nilsen did what he did or how society let him get away with it for so long. 

On the first of those questions that is an understandable failing. Nilsen's crimes were so beyond the pale and our minds are such complex hives of frustrations, desires, and suppressed memories that the work on understanding them will continue as long as humans exist. But on the second point we need to take a long look at ourselves. Society, now - as much as then, still leaves people on the street and it still marginalises and demonises those that don't adhere to its strict parameters. 

The unsettling conclusion I got from watching David Tennant as Dennis Nilsen murdering his way round Soho and Camden in the 1980s is not only that something like this could still happen today but, modern technology aside, it'd be probably be even easier. If those in government can proudly boast of breaking the law then what hope for the rest of us?