Secret Life: Times article & review 14th April 2007

6point7 found that tomorrows edition of The Times carries an excellent preview for Secret Life and an article about the drama. I will scan in any other images I find on the hard copy in the morning. 

It is easy to see why some viewers might worry about Secret Life. Channel 4’s new drama portrays a convicted paedophile struggling not to reoffend after his release into the community. The central, unavoidable issue in the script by writer-director Rowan Joffe is that it presents the paedophile Charlie Webb (Matthew Macfadyen) as a sympathetic, and often extremely likeable character. This could easily seem like an attempt to arouse sympathy for the worst kind of sex offender and an example of Channel 4 at its trendy, liberal worst. To some, it might be more evidence of the channel’s lack of moral compass, an extension of its preoccupation with deviant sex into a wholly inappropriate area.

Yet such a reaction really would miss the point. Macfadyen’s character is portrayed as a “nice” man, says Joffe, because most paedophiles are not the shabby, gap-toothed kidnappers of parental nightmare. He quotes Detective Chief Inspector Bob Maclachlan, a former head of Scotland Yard’s paedophile unit, who says that many offenders seem to be intelligent and charming men. “Monsters don’t get your kids. Nice men do.”  read more on the website