Murder in the Outback Easter Day, ITV1
In perhaps the only truly stupid thought the poet ever committed to paper, Ted Hughes once complained to a newspaper: ?I hope each of us owns the facts of her or his own life.? On the contrary, because a life impinges on so many others, such ?facts? are shared infinitely. Yet the instinct to possess your own narrative is strong and when your reputation is at stake it may become irresistible. Few in recent years have asserted their ownership as strongly as Joanne Lees. In No Turning Back , her book about the murder in Australia of her boyfriend, Peter Falconio, she insisted last year: ?The only person who can tell the authentic story, my story, is me.?
Murder in the Outback, ITV?s dramatisation of Falconio?s killing six years ago while the pair were on holiday in Australia, managed simultaneously to assert her right to tell her own story and to traduce it by telling it on her behalf. Kate Brooke?s screenplay was unashamedly on her side. This was no who-dunnit. The murder, committed by a roughneck called Bradley Murdoch, was shown in the opening minutes and followed Lees?s eyewitness account. The film defended Lees?s right to a brief sexual relationship with another man while in Australia. If, after the trauma of the murder, Lees could be difficult ? angry, sullen, untrusting ? that was fine, too. It particularly sided with her against the media. During the court case, hacks are seen betting on who will be called to the stand and in one scene, for which I would like to see the evidence, a reporter tells an editor ?My lot says, ?If she won?t talk, go for her?.? It was frank of ITV to allow the film to accuse its own current affairs flagship, Tonight , of gaining an interview with Lees on false pretences. (Admittedly, its reporter was the long-departed Martin Bashir ? but even so.)
As Lees, Joanne Froggatt made her media-unfriendliness a virtue. Her Lees was wilful in her reluctance to play the victim. At an early press conference, the real Lees wore a top with the words ?cheeky monkey? across it. ?I didn?t know there was a dress code for people who had survived a traumatic event,? she later wrote. She had given no thought to what she was wearing. In the film, we saw her carefully applying make-up before facing the press. Lees here was a postfeminist, not worried about the lorry driver who found her after the murder calling her a Sheila ? indeed happy to embrace him later ? but furious that the system was judging her femininity.
I admired this dramatisation. Froggatt was excellent, as was Bryan Brown as the low-key but ultimately effective prosecutor, the splendidly named Rex Wild. By emphasising the Outback?s mind-altering emptiness, Tony Tilse?s direction spotlit Lees?s solitude. My eyes filled when her victim?s statement was read out in court: ?I am stronger, wiser, less naive. I?m a sceptical, untrusting, fearful and heartbroken. It is lonely being me.?
These were her words, not the screenwriter?s, but I don?t suppose Lees will have approved of the film. Indeed her publisher last week sent reviewers copies of No Turning Back accompanied by a letter stressing that she had no involvement in the drama. It made out her relationship with Wild to be warmer than her book did. It did not touch on the death of her mother. Phil Banton, her family liaison officer, who ?restored my faith in humanity?, did not even get a walk-on. She will have other gripes. Or so I imagine. The last thing I want to do is speak on her behalf.