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1 hour ago
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It’s not often, honestly, that I truly feel my time has been wasted. I have a really, really low bar for what constitutes an amiable or reasonable way of passing the hours. I do not habitually feel a tremendous urge to fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds’ worth of distance run, admirable though I find the people who manage it. But filling 90 of them with a two-part documentary about the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree by a pair of local berks two years ago? Come. On.
The wildly inflated sense of the film’s own importance is demonstrated by the fact that its original title was The Slaying at Sycamore Gap. The slaying. The slaying. Just before broadcast it was renamed The Sycamore Gap Mystery, but it is the original that better suits the risibly sombre tone of the programme and the gathering bathos as the 90 minutes – 90 minutes! – progress.
DI Calum Meikle usually investigates homicides. “I never thought I’d be here talking about criminal damage,” he says, sombrely. But as it became clear that the local landmark, thought to have been planted about 120 years ago by the then landowner John Clayton, and made more widely famous by its appearance in the Kevin Costner film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves had been deliberately cut down, outrage mounted and the Northumbria police mobilised. “Could this have been committed by someone younger in years who hasn’t seen the potential significance of his actions?” the DI wonders to camera with an admirably straight face. Close examination of the crime scene reveals something revelatory. “We were minus the wedge. Hmm … This is interesting.” That’s the wedge – explains the programme to us in minute detail – that tree fellers cut out of a tree with chainsaws when they are felling it. It’s easier than trying to push the whole thing over, I guess. And it was probably a two-man job, so now we are looking for a duo with access to chainsaws who may possess a wooden wedge they’ve kept as a trophy.
A 16-year-old, meanwhile, has been arrested. One contemporary online commentator suggests “putting his bollocks through a bacon slicer”. It is not clear if this should happen before or after he is charged or found guilty. No matter. He has an alibi, so he and his bollocks are released unsliced.
But here, surely, is the crux – if you’ll pardon what feels like a pun though I’m not sure if it is – the interesting part of the story is the strength of feeling that the loss of the tree engendered. How apparently disproportionately human beings can react to the destruction of something rather than someone. Why was it so painful? Why did the fire at Notre Dame cause such grief? What of ourselves have we invested in objects? How do things – trees, nature, art, architecture – come to mean so much to us? Or are there moments in sociocultural life that are just flashpoints, lightning rods for a whole chaotic mass of frustrations and miseries? For once, we find something in this hard and endlessly fragmenting world that we can all agree is a bad or sad thing, and from there it takes on a howling life of its own. How many people were grieving purely for Diana? How many people really want X, Y or Z cancelled for his or her perceived misstep in the latest online furore? How, in essence, does Man A come to want to chop the balls off Man B for chopping down a tree? This, surely, is the fascinating part.
We will never know, because The Sycamore Gap Mystery is determined to follow the world’s most boring investigation as every moment of it unfurled. The top of the stump is cut off and removed to a place of safety “to maintain the integrity of that first cut”. An aerial shot of it being unveiled by DI Meikle on what looks like a mortuary table, surrounded by shadows, starts to give the whole thing a distinct Chris Morris vibe. But this is not satire.
Eventually, the two culprits are identified (“Both individuals reside in the Carlisle area,” says Meikle’s boss, DCI Rebecca Fenney, thrillingly). We watch some equally thrilling footage of Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers being interviewed by the police. On a phone belonging to one of the criminal masterminds (“A couple of brain-dead five-year-olds in grown men’s bodies,” says Lynn, who is described as the local “plant lady” and who should really have been in charge of production) is a video of the felling and a picture of a wedge of wood from a large tree. “I realised there is something significant here,” says DCI Fenney. This programme is, if nothing else, a gift to those of us who revel in the perfect unnaturality of police speak. Is it the right wedge, though? From the right tree? The suspense is unbearable. A forensic botanist confirms that it is. Hurrah. The men are each sentenced to four years and three months in prison. No bacon slicers are involved.
Criminal damage to viewers’ intelligence, however, has been committed. DI Meikle, get off that murder case. I need you.
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The Sycamore Gap Mystery is on Channel 4.
