With the Shannon Matthews story, it’s not easy to accentuate the positive — but BBC1’s The Moorside (Tuesday) is having a go nonetheless. Although touching at times, the result ultimately proves a rather awkward watch.
Shannon was nine when she went missing from the Moorside estate, Dewsbury, in February 2008. Her mother Karen made a tearful televised appeal for the return of ‘my beautiful princess daughter’, but ended up serving four years in jail for being an accomplice in Shannon’s kidnapping. With her chaotic taxpayer-funded life, and her seven children by five fathers, Karen was duly turned into a sort of anti-poster girl for the tabloids. The Moorside itself became a symbol, including for David Cameron, of ‘our broken society’.
Now this two-part drama sets out, very determinedly indeed, to stand up for the place — by insisting instead that the people of the Moorside are, even by the usual standards of Yorkshire people in TV dramas, peerless salts of the earth.
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