Last Night's Television - Black Widow Granny? BBC1: Horizon, BBC2

More filler than kililer

“There’s too much happened for her not to be guilty of something,” said a hostile witness at the beginning of Norman Hull’s film Black Widow Granny? “It’s not just coincidental.” Oh well, if you’re that sure let’s not waste money and time on a trial shall we? Who’s got a rope? More to the point, perhaps, whose got the exclusive on the lynching? The Black Widow of the title was Betty Neumar, a white-haired, bible-clutching old dame who admittedly seemed to have been a bit of a jinx on her former husbands. She’d had five in total and all of them had predeceased her, three of them by gunfire. This is the sort of circumstance that can get a girl a bad name, though as far as one could gather nobody had really thought to question Betty’s good intentions until the death of Harold Gentry, Betty’s fourth spouse. Harold had a brother called Al, who claimed that Betty’s first words to him after the discovery of the body were, “Al... I want you to know that I was in Augusta, Georgia, last night... I had nothing to do with Harold’s death”, a curious expression of wifely sorrow, you’d have to admit.

Al, by his own account, became obsessional about the unsolved murder of his brother, rarely able to leave the house without swinging by the sheriff’s department to nag them into action. His wife confirmed this fact with an expression on her face that suggested homicide had occasionally crossed her mind too. But Al’s persistence had finally paid off, when a new-broom sheriff looked at his bulky portfolio of suspicions and saw an opportunity to start his new administration with some good headlines. This is a prejudicial way of putting it, I know, but it didn’t take very long before you realised that five minutes of evidence was going to be stretched over 55 minutes of airtime in Hull’s film – a procedure that required an awful lot of moody filler shots and unsubstantiated rumour.

Five minutes of evidence may be stretching it, in fact. We were told that witnesses had testified that Betty had asked them to bump off Harold, but not who they were. There also seemed to be something a little rum about the death of Betty’s third husband, who she claimed had shot himself during a row (a death that was officially recorded as a suicide). But if she was a ruthless serial killer, she seemed to have a curiously dilatory way of proceeding. Her first husband, who she left |after just nine months, lived on to marry two other women before being shot a full 18 years

later. Her second husband, an alcoholic, froze to death on a New York pier, and her final husband, John Neumar, lasted 16 years with her before succumbing to a long illness. His children now wonder whether he was poisoned – citing Betty’s haste to have him cremated as corroborative evidence – but it seemed a pretty thin foundation on which to stake a witch-hunt.

When you finally got to meet Betty – now out on bail waiting to face trial – she struck you as one of those steely old birds who it wouldn’t be wise to cross, beady-eyed and menacing. It was easy to imagine that she didn’t go down well as a new sister-in-law or stepmother and that the petty resentments of family life – who gets the attention and who gets the money – had frothed over into something toxic. Al is convinced she’s his brother’s killer and has practised his lines for the television shows. Her prison overalls, he said, were “the purtiest thing I’d ever seen her in”. The local-television reporter pitched the tale with the kind of excess that suggested she has Hollywood rights at the back of her mind. And a Pulitzer- winning journalist stirred the pot further, no doubt aware that “unlucky coincidence” won’t be remotely as saleable as “granny serial killer”. Rule out the hearsay, suspicion, and flat out errors of fact, though, and you wouldn’t hang a cat on the fragments of hard evidence that remained.

The physicists in the Horizon film about black holes were all filmed as if they were deep-throat sources, faces half obscured by dark shadows. What they were mostly blowing the whistle on was the fact that they didn’t really know anything at all – black holes having revealed themselves as places where both quantum mechanics and general relativity hold sway, which is awkward since they seem to be intractably incompatible. Comprehension came and went, never squarely in focus but flapping at the corner of your eye. But it was thrilling to feel its occasional flutter, and to get some sense of the scale of the forces involved. Apparently, the black hole at the centre of our galaxy is 400 million times the mass of the Sun, which is itself a million times the mass of the Earth. You’d think they’d be able to say for sure that it’s actually there.