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.

 

Read It In Books:Ways Of Seeing.

"Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak"- John Berger.

John Berger's Ways Of Seeing (1972) has sat on my bookshelves for so long now I can no longer remember if it was a gift (and if it was, who from?) or if I bought it myself. Considering it is deemed by many to be a seminal text of art criticism, hell - of art understanding, I thought it was time I finally dusted it off, cracked its spine, and subjected it to the full EIAPOE review treatment.

Rene Magritte - The Key of Dreams (1930)

I was not to be disappointed. Starting with Berger's theory that seeing doesn't just come before words but also establishes our place in the surrounding world, and using Rene Magritte's The Key of Dreams to illustrate this, Ways of Seeing looks at how the relationship between what we see and what we know is fluid and is circumstantial on many things.

Berger isn't interested so much in why we look at paintings or even what is in those paintings or what style they have been painted in. But in HOW we look at paintings - as well as architecture and even, by extension, nature and each other. We can watch the sun set every evening of our life and while we know that it is the Earth that is turning away from the sun and not the other way round it, for some reason, doesn't feel like that is the case.

He describes how the sight of a person we are in love with makes us feel complete (even though many other people may have seen this exact same sight the same day and not felt anything). How we can look at a Van Gogh painting and think it's pretty and how we can look, again, at the same Van Gogh painting, now knowing it was the last one he painted before he took his own life, and see in it the artist's own despair and anxiety.

Vincent van Gogh - Wheatfield with Crows (1890)

These things are harder to rationalise in our mind than it is to understand what Berger means when he talks about standing in front of a Renaissance painting in the National Gallery thinking "if I look at this painting hard enough, I should somehow be able to feel its authenticity" but often paintings that have become famous have become so not because of their undoubted brilliance or, indeed, authenticity but because they are worth a lot of money - and Berger does not shy away when it comes to talking about how filthy lucre has tainted, or at least changed, our view of what makes great art.

He talks of a "bogus religiosity" driven by market values that has, since the invention of the camera, replaced their original unique qualities and he goes on to say that, because of this, art galleries and museums are, or were in 1972, of little interest to the layman. Replaced by the pop concert or the football game as weekend activities and considered too snobbish, or too elite, for most of us to be able to enjoy. 

 Leonardo da Vinci - The Virgin of the Rocks (1491-1508)

Berger quietly lambasts received ideas of ownership, capitalism, and even museum curatorship (he cuttingly, yet optmistically, calls curators "clerks of the nostalgia of the ruling class in decline") and he talks of how publicity and advertising exploits us, the viewers, makes us complicit in an unfair world, and, ultimately, leads us to being unhappier. 

While he rails against the way we interpret society being dictated by those who control culture he doesn't let us completely off the hook and delves into our own, often accidental, culpability in allowing this to happen. He writes about the choices we make when it comes to not just what we see, but what we look at. When we look at a photograph we see what is in that photograph but we also know, on some level, that the photographer chose how to frame that image, what to include, and what to leave out. We may also ask ourselves why the photographer made those decisions or, in fact, why any artist should choose to create any image and we may, if we're even bolder, ask ourselves if, when interpreting what is presented to us, have arrived at our conclusions using our own unconscious or, sometimes, conscious, biases.

Most famously of all, Berger speaks about how differently we view images of men to how we view those of women. His contention is that when we look at an image of a man we think what he can do for us and when we look at an image of a woman we think that we can do for, with, or to her. This, of course, is a male perspective (Berger is a man) but it is an enlightened one for the era, for the early seventies.

Hans Memling - Vanity (c.1485)

Peter Paul Rubens - The Judgement of Paris (1636)

Men, Berger goes on to say, survey women before deciding how they will treat them and women know that and, accordingly, survey themselves constantly. This isn't a natural state of affairs, one we're inherently born with, but a societal thing - Berger makes an arguable case that non-Western art is far less guilty of this kind of objectification. A learnt behaviour. Men look at women (witness all the female nudes hanging in the grand and celebrated galleries around the world) and women look at themselves being looked at (see how many male nudes there are next to these female nudes).

In some cases, Berger goes on to say, men painted naked women so that they could look at them and then painted them staring at a mirror, calling the painting something like Vanity, and somehow managed to blame the women for the weakness they feel at giving in to their own carnal desires. The reason for this is, historically, because the presumption that the viewer, the ideal viewer, of art is a man. Ideally a heterosexual man. Ideally a wealthy heterosexual man.

