And, as the murders themselves have little wider significance, the question of what purpose such a show can serve arises. There is no deepening of the issue of how willing the powers that be are to blame a woman, or to believe that any hint of female instability means the sufferer must be capable of multiple murder. The drama doesn’t open out (or at least hasn’t yet) into an interrogation of anything beyond the murders themselves. Taff clings stubbornly to his belief in it even as Stan shows how the blood trails, positionings and periodic need to reload the gun are entirely incompatible with Sheila’s supposed involvement and as Anne discovers how a killer could have got in and out of an apparently locked house undetected. Meanwhile, Colin Caffell (Sheila’s ex-husband and father of the murdered boys) sifts through sensationalist newspaper articles that revel in her apparent guilt. Dogged Stan dogs on, while Bamber’s cousin Anne (Gemma Whelan, like Graham, also being wasted) gives perturbed sidelong glances at Jeremy as his reactions to having his entire family slaughtered increasingly deviate from the norm. There are five parts still to go, but so far it’s all a little paint-by-numbers. Possibly it was slightly more complex in real life, but in that case every last detail of any complication needed to be up there on screen if we weren’t just to boggle in detached disbelief thereafter, as bodies were moved, and bloodstained carpets torn up and burned alongside tainted furniture at Bamber’s behest before the crime scene was fully investigated. But not for Stan and not for viewers, to whom it looks simply bonkers.
Technically possible, the experts say, and that’s good enough for the villainous DCI. These include – and here’s where reality intrudes to drama’s detriment – the fact that Sheila was shot twice in the head. The investigating officer, DCI Taff Jones (Stephen Graham, not given much chance to exercise his usual subtlety in a shouty, one-note part), cleaves to this theory as truth even after his underling, DS Stan Jones (Mark Addy), raises doubts. The police initially assumed it was a murder-suicide committed by her. Sheila’s body was found in the house, locked from the inside, with the shotgun that killed them all.
The police descended on the house and discovered the five family members shot dead. (Sheila, incidentally, is played very well by Cressida Bonas, putting paid to the rumours of stunt casting that arose when it was announced that a woman who was once Prince Harry’s girlfriend had got the role). It opens with Bamber (Freddie Fox) calling the police, claiming that his father had just rung him to say that his sister Sheila, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, was “going crazy with a gun”, before the call was cut off. Such is the besetting problem with ITV’s White House Farm, the story of Jeremy Bamber’s murder of his parents, his sister and her six-year-old twin boys at their family farmhouse in Essex in 1985.
You are not free to elide moments, gloss over awkward bits or smooth out the narrative through light fictionalisation. T he problem with dramatising famous – or infamous – events that took place well within living memory is that you are not that free to dramatise anything.