Television Review

PAT TATE was, according to his sister-in-law, "a loveable rogue" - if he sold you a car and something went wrong with it, well, that was your look out, and Pat could get away with that attitude because he was so loveable. Looking at the pictures of him in last night's Inside Story (BBC1), you couldn't help wondering whether the fact that Pat was built like a tank may not have had some bearing on people's readiness to turn the other cheek.

The myth of the decent villain is still going indecently strong - they only harm their own, they help little old ladies across the street. I have had this nonsense fed to me by otherwise intelligent people who must imagine that gangsters make money by taking in one another's washing, instead of by intimidation, theft and selling drugs. It's an irritating myth, but perhaps no more than that. At any rate, Pat Tate's loveable qualities and innate decency didn't prevent him from having his face blasted away with a shotgun in a Range Rover in a field in Essex in December 1995, along with two colleagues, Tony Tucker and Craig Rolfe. And the fact that they were only harming one of their own didn't stop his killers being sent down for a good long stretch.

Or perhaps that should be alleged killers. The murderers left no traces; but several months afterwards, Darren Nicholls went to the police claiming that he had been the driver for the men who had killed them, whom he named as Michael Steele and Jack Whomes. The story was that Tate, the distributor, had lost money on a substandard batch of cannabis supplied to him by Steele, the smuggler, and had started bragging that he was going to shoot him. Unsurprisingly, Steele and his partner, Whomes, took umbrage. Nicholls later tried to sever connections with Steele; when they responded with repeated invitations to him to come flying in a light aircraft, Nicholls, unnerved, grassed them up.

The pair were convicted in 1997, solely on his evidence. Todd Austin's film, "Supergrass", counterpoised Nicholls's story with indignant protestations of innocence from Whomes's family. His mum pointed out that a mother knows in her heart when her own son is telling lies; his brother argued that if Jack had wanted to murder somebody, he would have asked members of his own family to help, rather than a comparative stranger like Nicholls.

This was trailed, disingenuously, as "the film they tried to ban". In fact, Nicholls had obtained an injunction against the film, worried that it would make it easier for potential killers to identify him. In consequence, his and his wife's words were spoken by actors; and they were filmed in an extreme close-up that reduced their facial features to almost abstract shapes. There may have been sound practical reasons for this (you wouldn't want the actors to be at risk from seriously stupid criminals). The effect was to give a curiously surreal edge to the Nicholls's account of their new lives. For some time Darren Nicholls lived with no proper identity at all - his passport and bank details had all been erased, and nothing set up in their place. Even when he did get a new name, he anticipated difficulties establishing a new bank account because he had "no previousness".

At these moments, the film wobbled into something approaching philosophy. Confronted by these disjointed faces detached from previousness, by conflicting and insubstantial stories, you could get a dim sense of the shallow foundations on which we build notions of who people are, and what constitutes truth. This was, all told, not a great film, but it carried beguiling hints of something out of the ordinary.