The winner of four awards including a BAFTA for best documentary, tonight’s THE MURDER TRIAL was one very ambitious project from the get-go.
For the first time, remotely operated cameras were placed inside a British criminal court to capture a murder trial in its entirety. After three years of negotiation, the Scottish High Court gave the filmmakers permission for this extraordinary and unique access - to film the case of a man accused of murdering his wife. Her body has never been found, there is no weapon, no crime scene and her husband appears to have a cast iron alibi. It has all the makings of a killer mini series, but is firmly grounded in real life.
The winner of four awards including a BAFTA for best documentary, tonight’s THE MURDER TRIAL was one very ambitious project from the get-go.
For the first time, remotely operated cameras were placed inside a British criminal court to capture a murder trial in its entirety. After three years of negotiation, the Scottish High Court gave the filmmakers permission for this extraordinary and unique access - to film the case of a man accused of murdering his wife. Her body has never been found, there is no weapon, no crime scene and her husband appears to have a cast iron alibi. It has all the makings of a killer mini series, but is firmly grounded in real life.
Above all else, THE MURDER TRIAL has quite rightly been called “a bold televisual experiment”. Although cameras have been permitted in Scottish courts since 1992 - provided the participants give consent, naturally - the trial in question was almost six weeks’ long,with one particularly crucial witness on the stand for an astonishing seven days. This means that six weeks of filming is boiled down to two hours of TV, and even that included archive footage and interviews with participants. Major props to anyone included in the editing process, which would have been brutal!
The biggest risk involved in filming any trial, even a murder trial, is that the judicial process might be boring, crushingly so. With THE MURDER TRIAL this is not the case though, especially given the dramatic narrative that could have leapt off the pages of a bestselling contemporary novel. In 2003 fruit and vegetable wholesaler Nat Fraser was convicted of murdering his wife, despite the aforementioned existence of a crime scene. In 2011 that conviction was then ruled unsafe on appeal and this retrial ordered. The access granted to the documentary makers was completely unprecedented – remotely operated cameras were able to catch the action from all angles for the ultimate in “reality”.
This documentary could most definitely have only gone one of two ways – utterly compelling, or pants rippingly dull to the point of rendering one catatonic. Thankfully for us it went with the former, and at two hours long makes for one hell of a watch. One thing I know is that it will ensure that I critique the courtroom scenes in the average film most acutely from here on in as Inow knows the many significant ways in which real court is not like movieland court. As in, a “real” court looks more like a vaguely soiled, open-plan office; and the space at the front where TV lawyers stand while they state their case is more filled with people sitting at computers, frantically making notes. There is also usually no shouting least you get shafted for your behaviour – think sotto voce into microphones and hushed tones.
So, check this documentary out at your peril – re-runs of Law & Order et al will never be the same again…