The Fall, Culture Show Special — Not Like Any Other Love: The Smiths

The serial killer on The Fall (BBC1, Monday) is no ordinary serial killer. He has a unique and terrifying modus operandi — or ‘signature’, as we serial-killer experts call it. What this serial killer does is to predate ruthlessly and single-mindedly on those young, attractive women unfortunate enough to be in the precise target-audience demographic of glossy-grimy five-part, prime-time BBC thrillers about serial killers.

His thoroughness is chilling. First he checks out what they do for a living: architects and lawyers are ideal because then people at opinion-forming, BBC executive-frequented Islington dinner parties will definitely be talking about it, whereas they might not if it were just smelly prostitutes. Then, he puts off killing his victims until after we’ve got to know them, so they’re not just any old hideously tortured and murdered corpse in a photograph, they’re real people with attractive, husky voices and a flirtatious manner and a bright future about to be cut tragically short.

More evilly still, the killer is married. With a nice wife. And delightfully cute kids who sit on the stairs and say tearfully, ‘Daddy, where have you been?’ when he returns from one of his late-night killing sprees with a sinister black bag whose contents he has to lie to them about. He also has one of those jobs which in BBC-land would be considered caring and psychologically grounded and validatory: he’s a marriage-guidance counsellor.

So you see this ain’t your routine, fava-bean-n-liver-eating, Hannibal Lecter-style, black comedy psycho we’re being asked to spend five hours of our life with, here. This guy is fully fleshed, perfectly rounded and kinda sexy too — the sort of guy the target demographic wouldn’t actually mind sleeping with themselves if he weren’t so busy strangling them with the underwear he’d just riffled from their knicker drawers.