There were many nasty surprises in BBC2's drama Real Men (12 and 13 March, 9pm), but they were all the same surprise really: yet another person turned out to be a paedophile. The director of the care home was one, so was the female social worker, so also the corpulent copper. Even the kids raped one another. By the end of Frank Deasy's relentless three hours, the only surprise left was that the hero himself, Detective Inspector Matthew Fenton, was not also at it. In a scene near the end, he innocently stretched over to comfort the small, abused boy who had become his key witness. I shuddered from force of habit.
The highly watchable Ben Daniels, who earned his name's appearance above the film's title, played Fenton. Suspiciously well dressed (suspiciously, until we discover his wife works in a boutique), he was the sort of career cop it is easy to dislike. His sincerity before the TV cameras was so practised that his family compared him to Tony Blair. When he discovers allegations of abuse at a nearby but now closed children's home, he sees it as an opportunity to get more resources. Gradually, however, we learn about his own childhood, his difficult relationship with his now dead father and the tensions in his own marriage. This hinterland becomes the territory on which he communicates to 12-year-old Russell, the film's other lead.
Russell, played to a worryingly high standard of knowingness by Harry Eden, has been sent to the Meadowlands care home following his mother's mental breakdown. His brutalisation starts immediately, for the home's confused, disturbed and abandoned children not only carry out the traditional internal business of childhood, fighting and bullying, but are abnormally sexually sophisticated. It is as if they are trying to escape their childhoods by breaking and entering into the realm of carnal knowledge. They do so for comfort and for profit. Russell's room-mate, Lester, sells his body to former residents for £20 a time.
His pimp is none other than the home's head, Alistair Jackson, a family man with a large capacity for self-delusion, played with earnest sanctimoniousness by Ewan Stewart. Russell's pander turns out, even more shockingly, to be his young social worker Christina (Zoe Telford). We did not find out exactly what she and Jackson - they are lovers - did to Russell, but we did not need to. The scene at the end of the first episode in which Christina and Jackson lean in towards Russell, who is sitting between them on a sofa, is one of the most disturbing in a film that features two hangings and a shooting in the head.
At one point Fenton accuses his co-investigator, Paula Savage, of having a low opinion of men but his creator, Frank Deasy, clearly has a lower one. It is unfashionable right now to say that such a view of real men's nature is exaggerated or that such dramas carry with them a whiff of Salem. Here, DS Barry Grimes, the one policeman who allows the possibility that some accusations of abuse could be false - "There's criminal compensation here in the background" - turns out to have raped a teenage girl and, possibly, to be grooming Fenton's daughter for the future. With the murder inquiry all tied up, the very last scene is of Grimes picking up one of the girls from the home, now a prostitute.
The plot was unarguably sensational and if we were not to find it sensationalist we had to believe that child abuse was at epidemic levels. To help us, Deasy, as well as immersing us in the vernacular of this world of "beasts" and "groomers" and "kiddy fiddlers", bathed us in as much research into the subject as we could stand. We were told that while most abused children do not go on to abuse, most child abusers have been abused themselves. We learnt that "grooming" is done generally not by strangers, but by adults known to the children's families: "It doesn't happen over a school wall. It requires a plausible relationship." When the cops here go through old staff reports on children in care, they turn out to be highly sexualised, and the extracts, surely, came from actual case reports. We sometimes felt only a few steps ahead of a public education film.
But we were also only a few steps behind a conventional police thriller. The pleasures of whodunnit and discovering how a thriller's plot fits together were not absent and, because of the way we feel about child abuse, there was guilt attached to those pleasures. (There was, incidentally, no such difficulty in taking Tony Garnett's excellent recent prison drama Buried seriously as drama because although it too was violent, sexualised and disturbing, it was sui generis or, if in a genre at all, that of heightened documentary realism.)
Real Men's redemption came in the final half-hour when it escaped its detective format and the real question became not the outcome of the police case but whether Russell, by now shorn of his lovable mop of hair and viciously turning on his mum, could mentally escape his abusers and inform on them. When he did so and resumed a version of normal life, Real Men offered us a little hope. Not all abused children become child abusers. Not all thrillers about child abuse need be exploitative.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times
