Lessons From A Serial Killer

Could a convicted serial killer teach us all a lesson in diversity?

On the 4^th October, possibly the most important programme I have ever overseen was broadcast. But I suspect very few of the people reading this blog will have seen it. It was a programme aired only in Scotland. And it was about a possible miscarriage of justice.

Colin Norris is a convicted serial killer currently serving 30 years. He was a nurse who supposedly poisoned at least five elderly patients with insulin – killing four of them in 2002.

The programme was staffed by a lot of journalists who used to work on the series “Rough Justice” - which specialised in bringing miscarriage of justices to light. Our film on Colin Norris (BBC Scotland Investigates: The Hospital Serial Killer), revealed new scientific evidence that casts doubt on the insulin poisoning that he was convicted for. As well as the new scientific evidence my team also discovered other people that had died of similar low blood sugar symptoms as the 5 “victims”, but these other people died when Colin Norris was not on duty. This meant that either there was someone else murdering these people or, more likely as the new scientific evidence points to, they all died of natural causes. If our investigation is right an innocent man could be serving time for four murders and an attempted murder he did not do.

The programme was covered extensively in the Tartan press (The Herald, Scotsman, Daily Record and Scottish versions of the UK papers) and received an above average audience. The new evidence has now been submitted to the criminal case review commission to decide if a miscarriage of justice has in fact taken place.

For the purpose of this blog post, however, the key fact is that Colin is Scottish. This potential miscarriage of justice was not picked up by network television. In fact, it was only commissioned by me because I have a pot of money to highlight issues that are either of interest to a Scottish audience and / or are about something specific to Scotland.

If Colin Norris had been English, I would have been very unlikely to have been able to commission a programme looking at his case. The implications for people interested in diversity in television is obvious. How many important stories are falling through the cracks because there is not specific ring-fenced money for looking at a specific group of people? Is there a similar miscarriage of justice film about a disabled person that hasn’t had a top BBC team of journalists looking at it because there isn’t ring-fenced disability money or TV programmes? What important black issues are we failing to cover because there isn’t ring-fenced money to make black specific programmes? By their very definition, we will never know the answer to those types of questions.

The truth is all broadcasters and all genre commissioners are far better at commissioning diverse programmes in the mainstream than they were twenty years ago, both in terms of on-screen talent and issues. One only has to look at the recent mixed race season on the BBC as an example. And no one wants to go back to the days when different diverse groups were given their own programmes and ring-fenced money but the films were nearly all broadcast at obscure times when no-one was watching.

However what “BBC Scotland Investigates: The Hospital Serial Killer” did reveal is that ring-fenced money for specific communities, regions or nations can sometimes uncover important stories that would otherwise be overlooked. Ring-fenced programme money is not appropriate for all diversity issues and communities but there is no doubt that it does have a role to play in television. Just ask all the Scottish people who watched the programme.