There’s nothing noble about televising violent crime

Are there crimes that are too depraved to be dramatised? And how long should programme makers wait before real life crime becomes the subject of a TV show?

If the case of the Night Stalker - a serial burglar and rapist who terrorised south east London for 17 years during the 1990s and 2000s - is worthy of being turned into television, then doing so now is surely too soon.

Hundreds of elderly woman and men - the youngest, 68; the eldest in her nineties - fell prey to the Night Stalker. Men and women, sleeping in their beds, woken by a gloved hand, a masked face.

A decade after Delroy Grant, the man responsible, was brought to justice, ITV is broadcasting Manhunt: The Night Stalker. The four-part drama, which finishes tonight (Thursday), opens with a scene which makes you wonder whether depicting such fresh events for entertainment is really a good idea; the bloodied bedsheets of one victim shows what those who found Grant in their bedrooms suffered.

Martin Clunes, who plays DCI Colin Grant - the Met detective who eventually solves the case - has insisted the drama doesn’t ‘glamourise anything’. ‘Throughout the production process, it was crucially important to me that we respected the victims and their families,’ he has said

In the years when Grant was active, my grandparents moved to Shirley, in Croydon. It was a place where people go to grow old: many of the houses in the area – with their rotting window frames and overgrown gardens, which had once been so carefully tended – betrayed the age of the occupants

Watching ITV’s drama, I can understand the terror that people like my grandparents faced, drifting off to sleep at night, not knowing if they would be awoken by an unwelcome visitor. Grant was meticulous in his planning: he staked out houses, waiting in wedge-shadowed gardens in the dead of night

In the months before Grant was caught, those living in the area targeted most frequently by Grant had some reassurance: police commandeered spare rooms, watching for the Night Stalker to return to a patch that was so familiar to him. This was how they eventually caught him, when he finally slipped up in the early hours of the morning on 16 November 2009.

With Grant behind bars, Shirley is no longer a community that lives in fear of what might happen when night falls. But while the makers of Manhunt – and its star actor – might convince themselves that this documentary is morally justified, the victims may well differ.

Grant was a man who killed without killing, who blighted the final years of his victims; who brought terror to suburbia. So, no – reliving these events does nothing to respect those victims. Manhunter might be great TV, but let’s not delude ourselves that it’s a noble endeavour.