Harold Shipman: Doctor Death

A pretty good dramatization of how Doctor Harold Shipman finally fell under suspicion and was caught.

The production values are pretty basic but everything is well acted and the sets and locations all look pretty run of the mill and pretty realistic.

The programme takes a bit of dramatic licence obviously having to fill in many blanks.

Shipman is portrayed as charming, authoritative and highly respected and trusted. There seems little to no reason to doubt any thing he says. A few locals have doubts about the high death among his patients, many of them elderly but in excellent health and spirit. Shipman explains though that he has many patients in his surgery and that sadly death from old age does happen. Characters who do raise concerns are left looking foolish and crestfallen. Shipman continually exercises a caring bedside manner and is upheld as a pillar of the community. There's even some fantastic corpse acting.

The other main character in the story is a detective coming up for retirement who is first put onto the case when a forged will comes to light. Slowly they begin to uncover a mountain of evidence that there is a serial killer in their area. Shipman though seems able to offer a plausible defence and it's by no means certain they can prove his guilt.

The case is so famous that there's no point in trying to leave it a mystery so we know right from the beginning what he's up to. In the first scene he starts filling out the death certificate before he's even killed the victim. The drama uses a lot of actor with strong local Manchester accents to keep things feeling real.

The programme never really tries to answer the question of why he did what he did. I don't suppose we'll ever know. It seems to have had little to nothing to do with money. Nor do we know why he targeted elderly women. Was it because their deaths would be less suspicious? Was it because he had a special reason for wanting them dead. We'll never know....

Most of the acting is very good, there's just one or two extras who are truly wooden. The detective also sits down and discusses the case with a member of the public too over a drink in one scene. Pretty implausible.

Some critics will also feel maybe that this drama is exploiting an awful true story for entertainment.

I was gratefully surprised when I watched this movie, and after I was informed that was a TV Movie! Well, it doesn't seem like that: the timing is so perfect that we don't notice the intersection for commercials breaks. James Bolam is extremely convictive in the role of the physician that pretends to be GOD, choosing the day and the hour that a person should die. In a scale of 10, I give 6.

I thought that James Bolam played the part of Dr Frederick Shipman very sensitively and he certainly did the best he could with what must have been a tough role.

The setting for the drama was very good and the scenes representing Christmas 1997 were very good. I think it caught the atmosphere of the whole thing very well.

The humour displayed by James Bolam was very authentic to the real Dr Shipman and the sense of theatre he displayed to some patients in his surgery was true to the real character which I guess must have been relatively easy for the actor to do as he is so familiar with playing in comedy.

I particularly liked the confrontations between Dr Shipman and the police as well as the interview scenes.

The high-light of James Bolam's acting in my opinion came when he broke down after being confronted with the computer evidence and we see him crying and clinging to his solicitor's legs. This was an excellent piece of acting.

2 hours was not long enough as there was so much that could have been covered and one got the feeling that it had been rushed a little, and maybe the programme makers had found it difficult to know just where to start.

I found it intriguing and sad as well. It made you think about the case and yes, maybe it did supply some understanding into how the tragedy came about.

Dr Harold Shipman caused a massive stir when he was convicted and jailed for murdering 15 of his patients . " How could this have happened ? " was the public outcry , but after watching this docudrama I doubt if anyone will be any the wiser . There`s nothing fundamentally wrong about SHIPMAN except for the fact that it portrays Dr Harold Shipman as being extremely arrogant and conceited . Fine you may say , he was a mass murderer and he was , but what SHIPMAN doesn`t show is the way the general public and people in authority view doctors . Having read interviews with patients of Shipman many of them spoke about what a wonderful doctor he was and a really nice human being , many people refused to believe that a doctor in general and Shipman in particular would harm one never mind over a dozen sick patients but none of this is shown , only people who are suspicious about him at the outset and watching James Bolam`s performance you`d be hard pressed to believe anyone could be taken in by him . SHIPMAN was made with hindsight and I`ve got a really uneasy feeling it was made solely to cash in on the inquiry that concluded Friday 19th July 2002

At the inquiry it was revealed Shipman had murdered for certain 215 ( Two hundred and fifteen ) patients between May 1975 and June 1998 with another possible 45( Forty five ) murdered making him by far Britain`s most prolific serial killer. Shipman has never revealed why he did it and probably never will making any future film article or book deals pointless . Who cares why. He murdered scores of people and that`s the only fact that matters

This drama retraced some of the murders commited by primary care physician Harold Shipman in the Manchester area of the UK in the late 90s. Shipman was convicted of injecting his patients with lethal doses of diamorphine. Despite the highly unusual number of deaths in his practice his actions went unnoticed for a long period of time, and even now the authorities are unsure about the number of people that he may have killed. The film is low key, and does not attemot to provide any insight or reasoning into Shipman's motives, it simply documents the events as recorded in court transcripts. Nevertheless it is a powerful film; James Bolam a stalwart of light comedy in the UK is well cast. The film has caused some controversy here, as it has been shown on television before the inquiries into Shipman have been completed. Relatives of those who died tried to prevent the film been shown at this stage. On balance the events are documented as sensitively as possible; and the drama is good if very very uncomfortable viewing.