Tag: BBC TV

I watched the BBC drama The Moorside on iplayer, based on the disappearance and refinding of Shannon Matthews, a 9 year old girl who’s mother reported her missing and then 24 days later she was found staying at the home of her mother’s partner’s uncle. All the way through, because of knowing the story, it  appears obvious that the mother knows something more than she is saying, but most of the estate rally behind one of the women who organises searches, poster and t-shirt campaigns, marches and all sorts to keep the media focused on this little girl from the poor estate.

Thing turn horrid when it comes to light that the mother knew where her daughter was. It is interesting that the mother’s partner has been arrested for viewing child porn and there is the implication that he has been abusing the children, yet the estate turns on the mother calling her a “lying bitch” for the worry and upset she put them threw when, for whatever reason, she did not tell the truth that she knew where her daughter was.

The mother was a weak, sad, slightly mentally backward person, who had been abused all her life, rejected by her parents, and gone from different man to different man who used and her abused her. Maybe she did take her daughter to a safe place because she knew her present partner was abusing her but was not strong enough to say. Who knows. In one scene during two of the close friends of the mother are sat in the park and both say that they were abused but it is said in a matter of fact way; one saying you had to get over it and move on, the other saying she did report her father but only because he was remarrying and she wanted to project the children of his future wife. But it was just a very normal thing. It left me wondering how many people on that estate had been abused or where abusers and so reacted as they did.

There was a lot of showing mob rule and of it being all or nothing. But it was not just the people on the estate who were like that. When the mother was prosecuted the lawyer who gave the statement to the press said she was “pure evil.” No she wasn’t. She was a sad, weak, simple woman who had made a mistake and was taken advantage of and never told the truth. She never did tell the whole truth. And as psychiatrists are realising now there are people with borderline personality disorders who find truth a very strange concept.

Yes she did have mental health problems but she was not evil. What it left me feeling was how we are into this all or nothing. Trump is all evil or all mad or all something. Everything is in or out, good or bad. It is all or nothing mob rule and I believe The Moorside was showing just that through the tale of a young misused woman and an estate full of people who were lost and no longer knew their way.