Archive Crime Drugs Vice At home with the criminal element
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MacIntyre's Underworld, Five What if I told you that the subject of last night's MacIntyre's Underworld lives in a country house, wins prizes for growing leeks, is taking a kind of sabbatical in which he's enjoying bringing up his sons, and makes fussy distinctions between words that previously had blurrily similar connotations? You might think Donal MacIntyre had gone up in the world and found a posh literary eccentric to celebrate. But no. He's as down and dirty as ever. His subject was Paddy Conroy, the Newcastle career criminal, who has an almost wholly impenetrable Geordie accent, a character marked by ferocious drive and cheeky triumphalism, and whose distinction of the night was between a gangster and a villain. It turns out the former is a loner who lives in his imagination and the latter is just an ordinary bloke making his way as best he can in a tough world. Guess which one our Paddy is. There does seem to be truth in Conroy's claim. His life has been connected to the social fabric sufficiently that there were organised protests through the Newcastle street in the 1980s to get him released from a lengthy sentence. We found him recently released from prison on licence. Any misdemeanours would result in his going straight back inside. He therefore has to break the habit of a lifetime and withstand all the many provocations of his rivals - for example, in a ritualistic incursion into Conroy territory one gang held a party in the pub across the road from his house. MacIntyre struck footage gold twice. First was when we saw a shaken Conroy effing and blinding about the absence of his bodyguard and prearranged transport, as emerging from a building into the street instantly puts him in danger. Second was when Conroy was eventually provoked into an offence and - convinced he was going to be sent down - went on the run before the hearing, risking an even greater sentence. But the case was decided in his absence and he had only to pay a small fine. Conroy was delighted to use MacIntyre's interest in him to revel in his hard-nosed insights and embattled self-aggrandisement. But MacIntyre refrained from his usual high-minded attitude. Conroy, if he's damned, damned himself from his own mouth. We were left to make up our own minds. It was a fascinating portrait of a small man with big ideas, blithely unaware of how acutely unappetising the world he revealed to us is. MacIntyre experimented with an instrument with which we don't usually associate him, restraint, to make mincemeat of Conroy's triumphalism. I feel like I've spent most of my life watching Jack The Ripper television, where they pretend to be exploring the latest theory about who he is and why he did it, but they're actually making a hamfisted documentary attempt to revel in the gore and the menace. How refreshing, then, to bring state-of-the-art 21st-century detection methods to a 19th-century mystery. This was the premise of last night's Jack the Ripper - The First Serial Killer: Revealed, which re-examined the five murders using psychological and geographical profiling. The former calculated who it was likely to have been and the latter where he was likely to have lived. The profile they came up with was an uneducated but cunning local who knew the area and possibly even the victims. They even identified the street he was most likely to come from. In spite of my dislike of the easy reassurance handed out by detective stories which always find the criminal, I have to admit I did feel let down that no names were ultimately named. Perhaps if they had MacIntyre as frontman, and had added a strand of Who Do You Think You Are? family tree investigation in reverse, a camera crew could have turned up and caught the look in the face of The Ripper's bewildered descendent. Who it could be? Jan Leeming? David Gest? Or even the great MacIntyre himself? Wed 22 Nov 2006 |