Edouard Manet - Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe (1863)

Perhaps, with this obsession with capturing the naked, or nude, female form on canvas, Berger proposes, quite sensibly, that images were first made to capture an absence and that they do but they also capture not just what is caught in that image (a sitter, a landscape, some flowers or fruit) but how the artist themselves looked at it while creating that image (their state of mind, their age, their sexuality, an inconceivably high number of inherent biases and prejudices).

When he drills down into that, Ways of Seeing is just as fascinating as it is when he considers the inbuilt structure of gendered roles within art history and how business and finance have corrupted the idea that art is something that all can enjoy on an equal level. The way Berger puts sentences together, short - precise - exact - powerful, makes him an easy writer to read but the ideas he presents sometimes need time to settle in your mind. The way the book is broken up into text and sections of illustrations gives you ample time to do so and when it comes to referencing artists, Berger is pretty comprehensive. 

Frans Hals - Regents of the Old Men's Alms House (1664)

The list of those mentioned is exhaustive and includes Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Picasso, Durer, Rubens, Rembrandt, Goya, Chardin, Turner, Monet, Constable, Cezanne, Ingres, Poussin, Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, El Greco, Vermeer, Warhol, Giorgione, Tintoretto, Frans Hals, and our old friend William Blake (and there are illustrations from many others:- Giotto, Cimabue, Raphael, Murillo, Gericault, Piero Della Francesca) - and elsewhere there are name checks for such unlikely bedfellows as Balzac, Claude Levi-Strauss, Marilyn Monroe, Kenneth Clark, the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, and, best of all - for me, Walter Benjamin. Even buildings like the Church of St Francis in Assisi are considered.

Even without these references, Berger makes his points clearly and proudly and never apologises for doing so. Deep and meaningful thoughts are presented to the reader in an easily readable and readily digestible series of essays that may have seemed almost revolutionary at the time but have now become, or at least mostly become, part of the art viewer's armoury. A lovely little read and one everyone interested in art, or who simply likes looking at things, should read at least once in their life.

Perambulations on the Perimeter of .... SE22:Ghosts of Lordship Lane.

The fourth walk of my 'Perambulations' series didn't end in the same way as the first three (around SE23, SE15, and SE4) and it didn't end in the same way as last week's London by Foot walk around Hampstead. Those walks, like most walks I do, all ended on a pretty positive note but my trek around the edges of SE22 didn't. It ended, as many walks do, in a pub (if not a curry house) but it also ended with me feeling more down than I had at the start.

A most irregular state of affairs and one I'd like to say I can't really understand. But, truth be told, I can. I felt lonely. Not alone - I love, enjoy, and crave company but I can manage quite well on my own - but lonely. As if I was missing out on some important part of life. I watched couples with their kids in the beer garden of The Plough, thought about them going home to have lunch together and put those kids to bed, and I realised that one of the most fundamental joys, and one of the most hard earned, in life was one I cannot share with them.

When I woke on Saturday morning I read the news that the Texan country and folk singer Nanci Griffith had died and listened to her cover of John Prine's lovely and moving Speed of the Sound of Loneliness (this morning I went further into musical meditations on loneliness by listening to Soft Cell's Soul Inside and Hank Williams singing Long Gone Lonesome Blues) and it remained an earworm throughout the course of the day.

But it wasn't just that song, or even my very real circumstances, that made me feel lonely. It was the location. SE22 is, to all intents and purposes, East Dulwich and East Dulwich used to be my playground. The gang I used to play (for which read drink) in East Dulwich with is no more. One of them moved to Bristol and hasn't spoken to me for years, another one became such a vile and abusive alcoholic that I had to extricate him from my life, another moved to Northern Ireland when his wonderful wife was tragically and heartbreakingly diagnosed with terminal cancer, and another moved to California in much happier circumstances where he now lives with his absolutely lovely American wife.

So - we don't meet in East Dulwich anymore. Even the other characters from the scene at the time who still live in London tend to be more reclusive or, if we do meet, we meet elsewhere. East Dulwich, for me, is a graveyard of memories and though the pubs and Indian restaurants are still great I go there much less often than I used to.

