Review: When it comes to crime, honesty pays

THE CREDIT sequence to Crime Story, ITV's current strip-mine for true-life drama, makes no pretences at forensic precision or social service. No blue-flashing lights, no white-coated lab technicians, but a spooky Hammer horror castle occupied by the blindfolded figure of Justice and a malevolent-looking raven. Where Crimewatch Special is po-faced, Crime Story is Poe-faced.

This must be rather liberating for directors who can forget all that dutiful tosh about informing the public and concentrate instead on producing a calling-card for their talents. I haven't seen any of the other films in the current series but 'A Terrible Coldness', last night's programme about Graham Young, who poisoned his work-mates at a factory making photographic equipment, was absolutely unabashed about turning real events into well-crafted melodrama. It opened with the percussive flash of a photo-booth, punctuating the opening credits and leading up to the stacked black-and-white images of the central character. Everybody looks like a serial killer in those things but Graham Young was a category winner (I seem to remember the papers had a field day at the time with his icy stare and Dracula hairstyle). In motion you first saw him with his sister, announcing that he had a new job. He'd told the truth, he said, that he'd had mental troubles after the death of his step-mother but that he'd recently been discharged from hospital. What his manager didn't know was that the hospital was Broadmoor and he'd ended up there for poisoning his entire family.

In this version the manager seemed rather sympathetic and broad-minded, so maybe if he'd known he would still have hired him and just made sure that he wasn't on tea-making duties. As it was, Graham had access to the mugs and it wasn't long before everyone was going down with the Bovingdon bug. The horror of his crime, and the source of the film's title, was the dispassionate precision with which he recorded the effects of his administrations - racking illnesses that left his victims blinded and paralysed.

It was here that you wondered about the ethics of Richard Signy's stylish direction, a mannered business of exaggerated lighting, bleached flashbacks and tangential editing. He clearly wasn't aiming at anything like realism - it seems unlikely that you would have found 'You Always Hurt the One You Love' on a pub jukebox in the Seventies even though it made a canny recurring motif for Young's murders.

In other words as a horror movie it was a cut above the routine, a film that had a sort of icy chill to its composition. But horror movies make you feel different about victims; in horror movies they are there for disposal and it doesn't matter if you think them dumb for going down into the cellar at midnight.

If they're real people it does and Young was so grotesquely weird here that his work-mates' fatal innocence about what was going on began to look like obtuseness. Short of munching down dead flies like dry-roasted peanuts he could hardly have advertised his dementia more clearly. In truth his victims were killed by stupidity - it's just that it wasn't their own but that of the system that released him.

Sitting Pretty (BBC 1) comes from the fertile pen of John Sullivan, creator of Citizen Smith and Only Fools and Horses, so it should be a matter of enough said. For some reason it isn't. The sit- is all right - Essex girl with expensive tastes (Diane Bull's performance is strongly reminiscent of Alison Steadman in Abigail's Party) ends up back on the farm with her dowdy sister and folksy parents.

Unfortunately the -com seems unanchored to reality, dallying with stale cliches like frustrated spinsters and hypocritical politicians. However implausible the plots of Only Fools and Horses, you could always believe in Rodney's social embarrassment and Del-boy's chancer optimism. Here the characters seem to have been invented to fit the jokes rather than the other way round.