The Interrogation of Tony Martin: What the reviewers think

Tuesday 13 November 2018, 14:13

Must Watch TV reviewers Scott Bryan, TV Editor at Buzzfeed and Anna Leszkiewicz, deputy culture editor at the New Statesman share their thoughts on Channel 4’s new drama, The Interrogation of Tony Martin.

It's based on the transcripts of police interviews with Tony Martin – the homeowner who shot dead a teenager who was burgling his home.

Martin, now 74, was released from prison in 2003 after his murder conviction was downgraded to manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility.

Leave your comments on the programme below.

Scott says "I left feeling a lot more knowledgeable and understanding of this case"

"It’s sort of about whether you have the right to use justifiable force if somebody invades your home, and what is the means of protecting yourself if someone invades?

"There were a lot of ethical strands from that, he [Tony Martin] was saying that he’d been burgled so many different times and as a result he wasn’t able to protect himself because the police weren’t doing anything. It was at a point in time where the papers really jumped on it.

"What this drama tries to do is capture that sort of debate. They set it sort of as a drama, but what they’ve done is instead of using interpretation as to what has happened, they use the actual tapes after his arrest, and broadcast them in full.

"You really see that in the drama, I feel I left feeling a lot more knowledgeable and understanding of this case than I did before."

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Anna says: "It’s quite a simple premise, but it’s quite a powerful one"

"It’s really interesting, it’s called verbatim drama, which is something I hadn’t heard before. It comes from theatre, and the idea is that you would take your script, using real sources from the time and only use language that appears verbatim.

"In this case it’s tapes from the police interrogation of Tony Martin, and it’s pretty much entirely set in that interrogation room, the actors are speaking real lines from the tapes. So it’s quite a simple premise, but it’s quite a powerful one and it also means that this is contained as a one-off hour-long special, which I think is quite a bold move.

"With a lot of true crime there is a temptation to spin it out into a long series, whereas this is a fairly, in terms of what happened that night, a shut and closed case. We know what happened, it’s just about how you interpret what happened, to decide how guilty Tony Martin is.

"One of the more important things about this case is that the burglar who was shot and killed was actually a 16-year-old boy, not an adult, so that really complicates it. It’s a really interesting approach."