TV Eye: Real crime makes banal TV

<i>Stolen: The Baby Kahu Story</i>. Photo / Supplied

What would we do without crime? Sleep safe in our beds, perhaps. Or maybe leave our homes unlocked and our possessions unattended and walk the streets in short skirts without fear of being molested by drunken sportsmen who, according to some, are not responsible for their urges or actions.

What would we do without crime? Live without fear, I suppose. But we'd also be bored out of our gourds. Crime is hot spicy, sexy stuff, it's a leisure time amusement that packs out our cinemas and fills our TV schedules.

Deliver us unto evil because evil has better yarns, baby. Except when it doesn't.

So much crime, real life crime, is just so utterly banal. It is sordid and nasty and nearly always its details, its players, its beginning, middle and end are - no matter how sensational the headline - just an assemblage of pathetic people committing pathetic acts for pathetic reasons before they are caught.

I had cause to reflect on this - and also on why I so rarely take much interest in the never-ending parade of crime reports in the media - this last week after watching two locally produced dramas, TV3's Stolen: The Baby Kahu Story (last night) and TV One's Bloodlines (last Thursday).

Both were based on recent real life crimes - the first the kidnapping of a baby, the second a doctor who murdered his wife - and both, despite the best efforts of all involved in making them, could not escape the inherent banality of the crimes and the criminals.

Of the two, Stolen was perhaps the more naturally dramatic. It recalled the 2002 kidnapping, by one Terence Traynor at gunpoint in a quiet Lower Hutt street, of the 8-month-old daughter of two high profile Wellingtonians, treaty lawyer Donna Hall and jurist Eddie Durie.

Stolen was a straight-down-the-line, chronological retelling, with minor fictional tweaking, of a crime that shocked the nation.

The police, if Stolen is to be believed, pulled off a clever piece of investigating to get their man. Yet with the baby long found and Traynor long convicted - it failed to enthral.

There were three reasons, I think. The first is that tension is difficult to generate when the outcome is known. The second was that the real Hall was not someone who one could easily like, no matter how much one sympathised with her or admired her strength in such circumstances. Miriama Smith's portrayal of her from Tim Balme's script did not take Hall much beyond the rather cold, haughty public figure.

The final reason was Stolen - as much as it focused on Hall and her family and the doughty coppers - couldn't disguise the fact that it was the story of a pathetic man committing a pathetic act for pathetic reasons.

Bloodlines even more so. In the late 1990s, Dunedin doctor Colin Bouwer decided he would use insulin to slowly poison to death his wife Annette so he would be free to run off with another woman.

But again we knew before we started watching that the coppers got their man, and Bloodlines' retelling of who-did-what was so very bloodless it failed to raise the heart rate.

Both films were undoubtedly hamstrung by their efforts to play it straight with the facts and the personalities - something perhaps forced on them by dramatising such recent events and the attendant sensitivities that come with that.

Yet it doesn't have to be so.

The Aussies have showed with Underbelly - though perhaps not with the third series which ended its lacklustre run last week - that real crime can be made compelling by playing faster and looser with the facts, ramping up the sex and violence and - most importantly - picking real life crime that has more to it than pathetic people, crimes and reasons.

Underbelly's makers worked out that while fact might be stranger than fiction, fiction makes better telly.