The details of the process are credible, with a just-promoted warder (Alan Brent) explaining ‘I’m called officially “a hanging technician” … words like “hangman” come with too much baggage’ and a set-up whereby a false wall in the death cell turns out to be a sliding door to the gallows. The title pretty much tells you where it’s going – and the issue of capital punishment is reduced to a pair of mad-eyed, fanatical women sloganeering on either side of the fence outside Pentonville.

It’s presented as a fly-on-the-wall documentary, but is less insistent about it than many other efforts in the sub-genre: there are lengthy scenes of Gadd talking with his defence lawyer, John Carter (Adam James). Paul Francis Gadd, aka Gary Glitter (Hilton McRae), is repatriated to Britain after serving a sentence for child sex offences in a Vietnamese jail, and finds himself on trial at the Old Bailey on what is now a capital offence.

The premise here is that, after the Soham murders, the UK parliament has bowed to public pressure and reintroduced the death penalty – for murder and the rape of a child. My notes on The Execution of Gary Glitter (2009) ‘I don’t think they really should have the death penalty, but I think he should die.’īritish television has a tradition, all the way back to The War Game, of using science fiction as a way of debating current events – it’s always controversial, and means a lot of announcements throughout that this is not a real news program but a fiction set in a parallel world.

Angels of Music by Kim Newman