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Telegraph
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
One Day in Southport forgets the tragedy at the heart of the film
One Day in Southport (Channel 4) purported to be a documentary about the devastating tragedy that unfolded at a Taylor Swift -themed dance class on Merseyside a year ago. Rather like the appalling crime itself, however, the film was soon hijacked by other issues entirely. The result was grimly gripping but ultimately unsatisfying. Bafta-winning documentarian Dan Reed – director of Leaving Neverland and The Truth vs Alex Jones – investigated the mass stabbing, its febrile aftermath and the nationwide riots which followed. It proved too much to adequately examine in 51 minutes Reed began his story in simmeringly powerful style. A survivor relived the unfathomable knife attack and read aloud from her quietly furious letter to the perpetrator in prison. As she courageously did so, the camera lingered on her haunted eyes and shaking hands. This was intercut with dashcam and CCTV footage of a masked, hooded 17-year-old taking a taxi to Hart Space dance studio, silently getting out without paying and calmly entering the building. It was deeply chilling to watch, the stuff of a low-budget horror movie, before all hell broke loose. We heard screams, sirens and the testimony of parents who arrived on the scene to sights and smells they will never be able to forget. As misinformation about the knife man's identity spread online, the Southport community took to the streets. Angry mobs clashed with police. A local mosque was surrounded and set alight, while the terrified imam and worshippers hid inside. Ground-level visuals – a pacy mix of news footage, phone camera clips and social media reportage – were immersive, stressful and scary. It was instructive to witness how, in the absence of accurate intel about the murderer's identity, irresponsible speculation filled the vacuum. The assumption took hold that he was an illegal immigrant and a Muslim extremist. The authorities were too slow to disclose that Axel Rudakubana was actually Cardiff-born with Rwandan Christian parents. We saw how anti-immigration protests and riots spread to 27 towns and cities across the UK. Fuelled by far-Right rhetoric, Muslim neighbourhoods and asylum seekers were targeted by rampaging mobs. In post-apocalyptic scenes, a migrant hotel was stormed and a car full of Romanian workers vandalised. The Government and law enforcement were completely unprepared, scrambling to catch up with the escalating crisis. When they finally did act, they over-compensated with 1,800 rioters arrested, fast-tracked through courts and sentenced to a total of more than 100 years in prison. There were wider questions raised here. YouTuber Daniel Edwards described the protests as the 'consequences of not listening to the public'. Videographer Wendell Daniel argued that post-Covid disaffection isn't about race but about social class. Topics tantalisingly touched upon included two-tier policing and mistrust of mainstream media. Yet framed within a film about a tragedy which felt quickly forgotten, both the personal and the political were done a disservice. As the stricken Southport families mourned or recovered in hospital, narrative focus was elsewhere. We heard about flashbacks, trauma and survivors' guilt, but all too fleetingly. Rudakubana's victims condemned the rioting and rejected the politicisation of the girls' murders. 'It didn't represent me at all,' said one survivor. You wonder what they will make of this strangely scattergun film.
Times
5 days ago
- Times
One Day in Southport review — a horrifying portrait of Britain in 2024
I am often dubious about giving more airtime to murderous, attention-seeking lowlifes such as Axel Rudakubana, the Southport child killer. But one early image from Dan Reed's weighty documentary, One Day in Southport (Channel 4), summed up the utter coward. A taxi driver's dashcam footage showed him in a green hoodie and face mask trying to get through a door bearing the words 'pregnancy', 'yoga' and 'baby classes'. Wow, what a brave man, eh? What a warrior's legacy: walking into a community hub marked 'baby classes' and knifing little girls who are making friendship bracelets. An abundance of CCTV, mobile phone and dashcam footage helped to make this film, about this atrocity and the UK riots it sparked, sharply immersive. From the killer in the back of a taxi, sullenly asking 'Is this 34A Hart Street?' before commencing his mass-stabbing, to wobbly, close-up footage of rioters attacking police vehicles as someone shouts 'Set the van on fire!' and others smashing the windows of small terraced houses, there was a visceral, menacing feel to it, as if you too were there amid the baying mob. Reed, an award-winning director behind, among others, Leaving Neverland and One Day in October, chose to focus on YouTubers and others filming from within rather than the mainstream media filming from without. This gave it a more urgent, intimidating quality. 'You get what you deserve when you're protecting a f***ing mosque,' screamed one person, misinformed by social media, like so many others, that the killer was Muslim and had come here on a boat. 'I know he was born in Wales and all that, but he was of Rwandan heritage,' one interviewee said. Wendell Daniel, who is black and a videographer for Tommy Robinson, insisted this wasn't about race but about class. But Wesley Winter, a YouTuber born to British and Korean parents, seemed to take a different view. When filming riots in Middlesbrough, he was told by a masked man: 'If you're not white you can't go through.' His wife, who is Chinese, meanwhile, was sitting in their car being terrorised by rioters who she thought were going to drag her out and beat her. • Read more TV reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews I'm sure we can all remember the attack on a hotel housing immigrants, with rioters shouting 'Come out and fight like men'. But the film, skilfully woven and without a narrator, portrayed a sense of a country that was already a tinderbox, simmering with rage over immigration, the massacre of those little girls, the spark that detonated it: 'This is the consequence of not listening to the people.' It ended, without comment, with a clip of Keir Starmer's reference to 'an island of strangers'. In years to come this and other films may be studied as a bellwether of British unrest in summer 2024 and afterwards. But it is still the contributions of a quietly spoken young victim who survived the stabbings and her parents that were the most unforgettable. Whose stomach did not lurch when the girl's father (all of their identities protected) said a paramedic cut off her bloodied hoodie and 'it just looked like her muscles were inside out'? Dear god. The blade had fractured her spine and punctured her lung. Imagine the ferocity of that attack, one so vicious it left poor little Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, Elsie Stancombe, seven, and Bebe King, six, dead. The girl in the film said she had to have a special chair at school now because the normal ones dig into her scars. What spirit and courage she has shown; what an important documentary.★★★★☆ Love TV? Discover the best shows on Netflix, the best Prime Video TV shows, the best Disney+ shows, the best Apple TV+ shows, the best shows on BBC iPlayer, the best shows on Sky and Now, the best shows on ITVX, the best shows on Channel 4 streaming, the best shows on Paramount+ and our favourite hidden gem TV shows. Don't forget to check our critics' choices to what to watch this week, and browse our comprehensive TV guide
