The Hunt for Raoul Moat, ITV1, review: superb retelling honours the victims and reduces the criminal
British television is very good at dramatisations of real crimes, from See No Evil to The Moorside to The Salisbury Poisonings. When they are broadcast, these series are often accompanied by controversy, however, with the argument being what was the point in making them, given the inevitable attendant pain for the victims and their families.
Well, in the case of ITV1’s three-part series The Hunt for Raoul Moat, the point in dramatising Britain’s biggest manhunt could scarcely be clearer: Moat’s victims – Christopher Brown, shot dead in cold blood; Samantha Stobbart, his former partner who was also shot and maimed, and PC David Rathband, shot for being a police officer and nothing else – are here front and centre throughout.
By foregrounding them, the series diminishes Moat, which is another very good reason for its existence: 30,000 people subscribed to the “RIP Raoul Moat you legend” Facebook page at the time, deluded into thinking a sociopath was some kind of wronged avenger. The bare bones of the Moat story, of course, are well known: how could they not be when they played out on the front pages and the live news broadcasts so vividly in July 2010?
Moat, a nightclub doorman with a hair trigger and a victim complex, was in prison for hitting his own child when he was overheard plotting to go and harm his ex on his release. This he duly did, shooting dead Stobbart’s new partner, Brown, before seriously injuring her. He went on to shoot Rathband at point-blank range before going on the run and eventually killing himself after a lengthy stand-off with police. Less known – though prominent here – is that Rathband was permanently blinded and killed himself two years later.
The challenge for The Hunt for Raoul Moat as a piece of television is telling that story without making Moat the anti-establishment hero he so wanted to be. It isn’t easy, either, because a manhunt is gripping theatre. The Hunt for Raoul Moat’s triumph is that it gets the balance right: Moat, played by Matt Stokoe, is never glamorised or even shown much beyond what was necessary, and if his demise is tense, it is no more tense than the courtroom scene that sees his miserable accomplices jailed.
The abiding memory of three hours of the Moat story, then, is less Raoul Moat, narcissist, domestic abuser and violent criminal, and more of the mess he left in his wake. The reverberations and the aftermath, the drama shows us, are every bit as shocking as the events themselves.
