Stephen William

The series was overlong although interesting up to a point - that is, if you watch it as a portrait of a man caught in a trap partly of his own making, which he had no hope of escaping. Whether he was a murderer or not (and the series will leave you none the wiser) Ian Bailey was a complex character. But by focusing on him, and on the family of the victim Sophie Toscan du. Plantier, it failed to present the bigger picture. Like the Irish Police and the French judicial system, it paid little attention to other possible lines of enquiry or to establish any motive for Sophie’s murder, whether by Bailey or anyone else. The result was partial and inconclusive, the only resolution being obtained by the victim’s family in a ludicrous French “trial”, held off-camera, which convicted Bailey in his absence and without a defence on the basis of flimsy evidence.