Believe Me is more impactful for one key reason – and true crime dramas should take note

This article contains discussion of subjects including sexual assault and rape that some readers may find upsetting.

The debate as to what makes a “good” true crime drama continues to rage on as the genre boasts more shows in its catalogue than ever before.

There’s an argument that none of these series should really be classified as good or bad, seeing as they’re depicting real-life tragedy. Many also think that the genre is more concerned with its psychologically confusing perpetrators than anything else. Plainly speaking, should we really be consuming so much of it and in turn, feeding the TV machine it spawns from?

The whole idea around “why would someone do something so atrocious?” is the ember that continues to burn bright within the genre, with plenty of shows preferring to veer on the side of sensationalism at the expense of their responsibility to the victims. Thankfully, the same can’t be said of ITV’s Believe Me.

The channel’s latest venture into the genre premieres tonight and Believe Me may only be four episodes long, but packs a weighty punch that means its subject matter will linger with you long after watching.

Now, the series hardly reinvents the wheel when it comes to how to appropriately depict such harrowing events on screen, and I very much doubt much of it will surprise any woman watching, but its handling of sensitive subject matter is something that I think more series creators should take note of.

We’re in an age where Netflix’s Monster franchise continues to be a worldwide hit and the global obsession with serial killers and their minds seems to be at an all-time high. But rather than seek to dig into the life of John Worboys (played by Daniel Mays), his upbringing and why he went on to become one of the UK’s most prolific sexual predators, Jeff Pope centres the stories of the women who fought to bring him to justice.

Based on real events but with names and characters changed to protect anonymity, we follow Sarah (Aimée-Ffion Edwards) and Laila (Aasiya Shah) who are both attacked by Worboys on separate occasions, years apart. When they go to the police, they’re held under an intense spotlight as the investigating officers paw over the personal lives, drug and alcohol habits, and even the colour of Laila’s nail varnish as indicators that their stories aren’t to be believed.

Going into watching the series, I – like many viewers, I imagine – was trepidatious approaching those early episodes in case they were unnecessarily graphic. Those scenes simply start off as women trying to safely get home late at night, something every woman knows all too well. Night buses are their own often maddening thing but a taxi is something that we’ve all been made to feel is the safest option available. So, do we really need every woman’s worst nightmare played out in a scene-by-scene focus?

However, the claustrophobic feel of those cab scenes is so well done that it almost feels as though you’re in the back of the vehicle with Sarah or Laila. The difference is, as a viewer, you know what’s to come next and as Worboys cheerily explains that he’s just won big at the casino, you’re struck by the depiction of this sex offender as friendly and slightly pathetic. Miriam Petche, who plays Carrie Symonds, says that Carrie believed Worboys was “unassuming” and Believe Me captures that starkly well.

As he tries to persuade the women to take the cup of champagne he’s poured, you’re willing them not to drink it and when a drug-induced haze starts washing over them, the series makes a choice not to show what happens after. As Worboys gets into the backseat with Sarah, for example, he helps light her cigarette and we then pan to Mays’s face as he says “it’s all part of the service”.

After the break in the episode, we then see Sarah wake up in hospital. Covered in bruises and cuts, she finds that her tights have been ripped. She knows she’s been raped but that dawning realisation in those hospital scenes is stomach-churning enough, without ever having to lean on depicting the assault itself.

The subsequent police interview scenes are also intentionally crafted to not only be painstaking, but truthful to the real ‘Sarah’s’ experience of having to explain and defend herself to officers that didn’t effectively investigate her allegations.

We don’t see what happens to Carrie either, with her telling a friend the following week about what transpired and us getting flashbacks to the night in question. She’s adamant that nothing happened, explaining that she would know “instinctively and physically” if Worboys had done anything to her.

In that same second episode, Laila’s assault is also similarly not depicted but does show Worboys forcing her to take a pill and terrifyingly closing his hand across her mouth to do so.

Seeing as we’ve already had a first episode grounded in Sarah’s distressing police interview process, when we come to Laila’s, it’s hard not to feel anything more than red hot rage and despair. When an officer asks Laila what “sort of girl” she’d describe herself as, seeing as she’s wearing red nail varnish, viewers will be hard pressed not to want to throw something at their TV screens.

Believe Me is, rightfully, more concerned with shining a light on the failings of the Metropolitan Police in its handling of Sarah and Laila’s allegations against Worboys and how they fought for years to have their stories heard. In the wrong hands, it’s so easy to imagine that it could have been a sensationalist series that leaned into gratuitous violence, graphic sequences and some kind of unnecessary exploration into Worboys’s psyche.

Instead, Believe Me is a masterclass in the kind of factual drama that isn’t doing a disservice to the genre, rightfully platforming the narratives of its victims wholeheartedly – and it’s still just as gripping, heartbreaking and impactful.

For information and support, please visit Rape Crisis or The Survivors Trust.

Believe Me airs at 9pm on ITV1 tonight (10 May), with all four episodes available to stream on ITVX.

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