An interesting programme. Fly-on-the-wall documentary of how the police piece together the evidence to solve a crime. It's made with the Greater Manchester Police, but Greater Manchester is a large place which I rarely visit these days and even back in time I knew very little of.
Tonight's programme was a Cold Case, a rape of a prostitute from 1994, somewhat reminiscent of Waking the Dead, revisiting old cases, using advances in DNA technology and the DNA database to re-examine evidence and identify a culprit that was not possible then.
They introduced the programme by saying it was a crime that had been committed in Altrincham. There are few towns I know better than Altrincham. Or did know, anyway. But, if you include all the constituent villages and hamlets, Altrincham's a large place and I rarely visit these days.
Then they said the crime had happened at the Pelican. It occurred to me there are few spots on earth with which I am more familiar than the Pelican. Almost every single school-day I passed it twice a day...maybe there was a dozen, two dozen at most, times in thirteen and a half years that I didn't pass it. The most obvious way into Altrincham, for shopping and social, too. For years I thought Pelican Crossings were so-called because there was one more or less outside the Pelican (the one on which I used to strategically climb out of my pram).
Almost my local pub, except that it was the height of naffness to actually drink there. Full of under-age drinkers, which is why I took my brother there for a drink on his sixteenth birthday. Also a motel, as they explained in the programme, one in which the rooms don't need to be approached through reception. And nice grounds, through which runs Sinderland Brook, which forms the ancient boundary between Altrincham and Sale.
At the end they had a "If you've been affected by the issues in this programme..." helpline. Why should I be affected by this and not by shooting in McDonalds or The Fridge - somewhere that was a major drinking venue for me for a number of years, last visited little over a year ago. And why should I be surprised by perverse practices in a motel when it's over twenty years since I first learned about auto-erotic asphyxiation with fatal consequences following a Sale and Altrincham Messenger report of a travelling salesman whose body was found in the Pelican?
I suppose Brixton is a special case, one expects Brixton frequently to be in the news, but it's strange when a crime reconstruction programme happens in the leafy suburb you left because nothing ever happens. What was interesting was that the culprit - who got twelve years - lived as an affluent businessman in Wilmslow. In Wilmslow they like to think they're the bees knees. I expect when the story hit the local press, half the local population were genuinely shocked and the other half recognised that prosperous respectability is just a veneer.
