Interview with Executive Producers Dave Nath and Pete Beard

6 August 2021

Why did you want to tell this story now?

Pete Beard: We met Colin Stagg through another project and, through him, gained access to a lot of his case files including the undercover recordings. With the public enquiry into undercover policing going on, it felt very timely, and MeToo made us look at the case, one of the most infamous murders and episodes in the Met’s recent history, in a different way: what must it have been like to be the woman at the heart of it and how was she looked after? The 1990s are not long ago, but it feels like a different time.

Dave Nath: The case has been superficially reported as a failure where the focus is on who is to blame. We wanted to question why certain decisions were made and what the police were asking of this woman 25 years ago. Was it appropriate? Was she supported? Were they asking her to do something they would never ask a female detective to do in 2021? What do we learn from that?

Pete Beard: Emilia [di Girolamo, writer] came on board and turned the volume up on that, bringing a brilliant insight into crime in the 1990s and the female experience of that. Our approach to filmmaking is relatively empathetic with the contributors and with this we felt quite quickly that everyone seemed to have the best of intentions. The officers were misguided rather than corrupt.

Why make it as a drama rather than a documentary?

Dave Nath: The amount of outside pressure the police were under is very relevant in this case. The degree to which it might skew people’s judgement becomes really important, how that pressure makes you do your job in a different way. It’s important to see the outside influences brought to bear on these decisions, the noise going on around the case. You need context to understand why it went wrong.

Who did you talk to inside the Met?

Dave Nath: We didn’t speak to anyone currently serving with the Met, in research terms, but Keith Pedder is a consultant. We bought an option on a book he wrote.

Pete Beard: We had ‘deep background’ conversations with individuals we can’t name who were happy to talk on that basis, and they filled in some blanks without being official sources. There was also Alan Jackaman, one of the main detectives on the Samantha Bissett case, and Jonathan Hook, who works on another force but was a consultant for us on procedural issues.

Could you have made Deceit it without Colin and Keith’s involvement?

Dave Nath: Keith was really valuable in getting a sense of why certain decisions were made – it was particularly brave of him to help because it ended his career. And it would have been very difficult to re-examine the case without Colin’s co-operation and collaboration. There are consequences for him in us retelling this story. We worked with him for the best part of four years, talking about the approach, the content, what material would be brought back up and how people might view him.

Pete Beard: I bumped into a barrister I know, someone I consider well informed, and when I told her I was meeting Colin Stagg, she said, ‘oh yeah, who did he kill?’. That’s what he still lives with.

How did you handle the duty of care complications regarding Lizzie and the various parties in the case?

Pete Beard: Right from the beginning, we made sure Colin understood what he was getting involved in, what could be exposing for him, making him consider the issues around it. With Lizzie because of the anonymity orders on her, we’ve strictly fictionalised her character and communicated with her through various intermediaries on the bits she needs to know.

Dave Nath: Rachel’s family are aware of the drama. With Samantha Bissett, we had the benefit of having the family liaison officer on that case who was helpful in keeping her only surviving family member, her stepfather, abreast of the production, what it was and why we were making it.

How did you find working with verbatim transcripts and trying to bring them to life?

Dave Nath: When you get the right case – this was similar to The Interrogation of Tony Martin – a writer would struggle to capture the authenticity in a way that matches the verbatim content. You can’t get closer to the truth than verbatim, which is its greatest asset. You would never imagine the call between Lizzie and Colin going in the way it was really conducted, but you have to be careful because you’re dealing with real material so it doesn’t always synch with dramatic purpose. You have to curate that, keep the heart of it, the essence of the truth, while keeping in mind you’re making a drama and something that has to sit within four hour long episodes

What was unusual about Operation Ezdell?

Dave Nath: The pivotal position Paul Britton was given. Offender profilers had been advisors, usually in a limited capacity, up to that point. When Colin was acquitted, the judge at the Old Bailey described Paul as the “puppetmaster”. Sometimes I’d wonder who was running the investigation: the police or the psychologist? That’s a questionable place to be. The other thing is that Lizzie was reporting directly to Keith Pedder. You would never normally get that in an undercover operation, there should be a separation where the undercover officer would be line managed by her own undercover inspector to look after her duty of care and decide what’s appropriate. There’s something about this set-up that doesn’t feel particularly healthy or proper.

Pete Beard: There was also an ambition to use material gained and recorded by Lizzie – admissions by Colin – as evidence. It was an experiment that obviously didn’t fit with regulations of PACE and was thrown out of court. It has never been done since.

How is the case regarded in the Met now?

Pete Beard: I think there’s an official and unofficial recognition that it was a mistake. There have been several enquiries, enormous payouts and apologies to various people. Any officers I’ve spoken to off the record have talked about the attitude that ‘We don’t do things that way anymore.’

What do you hope viewers will take away from Deceit?

Dave Nath: So many things. Colin’s innocence would be number one, but also how outside factors can make people behave in a way that skews their judgment with enormous consequences. Here, it ended the career of a female undercover officer who was emotionally and psychologically impacted by the experience, the man running the operation finishes his career, Colin’s life is blighted for decades and a woman and her daughter are murdered in south London, perhaps because the police became too focused on Colin. Who should have been following up leads of Robert Napper when he was committing sexual crimes in south London during this period? This is the danger of confirmation bias.

Pete Beard: We want the audience to feel the pressure on Keith, the reality of Colin’s life, the torment Lizzie went through, rather than just see it written down in an analytical way, like an experiential drama rather than a documentary.

Dave Nath: We want to make drama that isn’t about looking for scapegoats but really analysing why things happen. It’s only through looking back at history that you can stop it happening again.