Review: The London Nail Bomber

It’s always curious to me which programmes the various channels’ press offices decide to promote, and which they resolutely ignore completely. One programme last night fell into the latter camp — BBC1’s The London Nail Bomber, an examination of the three bomb attacks instigated by David Copeland in 1999.

Now first of all, I must declare an interest here. When Copeland’s third, final — and ultimately fatal — bomb went off in the Admiral Duncan pub on Old Compton Street, I had been due to meet a friend there; if I had not been running late, causing me to ring him to reschedule for a later hour, who knows what may have happened. So it was with some trepidation that I sat down to watch this “drama documentary”.

I’m glad I did — but I’m also furious. Furious that a superb, moving documentary — featuring eye-witness testimony, recollections of the police officers, transcripts of Copeland’s own statements, all building up into a meticulous examination of the events of the fifteen days from the first bomb to Copeland’s arrest — should have been sullied by some of the worst dramatisations that the genre has ever produced.

We had the officer in charge of the case, talking to camera about her recollections in a thoughtful, approachable way. And then, we had another woman, twice the size and bearing only a superficial resemblance to her real-life counterpart, expositing to a subordinate as they walked down a staircase and uttering the classic line, “Don’t call me ma’am”. Why? It was a clumsy way to reveal information to the audience — information that the real police officer was clearly quite capable of conveying. It also reeked of a below-par Prime Suspect rip-off.

At other times, the use of reconstruction was quite effective, providing links between police officers’ testimony and the use of the actual CCTV video evidence available. But there were too many places where, by the use of the real witnesses recreating their roles, the reconstruction footage undermined the power of their verbal descriptions. And the ultimate horror: speculation that David Copeland may have had psychosexual fantasies involving bondage and Nazi regalia was illustrated with a dramatised version of those dreams. Again, why? It added nothing but an uncomfortable lack of credibility to a programme which had more than enough real, horrific detail to be drawn from real life.

Thankfully, as the programme progressed to the Admiral Duncan bomb, the excesses of the dramatist curbed themselves and the dramatic reconstructions did their job — joining the dots of what evidence we already had to hand, without overwhelming them. Recollections of the survivors were powerful stuff indeed, none more so than those of Colin Moore, who lost his brother and two friends in the attack. As he fought unsuccessfully to hold back tears when talking about that day, I doubt anyone watching him could remain dry-eyed.

And that’s what angers me. There was more than enough emotion, plenty of factual evidence, for a decent documentary with some reconstruction to be made. But The London Nail Bomber punctured it all with a ham-fisted approach to dramatisation. Maybe the BBC knew that, and maybe that’s why this programme got overlooked in their preview material. It’s a shame, because a re-edited programme, ten minutes shorter with the worst excesses curbed, would have been even more powerful and essential viewing for everyone.