I remain to be convinced that dramatising crimes like Dennis Nilsen's is a 'tribute' to victims - Tony Earnshaw

His characterisation was astonishingly good and, I suspect, he will be furnished with a shelf-ful of awards for his audacity, his courage and his sheer brilliance as a performer.

Yet the nagging question remains – should the Nilsen story have been filmed at all? Or has the passage of almost 40 years given it some kind of acceptability as small screen entertainment?

Des acknowledged the depravity and horror of the atrocities committed by Nilsen but never presented them overtly on screen.

Instead there were hints, such as the black bags stacked ominously in the wardrobe or the cooking pot left on the stove, a severed head having been boiled within it, never seen but spoken of and looming large in all its physical horror. Nonetheless, it represents a pandering to the voyeuristic impulse.

There remains within the collective British television audience an appetite for serial killer sensationalism, yet the delivery has to be seen to be done sensitively and accurately.

That means adhering to an unspoken set of rules, which, whilst somewhat vague, nevertheless allow audiences to step into the taboo world occupied by Nilsen and his ilk. Those rules include avoiding any overt recreation of murder and generally telling the story through a third party such as a relative, neutral observer or police officer.

In the UK John Christie, Peter Manuel, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Peter Sutcliffe, Fred West, Harold Shipman and now Dennis Nilsen have all been brought to life on the small screen.

Dramatising real-life crimes for TV perhaps inevitably leads to allegations, often from relatives, of exploitation. And invariably the filmmakers claim that they have been scrupulous in their research and that the resultant piece is, in some way, a tribute to the victims. I remain to be convinced of that.

Exchanging entertainment for the sometimes-specious claim of elucidation and investigation still allows for the indulging of the mass audience voyeur. It is the “sellability” of serial murder that has driven most of the big British TV dramas of the past two decades.

The advent of the semi-documentary paved the way for productions such as Des to further explore the mind-set of killers. The omnipresent taboo represented by living memory, rawness and relatives’ disapproval has been subverted by selling the stories not as gleefully exploitative portraits of heinous killers but as sober, unsensational examinations of crime.

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Thank you

James Mitchinson