Oddly enough it was in a graveyard that I started yesterday's walk - at least after I'd purchased a copy of Saturday's Guardian in the ambitiously named Wood Vale Supermarket. Oddly enough, in that graveyard (Camberwell Old Cemetery) I was alone but I was not lonely. I have written, many times before, about graveyards and how though they are sad places they are not depressing ones. They often show the best of humanity and on a sunny August day it was impossible not to again reflect upon that as I passed through.

Camberwell Old Cemetery, like many in London, is the final resting place of a diverse selection of bodies from all over the world. Seeing the names, and inscriptions and flags, I am reminded of how much London, and the UK, owes to those who moved here from Jamaica, Bangladesh, Turkey, Poland, Greece, India, Nigeria, and so many other places. London's multiculturalism is, without a doubt, one of the city's great strengths and anyone who seeks to threaten it will be proved to be on the wrong side of history.

As I have done so many times, not least in the last seventeen months, I walked down Brenchley Gardens - pausing only to take a close up photo of some berries on a yew tree. At the end I turned into Kelvington Road and when I saw the sign for Athenlay Road I, as ever, found myself singing Fields of Athenry.

I have walked past it hundreds of times but had never been in to Mem's Corner Cafe so I thought I'd give it a go. It's run by a load of noisy middle aged Turkish football fans and I was served an enormous, it ultimately defeated me, plate of cheese omelette, chips, and baked beans with a couple of slices of bread and butter, a cup of milky tea, and a can of Coke and I sat reading my paper.

The headline was about the incel killer from Plymouth Jake Davison and his misogynistic online rants about not being able to get a girlfriend (top tip:if you're looking for a girlfriend, maybe don't continually post misogynistic online rants - it tends to put women off) and I remembered being a teenager and being upset about not having a girlfriend. Instead of shooting a three year old girl in broad daylight I took a different approach. I had a wank and then went out and got drunk with my mates. Something Jake Davison should have done.

While the news from Plymouth, and from Afghanistan where the Taliban look certain to take Kabul any day soon, was depressing I was not, yet, depressed. I was alone but I was not lonely. I followed Cheltenham Road, past the lovely house above, to Peckham Rye Park and entered it. I had a look at the gym equipment, the geese in the pond, the (big) fish in the pond, the squirrels darting around, the bowling green, the river Peck (barely a ditch, at times merely a trickle), and the Japanese Garden with its huge, and empty - lonely even, barn.

On Peckham Rye Common, with my stomach way too full of chips, I led down in the sun and fell asleep to the sound of a group of young lads playing football (pretending to be Messi, Mbappe, and Ronaldo and arguing about VAR) and when I woke I felt I had digested my lunch enough to carry on - so did so.

On East Dulwich Road I saw Evans Cycles (not so much these days) and the old entrance to the Dulwich Public Baths and was reminded how, walking aside, my regime of gym, running, cycling, and swimming has become non-existent in the last few years. I saw an advert, too, for the delayed Nunhead Cemetery Open Day. I'd attended several times, and written about it in 2016, but will not be able to this year as TADS duty calls and that's non-negotiable.

My improvised nap (a luxury I am not afforded under the TADS rules of engagement) as well as the tea and fizzy drink had resulted in me desperately needing a piss so when I came to The Cherry Tree (opposite Rice & Peas takeaway, once a regular haunt on my way to the old Uplands quiz) and saw that they were using that afternon's Dulwich Hamlet v Chippenham Town Isthmian League fixture (a game that ended 0-0) to lure people in I didn't let the fact I had no intention of attending the game stop me popping in for a wee and a cold pint of Estrella.

It went down well though I would have enjoyed some company, somebody to shoot the breeze with. I resisted a second and continued under the railway bridge where the train from London Bridge and Peckham Rye pulls into East Dulwich and on the steep Dog Kennel Hill turned into the amusingly named Quorn Road.

Along Quorn Road, Pytchley Road, and Bromar Road there are several large brown brick buildings (and the new builds in the area are sympathetic to this style too) which are actually rather pleasing to the eye. I used to run along here but, at walking pace, it's easier to admire the architecture.

