Harold Shipman: Doctor Death

The first "Harold Shipman: Doctor Death" was a TV dramatisation made in 2002. This one is a straightforward documentary made for the twentieth anniversary of his arrest. The documentary makers speak to the detectives who investigated the case, the detective who arrested him in 1975 for an offence that could have cost him his medical licence, the press, people with whom he'd worked, and the children of his victims, the former of whom were all adults at the time due to his selecting older people, overwhelmingly women, to dispatch with medical precision. Curiously, the one person missing is Angela Woodruff, the woman who can be said to have brought him down.

An alternative hypothesis, one not mooted here, is that after murdering so many people, Shipman left the one deliberate clue every murderer is said to leave. He may well have been supremely arrogant, but he surely could not have expected to get away with such a brazen act as forging the will of the 81 years young Kathleen Grundy, especially as he must have realised her daughter was a solicitor.

We will never know that, nor will we ever be sure exactly how many of his patients he did murder, but we can be certain that something positive came out of this dreadful episode, and that in the UK at least there will never be any repetition of this horror by a deranged medical professional.

This series would easily have fitted into a one hour program. It was padded out with multiple shots of architectural features and signs on doors and clips repeated several times. The interviews seemed to have been commissioned by the tea marketing board as the camera focused heavily on mugs of tea. The 'original idea' of old people's deaths not being seen as important was interesting but not interesting enough to support 3 hours of TV. I appreciate that with many of the immediate relatives and other players dead it must have been difficult to bring anything new to the story. Very disappointing.