Stephen:The Long Wait For Justice?

On the 22nd April 1993, eighteen year old Stephen Lawrence was murdered in a racist attack in Eltham. It was three years before I moved to South East London but I remember the news well. I remember the now iconic image of Stephen with his thin 'tache, raised fist, and black and white striped MASH sweatshirt - now frozen in time - and I remember how he had hopes and dreams of becoming an architect.

I also remember that the police failed, initially, to catch the suspects even though there, by most accounts, seemed to be very compelling evidence pointing to a group of five local thugs. I remember that the Metropolitan Police were corrupt, violent, and institutionally racist in the eighties and nineties too. I even had personal experience of their violence when one of them punched me in the face and made homophobic and abusive comments to me in the back of a police van after arresting me for a jumped up and ludicrous 'crime'.

What I didn't remember was the public inquiry that found the police to be racist and incompetent (though maybe that's because that would hardly have been a revelation) and nor did I remember if anyone was ever convicted of a heinous and unprovoked crime. So ITV's Stephen (directed by Alrick Riley and written by Frank Cottrell-Boyce) would not only teach me more about the case and the police failings but also remind me if any of the murderers were ever found guilty of their actions.

If the Lawrence family ever received justice. Steve Coogan (who is good at straight roles but it does take a while before you get past the Partridge thing) plays DCI Clive Driscoll who, in 2006, finds several boxes of abandoned documents pertaining to the case at a former Deptford police station and asks Cressida Dick (Sian Brooke plays the now Commissioner of the Met, then merely a high ranking officer) if he can take on the case.

Driscoll believe's he can use "common sense coppering" to get a conviction and by that he means reviewing evidence, speaking to witnesses, and actually carrying out forensic tests (Sam Troughton as Ed Jarman and Nancy Carroll as Angela Gallop are particularly good in the white coat roles). All the stuff that should have been done first time round. All the stuff that murder police are supposed to do anyway. Driscoll believes that the Met should be "more than a match for a gang of racist thugs" - and so they should be.

Or at least would be if they weren't hindered by corruption and racism from within their own ranks. There are some, many even, in the Met who don't want the case reopened. Revelations even come forward of one of the suspect's fathers paying off bent coppers to stall the investigation.

As Driscoll and his team - DI Shaun Keep (Jonjo O'Neill), Peter Birdsall (Jay Simpson), Tricky (Graeme Hawley), and Derek Reid (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr) initiate a thorough and correct procedure, we see Stephen's parents continue to fight both for justice for their son as well as to find peace in their own lives.

Neville Lawrence (Hugh Quarshie) is trying hard not to be consumed, understandably, by hatred for the people who killed his son while his by now ex-wife Doreen (a great performance by Sharlene Whyte) is more focused, determined, and even business like about bringing the killers to justice and even going on to fight wider injustices within the British legal system.

She is often seen accompanied by her lawyer Imran Khan (Adil Ray). In a programme that is two parts police procedural, one part courtroom drama the viewer is never allowed to forget that these horrific events were real and there are as many moving scenes as there are upsetting ones - not least Stephen's friend Duwayne Brooks (Richie Campbell), who was with Stephen on the night of his murder and was even wrongfully accused of being responsible for it, giving evidence in court the morning after his father's death.

Driscoll's job is to bring the killers to justice but to do that he has to win the trust of several people who have been given a lifetime of reasons not to trust the police. He must also prove to Neville, and especially Doreen, that he is not like the incompetent and corrupt officers who have failed them so badly in the past.

Coogan's Driscoll is a peculiarly old fashioned bobby. He has five kids of his own (one, he topically mentions, serving in Afghanistan in a war that the UK would go on to lose), does everything by the book, and, when he's not at Craven Cottage supporting Fulham, hosts cockney joanna singalongs at old people's home.

He is, fundamentally, a decent man. He asks, of himself and the institution which he works for, if the Met can't be bothered, or don't want, to solve murders then what even is the point of their existence. These are questions the Lawrence family have long been asking themselves as well as, sadly, far too many others.

The reason so many of these stories (Anthony, Uprising, Steve McQueen's Small Axe) are being made now isn't because, as you may imagine Oliver Dowden to suggest, because ITV and the BBC have been hijacked by "woke" leftie culture warriors but because they should have been told years, decades, ago. 

The commissioning and making of this powerful series, much like the tale it tells, is an attempt to correct past injustices. In that it is better late than never. But, as a society, we still have far to go. A radio playing in the background during one scene of Stephen mentions the rise of the racist London mayoral candidate Boris Johnson.