Thomas Sutcliffe: The feeding of our darkest appetites

Television has long known that crime pays, but if you really want to make a killing it seems that serial murder is the way to go. Should you need corroborative evidence, just flick through the pages of this week's Radio Times, in which – alongside the back-to-back crime dramas about which David Liddiment protested so high-mindedly in his MacTaggart lecture – you can find the hard stuff, all those stories that come with the frisson of archival fact.

Yesterday evening, for example, Channel Four continued its series on crimes "that have caused a moral panic abroad" with a film about Javed Iqbal Mughal, who claimed to have killed 100 homeless boys in Lahore. On Thursday night, BBC2 will screen a documentary about the shooting of Gianni Versace, a murder that turned out to be the fifth in Andrew Cunanan's killing spree, and on the same night Channel Five offers Post Mortem, an account of the Beverley Allitt case. Finally, on Friday, BBC2's series Catching the Killers looks at the history of criminal profiling – including the cases of "the vampire of Dusseldorf" and America's Ted Bundy, the international superstar of compulsive murder.

It isn't any of these, though, that have provoked a minor moral panic of our own, but the news that Channel Five plans to broadcast extracts from Fred West's police interviews as part of a programme about the Cromwell Street murders.

Like quite a few people, I expect, I reacted to this news with a lurch of incompatible sentiments. First there was a mild jolt of dismay at Channel Five's willingness to peddle such material for audience ratings (mild because to be fiercely indignant about Channel Five's serial exploitations would ultimately be exhausting). And then, lurking shamefacedly in the shadows, was the uncomfortable knowledge that I was quite likely myself to be part of that audience.

It was no good reassuring myself that I would be obliged to watch it as a television reviewer. That might eventually serve as a convenient alibi, but the truth is I would be watching because I was curious to hear what West sounded like, to listen to the unaccountable giving an account of itself.

This combination of repulsion and attraction resulted in a rather queasy effect – a choppy alternation of impulses in which any kind of steady horizon became difficult to detect. Was Channel Five really any worse than other networks in this respect? And just how disreputable was the curiosity that had been aroused by their promise?

It didn't make me feel quite as queasy, though, as an outright condemnation of the planned programme in a tabloid newspaper, written by Geoffrey Wansell, Fred West's official biographer and thus one of the few people who have already heard the interview tapes in question. Mr Wansell's article was a masterpiece of self-serving hypocrisy – an object lesson in how to exploit material while simultaneously condemning its exploitation. "To my dying day I will never forget the impression they made on me," Mr Wansell wrote about the tapes, before going on to explain how West had described in "the most precise and horrifying detail" how he had dismembered the body of his daughter Heather.

In an article devoted to the principle of charitable silence, you might have thought that the adjectives "precise and horrifying" would be sufficient, but Mr Wansell knows what readers want, so his next paragraph described some of the details in question before he concluded – with an audacious non sequitur – that "no one in their right mind could or should broadcast such material". Publishing it in a mass market newspaper is apparently a completely different matter, and imputations about the sanity of the author would be quite unfair.

The uncharitable thought occurred to me that one of the reasons Mr Wansell felt this so strongly was that his title to exclusive knowledge about West – "I'm one of the few people who has actually heard every single one of West's police interviews," he boasted at the beginning of his piece – would inevitably be diluted by any broadcast. And if, as he argues, confrontation with "the extremes of humanity remains at the heart of the challenge to any writer", then why is this not a challenge that might be extended to ordinary citizens too?

Still – a badly-argued case does not necessarily make its alternative true, and the more I searched for respectable arguments to back up the less-than-respectable prurience the programme aroused, the more clear it became that there aren't any. Channel Five might insist that it is going to make a sensitive and serious programme which addresses a matter of genuine public interest(there's always a first time for everything), but its explanation that West's own voice is necessary to make the case that the police investigation was flawed is pretty thin.

When Gloucester's council arranged for the demolition of 25 Cromwell Street, it had the rubble carted away to two RAF stations where it was systematically destroyed, with even the bricks ground to dust, to thwart those who might trade in relics. As Crown evidence, the tapes escaped that superstitious purgation and it is as true and authentic relics of a horror that they have value to the programme makers and – let's not pass the buck – to those of us who feel the faint itch to hear them.

Should we be allowed to scratch, though? The suggestion that we are facing up to the truth by doing so won't really wash, because Fred West was a monstrous liar as well as a monster. On the back of his book about the murders, Gordon Burn quotes a line from Don DeLillo: "News, darker and darker news, may be the only narrative people need, and the shapers of this narrative are authors in their own right." By this light West was a hideous bestseller, the creator of a storyline that gripped the whole nation, and there is a sense that in giving him a voice Channel Five are also conceding authorial kudos to him.

The possibility of a posthumous crime – slander – is very real. What is more, there can be little doubt that the broadcasts will cause pain to those already horribly intimate with the crimes. Martin Amis, whose cousin Lucy Partington was among West's victims, has written movingly about how sharply media coverage presses in on relatives who know too much already. Screening this material isn't about prevention or greater knowledge or honouring the dead – it's about us and our darker appetites.

And ultimately that's why I can't work myself up to condemn Channel Five, any more than you would condemn a pig for rubbing itself against a post. Their decision to fight for the inclusion of these recordings may be indefensible in forensic terms but it is all too understandable in human ones. And there may even be a tiny saving grace in the fact that our curiosity about West is not easily separable from our sympathy for his victims.

It might be more humane to suppress our fascination, to decline all of these invitations to sidle close to the brink and stare over, but I think it would be a little inhuman to be able to do it without a struggle, not even to feel the tug on our appalled imaginations.

I still don't know whether I will watch or not – I found myself unable to complete Burns' book because there were simply some facts I didn't want in my head – but if I eventually do listen to these soft West Country tones, I will take responsibility for the fact, rather than blaming the broadcaster.

sutcliff@globalnet.co.uk