Television

Caroline Faber, the honeyed voice of the mindfulness narrator on the programme.

Oh, the digitised life is fraught with nightmares. Lusus, acted by a huge cast of creatives and fine actors, hurtles through the disconcerting panics and robotic voices – ‘This number is no longer in use’; ‘This service is unavailable’; ‘Please enter your 16-digit…’; ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t detect a response’ – that induce helpless fury in over-40s. Enjoy!

After several threatening episodes of Lusus, I fled to the real universe. What pleasure on Poetry Extra to hear a 1963 recording of Sir Ralph Richardson reading The Ballad of Reading Gaol, by ‘prisoner C.3.3’ (alias poor Oscar). ‘With midnight always in one’s heart / And twilight in one’s cell’. It was ‘wrung out of me’, Oscar wrote, ‘a cry of pain’.

How superb to listen over three afternoons to The Reckoning, Mike Walker’s drama revealing the Machiavellian mystery behind the fatal stabbing of Kit Marlowe, with Charles Nicholl narrating from his own book.

I enjoyed, too, Red Lines (by Craig Oliver and Anthony Seldon) about David Cameron’s meeting with Putin, starring Toby Stephens and Jon Culshaw.

A documentary from Cheshire, where a pair of ageing bachelor brothers named Piekarski curate their cuckoo-clock museum lifted my spirits – as did a totally unexpected history of Spam, Monty Python’s ridiculed foodstuff which is apparently a national dish in Hawaii. There is even a Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota. How can the dystopian metaverse compete with such riches?

Marybeth Hamilton’s episode of Dietrich in Five Songs (Radio 3) on Falling in Love Again was brilliant.

‘In her 1972 concert [at age 71], her wrinkles pulled taut by needles, her high heels biting into her ankles, she sang every song the audience wanted to hear.’

In the final episode, Paul Morley (with his northern hard g in ‘song’, ‘singing’ and ‘singer’) rather overstated his evocation of the fleshless, boneless, ethereal, psychosexual, celestial, subversive, mesmeric, timeless essence of Marlene.

John Wilson (This Cultural Life) sought reminiscences from the venerable writer Penelope Lively, who’s announced her retirement at 89. During the war, staying in Government House in Jerusalem with her nanny, she saw Charles de Gaulle.

‘We were sharing a bathroom,’ she said. ‘And there he was – in his paisley dressing gown, with his sponge.’

And another sponge emerged in a World Service documentary about HM the Queen, celebrating her longacquired diplomatic skills – speaking Gaelic in Ireland etc – and the weekly conferences with her 11 prime ministers. ‘Everyone can come and tell me things, and unburden themselves,’ she said. ‘It’s rather nice to be a sort of sponge.’

The power of Radio 4. In his programme (and podcast) Just One Thing, Dr Michael Mosley mentioned beetroot juice: beneficial to the gut and also a bit of an aphrodisiac, as the ancient Romans discovered.

Hours later, I found the kitchen sink full of beetroot. ‘Did you by any chance hear Just One Thing?’ I asked my husband.

‘I did,’ he said. ‘And Michael [the greengrocer] said, ‘You’re the third man who’s been in today asking for beetroot.’

In December 2001, Kathleen Peterson, a successful telecoms executive and mother/stepmother to five children, was found in a pool of her own blood at the bottom of a staircase in the family mansion in Durham, North Carolina.

Her husband, Michael Peterson, a 58-year-old writer of crime fiction and possibly the creepiest man alive, called 911 to say she was still breathing, but he did not for some reason perform mouthto-mouth. Because the police didn’t buy his story that Kathleen slipped on her way to bed, the Peterson mansion became a crime scene.

Todd and Clayton, the eldest of the Peterson children, are the fruit of Michael’s first marriage to a woman of very little brain called Patty. The middle two, Margaret and Martha, were adopted as babies when their own mother, Elizabeth Ratliff – a friend of Michael and Patty – died, and the youngest, Caitlin, is Kathleen’s daughter from her previous marriage.

All except Caitlin, who believes that

Colin Firth and Toni Collette as Michael and Kathleen Peterson in The Staircase Peterson killed her mother, stand by their father, despite the surprising revelations thrown up by the case, including the large quantity of hard-core gay porn on his computer. What’s more, 20 years earlier, Elizabeth Ratliff had similarly been found dead by Michael at the bottom of another flight of stairs, with precisely the same number of lacerations (seven) in her head.

So Margaret and Martha discover that they have lost both their birth mother and their adoptive mother to a fall down a staircase after an evening with Michael Peterson – but does their devotion to him waver for one moment? Not a bit of it.

Meanwhile, in Paris, just as the investigation in North Carolina is beginning, an Oscar-winning film maker called Jean-Xavier de Lestrade hits on the idea of making a film about the case in real time, including interviews with Peterson, his children, his defence team and the DA’s office. More than happy to have a film crew follow him around for the next two years, Peterson, a worldclass narcissist, hands them so much material that the one-hour documentary they have planned becomes a 13-episode docuseries called The Staircase, first broadcast in 2004, which can now be watched on Netflix.

It contains priceless moments such as Clayton’s admission, when asked by a private investigator if he had ever suspected his father’s bisexuality, that no, he hadn’t, despite having walked in on him once when he was ‘jacking off to something, kind of, gay’.

The docuseries has now been turned into an eight-episode Sky drama starring Colin Firth – confusingly also called The Staircase – with actors playing Lestrade and his team of camera crew and interviewers. This means that the Sky drama has, at any point, about 30 people in each scene, because not only do the Peterson family never leave their father’s side, but his legal team has set up camp in the house along with the French filmmakers.

If you have a couple of weeks to spare, I recommend watching the docuseries of The Staircase alongside the drama mini-series, because it shows how self-indulgent and pointless this ‘remake’ is. Colin Firth’s impersonation of Michael Peterson, who has that irritating habit of ‘upspeak’, is so exact that it does not allow any interpretation of his character. Short of giving them all plastic surgery, hair and make-up, the filmmakers have done everything in their power to ensure that the cast are dead ringers for the real-life originals.