This sensitive, finely worked drama shows us the unrelentingly bleak reality of the monstrous narcissist Dennis Nilsen’s macabre murders
I mean it as the highest praise when I say that Des, the three-part ITV dramatisation of the crimes of Dennis Nilsen, is absolutely horrible. There is an almost visible miasma enveloping every scene, across three nights this week. Of evil, of sadness, of bleak loss and of awful, unwanted knowledge. The first episode opens in 1983, the year Nilsen was caught (if that’s not too active a phrasing for what the police actually did) with news footage of the 80s homelessness crisis, among whose victims Nilsen found most of his own.
The police are called to some flats whose drain has been blocked by what seem, and are soon proved incontrovertibly to be, human remains. We will later discover that Nilsen (known as Des to his workmates and such friends as he had) called in the drains complaint himself. We are left to reason for ourselves why, as the drama, which notably never fails to treat its audience as capable of nuanced and critical thought, unfolds. When the owner of the top flat returns home after work, he lets the police into his home. It stinks. DCI Peter Jay (Daniel Mays) asks where the rest of the body is. “It’s in the cupboard,” says Nilsen, amenably. And so begins the infamous case, made notorious not simply for the number of people Nilsen killed, undetected, over a five-year period (at least a dozen) but for his treatment of the bodies thereafter – bathing and dressing them, posing them in armchairs, chatting with them, before dismembering the corpses and burning them or flushing the pieces down the lavatory.
