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Gareth McLean
Tuesday January 13, 2004
The Guardian
Actors are like X-Men. Some use their power only for good - John Simm and Lesley Sharp, say - while some use theirs purely for evil: Martin Kemp and Neil Morrissey, for example. Others are caught on proverbial horns, torn between the darkness and the light, between doing the right thing (which is to say, quality work) and giving into temptation (which is to say, doing duff stuff and running with the money). Before being so harsh as to roundly condemn such daft thesps for succumbing, consider that Anakin Skywalker couldn't resist the dark side - and the Force was strong in him. Actors, believe it or not, are just as human as the rest of us.
James Nesbitt wavers, a bit like the X-Man Pyro. Sometimes, he uses his power for good (Bloody Sunday). Sometimes, he uses it for evil (Murphy's Law). And then there are those Sky football adverts of which we shall never speak. Thankfully, Wall of Silence (ITV1) saw Nesbitt doing good as real-life-person Stuart Robe, father to a murdered son, Jamie (Calum Callaghan).
Jamie Robe was beaten to death with feet and fists, baseball bats and pool cues in 1997 on Rotherhithe's Osprey estate. When his attackers split his skull, it made a noise akin to knuckles cracking. When the police, and then Stuart Robe, asked estate residents to help with their inquiries, they were met with the titular wall or else rancid abuse. People were either too scared to talk or too vile to care. In the end, it took the Turkish men from the kebab shop and a girl called Tracy to convict Jamie's killers.
So far, so movie-of-the-week, but Wall of Silence was better than that. If we must recall the disclaimer that dialogue was created, chronology was altered and that "some minor incidents and characters are fictional", we should also note how emotionally true the drama felt. And even though Nesbitt's Stuart and Phil Davis's DI Cottis were the focus for the story, the rest of the cast coped admirably with what they had, particularly Sophie Stanton in an underwritten role as Evelyn, Jamie's mum.
As well as being confidently directed (that we saw the attack but didn't hear it made it all the more powerful), Wall of Silence was cast perfectly. Ross Boatman and Jay Simpson made perfect policemen and Jamie's murderers were suitably thuggish, with John Joseph, playing James Pearce, exuding a toxic aura of hatred and contempt for pretty much everything. Obviously we didn't get to know the killers, learn of their deprived backgrounds, or discover they had been abused as children, but it was pretty clear that the most dangerous people of all are those with nothing to lose.
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