TV Pick of the Week: A Confession - Review by Yvette Huddleston

Screenwriter Jeff Pope’s excellent six-part series does exactly that to present a sensitive, thoughtful and thought-provoking drama. It opens in Wiltshire in 2011 with one family waking up to find that their beloved daughter and sister Sian O’Callaghan has not returned home after a night out in Swindon. The tension very slowly escalates from the moment Sian’s mother Elaine (Siobhan Finneran) answers a call from her son to say Sian’s partner Kevin is concerned – “oh she’ll be fine,” replies Elaine, “she’ll have stayed at a friend’s house” – to the gradual, awful realisation, after multiple calls to friends and hospitals yield nothing, that something is not right.

The police are informed and Detective superintendent Steve Fulcher (Martin Freeman) and his team begin the search. Fulcher is aware that, as with all missing person cases, it is a race against time, but he is nevertheless hopeful they might find Sian alive. He reminds everyone of their duty as police officers to ‘preserve life’ and everything he does subsequently is motivated by that aim. Meanwhile we also meet Karen Godden (Imelda Staunton) mother of Becky, a troubled young woman who was working as a sex worker to feed her drug habit, and who, although there have been sightings by others, Karen has not seen since 2003.

After painstaking investigation into Sian’s case, Fulcher and his colleagues find key CCTV footage leading to taxi driver Christopher Helliwell (Joe Absolom). He becomes their chief suspect – they wait and watch in the hope that he will lead them to Sian, but when he is spotted buying large quantities of paracetamol, and becomes a suicide risk, he is arrested. Then things take an unusual turn, once they pick him up Fulcher sits with him in the back of the car and gently elicits a confession from Helliwell that he murdered Sian, and he leads them to where her body is. Then he turns to Fulcher and asks ‘do you want another one?’ It is at this point that Fulcher makes a decision that, while leading to the discovery of Becky’s body, also spells the end of his career. Freeman is excellent as the solid, reliable, moral centre of a story that asks profound, searching questions about policing and the criminal justice system.