'Rillington Place': this serial killer series will give you the creeps

Convicted of torturing and killing five children between July 1963 and October 1965, Brady and his lover and accomplice Myra Hindley, who died in prison in 2002, were jailed for life in May 1966. Theirs was the UK's first serial-killer trial after the abolishment of capital punishment.

That the so-called Moors Murderers escaped the noose was, ironically, due largely to the work of an earlier serial killer, the impotent and sexually frustrated Reg Christie, whose grim handiwork has been brought to life in the BBC's excellent three-part drama series Rillington Place.

John Reginald Halliday Christie murdered at least eight people, including his wife, Ethel, by strangling them in his flat at Rillington Place in Notting Hill, London, during the 1940s and early 1950s.

Two of his victims were Beryl Evans and her baby daughter Geraldine, who, along with Beryl's simple-minded husband, Timothy Evans, were also tenants at Rillington Place. Evans was charged with both murders, convicted and hanged in 1950.

Evans's innocence would emerge during Christie's 1953 trial, and the subsequent controversy over this maladministration of justice greatly contributed to the suspension in 1965 of the death penalty in the UK.

The unsettling malevolence that Tim Roth brings to this BBC production is startling. This is the stuff of nightmares. His Christie, a stooped, bespectacled and near insignificant character, is slow to reveal his inner evil but, when it comes, it is bone-chilling and compulsive.

WATCH the trailer for Rillington Place

Wednesday's opening episode (there are repeats, if you missed it) introduces us to the dank grime of Christie's world. He and his wife, Ethel, played by Samantha Morton, have been reunited after a long separation. He's been in an out of prison for various petty crimes, but when World War 2 breaks out, he manages to become a policeman.

He brings Ethel contraband chocolate and jewellery, gifts that do little to settle our disquiet about Christie's flashes of temper or the suitcase and its potentially grisly contents that he's stashed under the sofa.

This is oppressive stuff. The interiors of Rillington Place are claustrophobic, dark and squalid. Domesticity here is austere, stripped of comfort and cheer. The dialogue is elliptical, yet the menace is all too patent. In one scene Christie is reluctant to leave the kitchen and go to bed. "Shall I keep you company?" Ethel asks. "No thanks," her husband tells her. "That would defeat the purpose."

It is almost painful watching the scales fall from Ethel's eyes as the truth about her husband slowly emerges. After she embarrasses her husband in front of a guest and he half-strangles her in rage, she leaves Christie to live with her brother.

Unfortunately, she returns to her husband soon afterwards, convinced that she must try to bring some normality to the marriage. Home again, much to our disquiet, she finds a coat hanging in their hallway that belongs to a woman who is reported missing and a bloodstain on the mattress of her bed.

Before long, she is watching her husband spy on the new neighbours through a peephole in their kitchen door. Creepy indeed, but superlative viewing all the same.

• 'Rillington Place' airs on Wednesdays on BBC First (DStv channel 119) at 8.01pm. It's also available on DStv Catch Up.

• This article was originally published in The Times.