TELEVISION
O
ver the 1998 May bank holi-
day weekend Susan and
Christopher Edwards shot
Susan’s parents, William and
Patricia Wycherley, at their
home in Forest Town, Mans-
field. They wrapped the bodies in a
duvet cover and buried them under
their own lawn. On Tuesday morning
they opened a joint bank account and
stole the Wycherleys’ savings, pensions
and benefits. By forging cards and
letters from the Wycherleys they per-
suaded relatives and the Department
of Work and Pensions that the couple
were alive, collecting £285,286 over 15
years, which they mainly spent on
autographed movie memorabilia such
as a card from a 1940s dinner dance
signed by Frank Sinatra.
Their ruse was so successful that the
DWP wrote to William in 2012, congrat-
ulating him on his forthcoming 100th
birthday and asking for a meeting to
assess his benefits and arrange a tele-
gram from the Queen. Realising the
game was up, Susan and Christopher
fled to France for a year before running
out of money. They surrendered to the
police at St Pancras, London, with
nothing but a change of clothes, a suit-
case of memorabilia and €1 in cash.
These are the facts of the case.
Landscapers — starring Olivia Col-
man and David Thewlis — has all these
facts, but takes them and runs off into
a fantastical, dark comedy drama that
stands apart from a television year
dominated by grim true crime dramas.
It opens with what looks like a still pho-
tograph that springs to life as a director
summons rain, lights and extras.
Throughout the four-part series it
shows us what is going on inside
Susan’s head by revealing the way that
she turns real life into scenes from
movies. It’s as if Dennis Potter wrote
True Detective rather than The Singing
Detective, with a budget to match.
Key scenes are shot as if they were
old Hollywood movies. During their
trial, Colman imagines Thewlis gun-
ning down the judge with his fingers
and a brief courtroom gun battle
morphs into a shoot-out in a forest in
Wild West garb.
Colman’s Susan comes across as
an awkward dreamer, abused by her
father and controlled by her parents
until she meets Thewlis’s Christopher,The makers of a new TV true crime drama, starring
Olivia Colman, are mixing fact with fantasy to tell
the darkest of stories, reports Stephen Armstrong
who shares her love of films. “We’re try-
ing to bring the audience into Susan’s
inner psychology,” the show’s director,
Will Sharpe, explains over a Zoom call
with Colman and her husband, Ed Sin-
clair, with whom he co-wrote the script.
“With most true crime dramas the pro-
cedure and plot are much higher in the
mix. This is exploring how she created
her own version of truth using her safe
space — the world of old movies.”
As Colman is sitting next to her hus-
band, it seems essential but slightly
pointless to ask how she felt working
with him. She laughs. “I didn’t know if
I was going to love working with Ed,
but it worked if we stuck to our roles.
Ed tried to give me a note once and
that went down like a cup of cold sick,
so he realised what we do is that Ed
has his role, which he’s brilliant at, Will
has his role, which he’s brilliant at, andLife of crime
Olivia
Colman and
David
Thewlis in
LandscapersLET’S MURDER DAD AND
STEFANIA ROSINI/SKY UK12 28 November 2021