Anne
Rating: 
The Tourist
Rating:
Like one thin ray of sunlight squeezing through a chink in a heavy sky, a single act of kindness illuminated the bleak Hillsborough drama, Anne (ITV).
As they drove across the Pennines from Liverpool in the small hours on an April night in 1989, Anne and Steve Williams (Maxine Peake and Stephen Walters) found themselves stranded.
Desperate for news of their 15-year-old son Kevin, in the aftermath of the FA Cup stadium disaster in which 97 fans were killed, they had not stopped to fill up the car. Now they were out of petrol, and miles from anywhere.
In moments of the greatest need, it is so often petty events that push people beyond endurance. That is when the kindness of strangers is beyond price.
Maxine Peake was transformed into the late Hillsborough campaigner Anne Williams
Steve hiked to the nearest farm. We did not have to hear the words he used to explain their plight to the farmer. All we saw was a man who offered what help he could, on a cold dawn morning.
With a jerrycan of siphoned fuel, the farmer got the couple moving again. ‘It’s the least I can do,’ he said.
In the first episode of this four-part drama, airing every night until Wednesday, that moment gave us the only thread of hope to hold. This is a relentlessly sad and horrifying story, and the past 30 years have not softened it.
As the straightforward title tells us, Peake’s character is the whole focus of the script. She portrays the wild grief of a mother, building from hysterical denial and disbelief into an all-consuming anger at the authorities who allowed this tragedy to happen and lied about it afterwards.
It is well worth sticking with the Williams brothers’ darkly comic thriller The Tourist, shown on BBC
