Steeltown Murders; The Stones and Brian Jones

“Writer Ed Whitmore does full justice to the painstaking and never glamorous policework that finally found the Saturday Night Strangler, and the difference integrity makes to a job and to a life. More importantly, it does so without ever losing sight of the shock, the intensity of the loss created by a man who, like so many, should have been stopped before he escalated to murder, and the endurance of the grief he caused. It takes its time but never flags or becomes ponderous (thanks to Marc Evans’ directorial talents, as well as the dense script), and it takes its responsibilities to the living and to the dead seriously.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“Solidly crafted by writer Ed Whitmore, a veteran of nearly 30 Silent Witness scripts as well as the 2022 Bafta-nominated Manhunt: The Night Stalker, Steeltown Murders justified its existence in an overcrowded true crime landscape. If the glut of such morbid TV drama must be added to, let it be by the more thoughtful likes of Steeltown Murders.”
Gerard Gilbert, The i

“Philip Glenister plays Inspector Paul Bethell in the 2000s, sharing the role with Scott Arthur as the diligent young DC Bethell in 1973. The two actors are so similar that it’s easy to recognise them as the same man in different eras, but the constant switching between decades does slow the story down. That’s a real shame, because it’s a moving and engrossing case, and writer Ed Whitmore powerfully evokes both the horror of the crimes and the reluctance of the community to reopen the wounds.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“You could almost smell the place, the beauty of the surrounding hills only compounding the sense of filth when we learnt of the unsolved murder of Sandra Newton, with the local coppers fitting up her boyfriend while the real killer was poised to strike again. The jokey cheeriness of factory workers Geraldine Hughes and Pauline Floyd (Calista Davies and Jade Croot) as they excitedly headed for a night out signalled their fate with the grim inevitability of a Crimewatch reconstruction.”
Ben Dowell, The Times

“Writer Ed Whitmore and director Marc Evans are clearly trying to handle this story with care and an absence of sensationalism, but have ended up with four turgid hours of television – which is odd, because they had none of these problems when making ITV’s vastly superior Manhunt.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“Nick Broomfield’s biography of the Rolling Stone whose drug- and booze-ravaged 26-year-old body was pulled from his swimming pool on 3 July 1969 is at its best when telling his life story through the women who loved him – and whom he, at least temporarily, loved. Forty years after Jones’s death, a heartbreaking note from his dad, Lewis, turned up in the attic of Lawrence’s family home. Read poignantly by Lawrence, it forms the denouement to Broomfield’s touching film.”
Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian

“Broomfield’s film keeps returning to the idea that Jones’s unhappiness and insecurity can be traced back to his failed relationship with his parents, and his yearning for their approval. Well, who knows. It’s as good a theory as any and it acted as a framing device for an absorbing film which aims to restore Jones to his rightful place as a central figure in the story of The Rolling Stones.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph