Television Review

Television Review

IF YOU EVER find yourself thinking that Britain has become a modern, enlightened country, it's worth spending a few minutes with Kilroy (BBC1) to restore a sense of reality. Yesterday morning, the bronzed one tackled the question of what should be done with asylum seekers. The Labour MP Martin Linton came on to argue, in line with Government thinking, that the real problem lay with the economic migrants who tried to abuse the asylum system and were undermining the "genuine" asylum seekers.

But this was at odds with the message Robert Kilroy-Silk was getting, which boiled down to: send them all back, and bugger the consequences. He put a hypothetical case to a member of the audience who had described herself as "a good Christian woman": suppose he were a genuine asylum seeker, and that being sent back to his country would mean his death, and the death of his wife and his children. As a good Christian, could she look him in the eye and tell him she would send him back? "I'm very, very sorry," the woman replied, "but yes." You wonder what her attitude would be towards religious dissidents facing the threat of crucifixion.

Perhaps it is a mistake to associate this with Stephen Lawrence, who was after all born in this country. But it's worth pointing out that, while recent coverage of the Lawrence inquiry has emphasised the case as a "turning-point" in race relations in Britain, there are still unplumbed depths of blind, petty xenophobia to cope with, and Kilroy performed a service in putting them on show.

This is not to detract from The Murder of Stephen Lawrence (ITV). Mindful of the risks of over-dramatisation, Paul Greengrass, who wrote and directed the film, aimed for a rigorous naturalism that most documentaries nowadays avoid - unstable, bobbing cameras, low-key acting. There were times when it went too far (the panicky aftermath of Stephen's stabbing, when the frame jiggled insanely around the screen) or fell short (some intimate scenes between Neville and Doreen Lawrence). For the most part, though, it was magnificently restrained, and Hugh Quarshie and Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who played Stephen's parents, were plausible and impressive.

There were a number of telling moments in here: the police scepticism that came into play even as Stephen lay bleeding on the ground ("They just ran out and attacked you? Why would they do that?"), the uneasiness of the police family liaison team at confronting a family's grief. But, like the wheels of justice, the film ground very slowly. Given its length, it was a shame its focus was so narrow - apart from anything else, it neglected to show the Lawrences' sheer canniness in pursuing the case. As Saturday's BBC2 documentary Why Stephen? pointed out, there have been plenty of murdered black teenagers - only this one grabbed national headlines.

For all that, The Murder of Stephen Lawrence was a shaming document, and ITV deserves credit for putting it on in primetime. And the fact that it had to be split in half is the most powerful argument I've seen so far in favour of abolishing News at Ten.