Rough Justice:Deceit.

Channel 4's recent Deceit (created and written by Emilio de Girolamo) was a strange beast. In attempting to tell a true story (or at least one based on real events) you'd imagine Deceit would be sympathetic to those, many still alive, who would have been affected by the case at the time - and still almost certainly are. Intensely watchable though it was, the level of lurid and grisly detail bordered on the sensationalist and at times, I would imagine, could even be hurtful.

The casual rape jokes, images of the prime suspect caressing his knives, and scenes of childhood flashbacks that clearly used a considerable amount of artistic license all seemed a bit insensitive too. Even when Deceit tried to make quite reasonable points about sexism (the women in the police station do the dangerous work and the men take the credit, jokes about how female colleagues should not get pregnant or there would be nobody to make the tea) they were so heavily signposted as to appear laboured.

This all seemed unnecessary when the story, one I can remember happening, is so compelling. In 1992, 23 year old Rachel Nickell was stabbed to death in front of her two year old son in broad daylight on Wimbledon Common. The murder was so brutal it seemed likely that the killer would strike again but the police, several months after, had not found the person responsible.

Under huge pressure to do so, they employ the service of a criminal profiler, Professor Paul Britton (Eddie Marsan) and he, with help from an unseen colleague in the FBI, comes up with a highly specific character profile which seems to fit with a local loner, Colin Stagg (Sion Daniel Young). Stagg has already been taken in for questioning about the case and when Crimewatch covered the Nickell murder, several people had phoned in to suggest he fits the description of the suspect.

But all the evidence against Stagg is circumstantial and the police need something more concrete before they can charge him. So they call in "Sadie Byrne" (some names have been changed for reasons that soon become apparent), a streetwise Dublin police officer who we've first seen in a crack den in Tottenham (quite a crack den too, a shit covered toilet, a man being given a blow-job as he smokes a crack pipe, and pregnant women wandering around in a daze).

Niamh Algar, who plays Sadie, is excellent (though several lingering and lubricious shots of her cleavage hardly strike the right note in a programme of this nature) in a role that requires her to display confidence and vulnerability in equal measure. She's tasked with building a relationship with Stagg which will lead to him revealing his involvement in Nickell's murder.

It was known at the time as a honey trap and that's not too strong a term when you consider Sadie is asked to "indulge" Stagg's "darkest fantasies" and to pretend that, as a younger woman, she was involved in a Satanic cult. Sadie invents a new identity, Lizzie James, and writes a letter to Stagg. Stagg writes back and soon, as planned, the letters heat up. It's not long before Stagg is offering her "a damned good fucking", threatening to destroy her self-esteem, and more.

When Stagg tells 'Lizzie' he loves her, the police can sense victory but nobody involved seems to question the morality of what they're doing and everyone assumes unquestioningly that Stagg is guilty and works from that, as we now know, completely flawed premise.

Harry Treadaway plays 'tache sporting Detective Inspector Keith Pedder almost as if he's a Chris Morris creation (perhaps a younger version of Brass Eye's Ted Maul) which can be distracting at times and when Sadie/Lizzie has her first meeting with Professor Britton (in a huge stately home for some reason) it is both weird and creepy.

For flimsy plot reasons, he performatively stirs her tea (served in a glass, nice) and whispers into her ear about how she has "beautiful blue eyes". Is he trying to freak her out in preparation for what she is likely to experience with Stagg or are the makers of Deceit trying to make a point about how everyday male behaviour towards women is inappropriate and in some way responsible for the more lethal transgressions like the one carried out on Wimbledon Common.

It's not clear. What is done very well is the way we experience Sadie's journey as Stagg gets into her head as much as she gets into his. Unable to listen to the advice of her friends Lucy (an underused Rochena Sandall) and Baz (Nathaniel Martello-White), Sadie becomes obsessed with catching Stagg to a monomaniacal degree and it starts to cause her nightmares.

Nightmares which all seem to resemble, both inappropriately and unimaginatively, very well known horror movies (there were nods, and too many of them, to Carrie, Halloween, and, most of all, Psycho). The real nightmare of the murder, and the hard work of solving it, becomes buried beneath a psychosexual drama played out between Sadie/Lizzie and Stagg.

A man we, the viewers, know is innocent. A game is played where she tells him stuff, horrible stuff, and threatens to withhold her affection if he can't at least match it with a story with an equivalent level of transgressive frankness. When he finally takes the bait, his story is vague, unverifiable, and, most likely, a complete work of fantasy. A story he has made up simply to impress her because he's lonely and wants to be with her.

The final quarter of Deceit, in which Stagg goes to court while the real killer remains at large, is incredibly chilling and does make a very effective save in a drama that if it had been more sympathetic to the reality of the situation and tried to less hard to shock the audience would have been all the more effective.

Credit to Niamh Algar and Sion Daniel Young for making it work so well (and it was good to hear some of the tunes from the time on the soundtrack - Stereo MCs' Connected, The Charlatans' The Only One I Know, and Suede's Animal Nitrate) but Deceit, perversely enough, was deceitful in that the drama did not necessarily do justice to those involved in it. As if they had not suffered enough injustice already.