Boy A gets only a B plus

Channel 4’s major film Boy A was a thuddingly sincere piece of drama that dared you to dislike it, just as it dared its characters to dislike its central character, Jack Burridge. As a child Jack and a fiendish friend had murdered a little girl, an unspeakable act that dominated the newspapers of the day. In court, Child A, had been denounced as evil, which was the world’s verdict.

We met him aged 23, about to be released into society under his new name. A social worker, Terry, gave him a pair of trainers carrying the logo “Escape”. This was his chance not merely to escape the penal system and his past but his previous identities: the unloved son, the school dunce, the demonised defendant. The writer Mark O’Rowe, who adapted Jonathan Trigell’s novel, asked us to believe in the discontinuity of personality and thus assume a position of superiority over a vengeful, unforgiving, paranoid Britain, presided over by a red-topped press.

At the point of his release, Jack, played with awkward vulnerability by Andrew Garfield, was pathetically enthusiastic. Terry assured him that his new identity was his right but, as in a fairy story, there was a rule he must not break lest the enchantment be broken: to acknowledge, perhaps even to himself, but certainly, to others, his past. This proved much harder than keeping down a factory job, making mates or finding a girlfriend, since he was beset by memories (flashbacks in TV terms), nightmares and a confessional urge to tell his girlfriend. That the past would in the end trap him was heavily hinted by the director John Crowley who filmed him in confined spaces: in narrow hallways, between stacks of factory goods, surrounded by bars in a corner of a disco.

If the camerawork was bleak, beautiful and gently metaphorical (a tree of knowledge loomed over Jack as he surveyed his friend’s grave), the story was over literal and simplistic. It made the rehabilitated Jack not simply an exile from society but a visitor from the Planet Zog who had heard of neither Panini nor David Brent: his cultural innocence was almost saintly.

Theorising reasonably, that Boy A had turned bad through a lack of parental love, it gave him both a violent father and a mother dying from cancer. To explore the possibility of redemption, it had Jack save a young girl from a car crash. Terry was a great social worker but a lousy father who ignored his own son. In revenge, Terry’s boy sold Jack’s story to the tabs. Peter Mullan, an actor who specialises in depicting fractured towers of strength, was Terry. He had to work overtime to keep his story credible.

Most disappointingly, the film looked away when it came to Jack’s crime. The producers insisted that this was not the story of James Bulger and that Jack was not Robert Thompson or Jon Venables but the premise invited us to consider a case as bad as theirs. Here, however, Jack, led astray by the more damaged Philip, abducted not a toddler but a brattish adolescent and it was not even clear that he did more than witness her murder. The redemption did not fit the crime. While the acting and direction of Boy A haunted, its fudges irritated.

While you were watching Boy A or Monarchy (after its last attempt to publicise it, the BBC offered us no preview tapes), BBC Four was showing a fascinating little documentary by Mark Everett, better known as E of the rock band Eels. It was about his relationship with his father Hugh, a quantum physicist who devised the theory of parallel universe, a brilliant but embittered man whose theories had been ridiculed before becoming orthodoxy (at least in sci-fi). As a father he was a big fat zero.

His Many Worlds Theory explained how an electron could happily be in two different places at once. Despite an involving beginning, Parallel World, Parallel Lives tried to be in two places at once and found it couldn’t. After some lucid, cartoon-aided explanation of the maths, it focused on the relationship, a subject that even 25 years after Hugh’s death defeated Mark. He let himself off the hook with a song about turning out like his father. If you swapped the rock star’s cigar for the physicist’s cigarette, they certainly looked alike and in their easy cynicism and preference for privacy perhaps there were other parallels as well.

Out of the box

Congratulations to Paul Watson, the grandaddy of reality TV. After his summer travails when he was accused of faking a death scene on Malcolm and Barbara, last week he won two Grierson Documentary awards including a lifetime achievement gong. Accepting the latter, he told a story about a barman who had not heard of a single one of his programmes – not even The Family – but bought him a drink on the ground that he had won the same prize as David Attenborough “the bloke in 10 Rillington Place”. A tall story? Not according to Watson, who told the audience he never ever lied.

HD Corner: my reader last week was right: the picture standards of Cranford, shot on new HD Genesis cameras, are deeply ordinary. On the other hand, the HD coverage of England’s Croatia disaster was stunning: you could see every flake of dandruff on Alan Hanson’s jacket.

andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette