redsturgeon wrote:Fascinating watching, I would recommend it.
I agree. I thought it was one of the best TV dramas I've seen for a while, and that Sheridan Smith, in particular, was outstanding.
I recall her from the drama documentary in which she played Cilla Black. She did her own singing and I thought she actually sounded better than the original!
But all the acting was excellent. The woman who played Karen was uncannily like the real woman.
I have to say I thought it had a bit of a "victimy" spin on it, as far as Karen was concerned. This may be true, of course, but the judge who heard all the evidence said "The offences you committed were truly despicable".
I didn't see her so much as a victim; just someone who was completely inadequately equipped to deal with life. There are millions of such people, surviving from day to day, but they're like the "submerged tenth" of Victorian times. The rest of us are mostly in blissful ignorance of their existence until we see something like this.
The crime may well have been "despicable" by the standards of normal people, but I sometimes think that judging and punishing women like KM is making the incorrect assumption that she is a normal member of society, to be judged by normal standards.
In reality, people like her are rather like overgrown and rather backward children. They tend to act on impulse rather than making rational decisions, largely because they’re incapable of rational thought.
In many cases, again like a backward child, they have only the vaguest notions of right and wrong and can’t assess or predict the serious consequences that follow an action.
Putting such people in prison is, I suppose, inevitable, in order to appease the public’s demand for punishment, but it achieves nothing. It doesn’t act as a deterrent, because that assumes people will weigh up the risks before repeating the behaviour, which they don’t. In any case, this was clearly a one off, incredibly stupid act that there was no chance of her ever repeating.
I don’t pretend to know how people like this should be dealt with, but the main problem is that the people who constitute this “submerged tenth” seem to be a permanent feature of society, with no real hope of ever bringing them out of the pit they inhabit.