A very good post!

Yes there were not all the support services that we take for granted now and you couldn't google anything! And of course attitudes to prostitutes, abortion and social behaviour have change to the point that they would be unrecognisable back then. It was a totally different society back then and you did take most things by word of mouth as you had no other reference point to refer to.

I never saw the original in the cinema (I'm too young) but even so I do very much remember the claustrophobia of the rooms, the corridors, the streets even. You could almost physically feel the damp, the cold, the darkness and the desperation of Rillington Place.

Attenborough was great, but very different from Tim Roth.

If I remember well Attenborough was mainly menacing and cold, whereas IMO Tim Roth portrayed Christie as the real monster that he was. A sad little old man, stooping, whispering...and then the full force of what he is doing just hits you straight in the face.

I was quite glad (if that's the right word) that I watched this on BBC I Player, because by the time episode 3 came along, I had to pause it several times. It was as if Tim Roth's whispering, the "there, there, I've done this before" had seeped underneath my skin and into my mind. He made my skin crawl.

Fantastic performance Mr Roth, please don't stand behind me in Sainsbury's though.

What even if he is offering you a nice cup of tea in his best whispered Halifax accent?

I've started doing that to my wife now. She hates it.

"There there...sit down me dear...there there...be over in no time..."

That'd be grounds for divorce in this house!

Sounds like a plan - thanks for the tip.

Its Tim Roth, he can say what he likes to me!

Seriously though, i thought this was fabulous. Episode one a little slow but episodes 2 and 3 were fab. Roth deserves a Bafta for his performance.

Strange to think he was the shouty robber in Pulp Fiction. The complete opposite.

Check out this interview with Tim Roth discussing his TV film Made in Britain which was released in 1982. Be wary though there are clips from the film with profanities.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G4RM5WXCINE

I've only read a couple of posts on this so I'm probably the only one that thinks this! Whilst I think the acting was good, I didn't really enjoy the programme. I found it quite boring and Tim Roth's Christie just came across as a bit odd, not as a serial killer. I think Richard Attenborough's portrayal was much better and thought the film was far superior and told the story much better. My hearing is good but I found Tim Roth mumbled his lines quite a lot and whilst I could understand most of it, there were a few words I just couldn't understand even with replaying the scene.

To me it just didn't come across how significant this case is in British crime history, it came across like it was any old crime drama, not one that lead to the abolishment of capital punishment.

My suggestion is watch the film with Richard Attenborough if you haven't already, that is far superior.

How are serial killers meant to act?!

I've just recently caught up with this as I recorded it when it was broadcast. Tim Roth is a fine actor, always different, in this he had me believing in him so much that I wanted to put my fist through the TV screen & punch the obnoxious Christie. I felt very sorry for Tim Evans, it was easy though to see how a jury wouldn't believe him after all the lies he'd told previously about other stuff, as an illiterate person he stood no chance in court against a barrister who probably went to Eton & Oxbridge. To be honest I had little sympathy for Ethel, seeing as she stood by & let Evans hang knowing full well how vile her husband was - she got what she deserved. The ironic thing is that nowadays with the huge advancements there have been in science including forensics (particularly the discovery of DNA) since the 1940s/50s, executing an innocent person would be almost impossible & yet we don't have capital punishment - as opposed to back then when we had capital punishment but did not have the scientific capabilities to prove guilt 100%. If there was a referendum on whether or not to bring back the death penalty then I would vote yes to bringing it back as I do think that evil people like Christie deserve to die.

Well the capital punishment argument is not just one of proving 100% that someone did a thing to another that which we as a society disapprove of, it's the act of doing which we so disapprove to them that makes us no better than the criminals we are complaining about.

So it's not what they did and proving 100% that they did it that gives us a right to do the same to them that is the issue. It's should we be doing anything to them, that which we consider so wrong for them to do?

Plus we have time to consider, whilst many murders are 'heat of the moment' acts which makes what we do more nasty, cold and shameful if we then kill them in an act of revenge.

I agree, I wont be watching it, although it was a classic and Richard Attenborough portrayed it so well, it was also a depressing black and white dreary house and times film that doesn't have the pull of something like!. say Jaws to get me watching time and time again... Nah.... not for me.......