From the top of Grove Hill Road you can admire panoramic views across South East London and it was at this part of the walk that I ventured, for the first time, down roads I had not passed before. Champion Hill starts off as a series of tower blocks but as you pass down it you find quaint, quirky, and surprisingly large houses. I was stopping to admire one when a kind lady approached me and asked if I was lost. I wasn't, how could I be - I was on an aimless walk, but we chatted for a while about our love of walking and exploring. These chance encounters are one of the things I most love about getting out for a walk. We said goodbye and I now think she probably has no idea how her small act of kindness improved my day.

The next stretch was absolutely lovely. Green Dale is a cycle, and pedestrian, path that cuts from Denmark Hill to Townley Road in East Dulwich and, remarkably - I've lived locally for over twenty-five years, I have never been down it before. A fairly steep descent leads to fields and the distant sound of Dulwich Hamlet fans cheering and singing. 

There's a sign telling us that Sir Henry Bessemer once had a conservatory here and that that conservatory once held the world's second largest telescope and there's another sign that informs us that local schoolchildren are taking part in attempts to rewild much of the local area with both plants and insects. It had me reflecting on that old line about London really being a collection of villages and it had me reflecting, also, on the idea that some outsiders have that Londoners are selfish and isolated and don't care for nature.

It's not something I've bought into and it's not something I believe. The evidence for it simply does not stack up. There is, however, an element of society that can be selfish and isolated and that is reflected in the private playing grounds of Alleyn's School (motto:God's Gift - I ask you).

Alleyn's Old Boys and Girls (at least it's a co-ed) include C.S.Forester, Jude Law, Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen, Marc Bolan, Pixie Geldof, Terrence Higgins, Jessie Ware, The Chemical Brothers, and Frank Thornton who played Captain Peacock in Are You Being Served? A group of young lads (who may one day grow up to be pop stars or play stuffy floorwalkers in department store based comedies full of saucy double entendres) had just finished a game of football and one was stuffing his face with a packet of Walker's prawn cocktail crisps. I can't imagine that being the snack of choice for Raheem Sterling although Gary Lineker may beg to differ.

Across the playing fields, the green spire of St Barnabas reached majestically into the blue sky and I followed the graceful arch of Townley Road back to Lordship Lane. Lordship Lane was the epicentre of my East Dulwich playground and though I did not visit the East Dulwich Tavern, The Bishop, or The Palmerston (and Inside 72, one of my favourite bars ever, is long gone) I did attempt to go in the Lordship. A pub that has changed names so many times I struggle to remember them all.

Maer One's riff on Murillo's The Madonna of the Rosary (which can be seen in nearby Dulwich Picture Gallery) made for an attractive exterior to the pub but it turned out that Louise and Simon (whoever they are) had booked out the whole place for their wedding reception. Perhaps they were fearful of being over run by celebrating Dulwich Hamlet fans or maybe they'd heard the Chippenham 'firm' were in town. Either way, my plans to sup a pint in there were well and truly scuppered.

No need to worry. I walked a little further up the hill, past a blue plaque for former Dulwich resident Enid Blyton, and plopped myself down in The Plough beer garden. A pub I had quizzed in with the old gang many many times and one that is so vast it always feels empty.

My Peroni went down well in the sun but when the wind picked up (and my phone needed charging) I popped inside for another. My neighbours had invited everyone in the neighbourhood round for a barbecue (and they were threatening Hungarian plum brandy - palinka) but I wasn't in the mood. I didn't feel social. I felt alone and, now, I felt lonely.

More beer probably didn't help but I had it anyway - I was now actively trying to avoid having to talk to my neighbours - what is wrong with me? I read The Guardian, I played with my phone, I watched pretty girls walking down the street, I started out in to space, and I thought about all the wrong turns and mistakes I'd made in life and all the people I lost along the way. I reminded myself that I do have (many) good friends and that soon I will be with them but I just couldn't escape the funk I was falling into.

A text from my friend Dan asking me out for a Sunday roast today cheered me up (though I didn't go) and by the time I got home my neighbour's BBQ had finished and they were sat in their garden quietly alone (I worried it had been a flop and felt a bit responsible - I did say I'd try to pop in) and I, too, sat home on my own watching some Netflix thing about dictators (Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Papa Doc Duvalier, Idi Amin, Stalin - all your favourites) before going to bed. Unlike most walks, this one left me feeling sad and lonely. The ghosts of Lordship Lane still linger in the back of my mind somewhere and my attempts to exorcise them had been a failure. Maybe writing about it will help.