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Indelible Evidence

CHARMLESS CRIMEWATCH roadtester shuttled out on BBC2 proffering supremely detailed reconstructions and behind-the scenes gubbins with camera-shy forensics. Notable early small screen airing of PAM ST. CLEMENTS’ Cockney Harridan, here trying to gas herself in own car.

6 Comments

6 Comments

  1. Lee James Turnock

    May 1, 2010 at 11:59 am

    Bloody terrifying, almost on the same level as the Mad Death and Threads for offering up depictions of carnage and horror against an ‘everyday’ backdrop. Spurious highlights included a woman burning the breakfast whilst overcome with horror at the senseless murders of her husband and son, a woman crawling from the smouldering wreckage of an unsuccessful car bomb muder attempt, dragging her shattered legs behind her, and some weirdo who boiled up his own mother and tipped her down the drain. “Charmless”? I should bloody say so, and all set to a squawking free-jazz sax theme.

    • George White

      March 1, 2024 at 12:19 pm

      Very much in the same realm of haunto BBC 16mm docudrama that started in the late 70s with A Life at Stake, then continued into Spy! (1980- Cold War stuff), Escape (1980- about famous breakouts, one ep shot in Ireland in order to shoot in a prison), and Prisoners of Conscience (about miscarriages of justice, George ‘Katanga in Raiders/racist name wizard in that awful woman’s films’ Harris as Mandela and Richard Griffiths for once playing younger than his years, as William Beausire, the Anglo-Chilean banker who was disappeared).
      These series have mostly disappeared, sadly.
      This seems a link between those and the later types of In Suspicious Circumstances and Strange but True.
      One ep of Indelible Evidence, unusually shot in NI, rather than fake it in Yorkshire. About the IRA freedom fighter who had a weird way of eating an apple. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV9Rj11tbJY&list=PLsxZS65ZZOF0S5yxktm_D-W1iz8K-eQ6A&index=3

  2. Richard Davies

    November 15, 2010 at 8:44 pm

    This was revived in the 1990s for a few years.

  3. Tom Ronson

    March 28, 2022 at 1:30 am

    Some wonderful person has uploaded the entire run to YouTube. Fascinating stuff, if only because the policemen and forensic experts involved in the actual cases played themselves! As a marker of how out-of-touch the police were in the seventies and eighties, the murder of a young boy resulted in the local plod interviewing the gay community, as opposed to known paedophiles…

    • Sidney Balmoral James

      March 28, 2022 at 5:43 pm

      I have a very hazy memory of a spoof of the credits (in which that awful sax groaned on while the camera panned over bagged exhibits) in which the saxophone was abruptly halted by an off screen shot, and then the camera panned over the saxophonist also bagged-up.

      • Tom Ronson

        October 27, 2022 at 1:00 am

        I believe that was on one of Bobby Davro’s ITV series, of all bloody places…

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