Loose Women favourite Denise Welch ‘hid’ from hunters by appearing on her ITV show (Image: Getty)
Norwich is the thriving hub of Britain’s crystal meth drug trade. Who knew? It’s a bit like discovering TV’s Vera was a secret dogging enthusiast.
Channel 4’s 24 Hours In Police Custody introduced us to Toby Bunting, a senior clinical nurse recovering from heart surgery with an unexpected sideline in peddling class A narcotics.
If Bunting, 50, hadn’t fallen asleep in a lay-by after a party, the police would never have discovered bags of the vile gear, AKA Christina or Tina, in his car along with sex-toys, left-over Chinese take-away and enough Viagra to stock a chemist’s. Whose party was this? The Marilyn Manson fan club?
Bunting lied, cried, and denied everything, telling cops, “I didn’t know there was going to be drugs at the party. I was asked to get rid of it, and that’s how it ended up in my vehicle.” Of course! One weary officer replied, “I’ll be totally honest with you, Toby, I don’t believe anything you’ve told us there.”
Realising nobody would, Bunting pleaded guilty and copped two and half years behind bars.
Axel Cruz, a Mexican tattoo artist also operating in Norwich, had 12 kilos of ‘Tina’ at home with a street value of £1.6m, and a machete, presumably to trim the hedge. Cruz’s hoard was uncovered after Stansted Airport custom officials found cocaine hidden inside gym equipment sent from Colombia and addressed to his flat.
He was jailed for 16 years. I felt for jobless Daniel Fordham who agreed to store Cruz’s stash for £15,000 and got arrested in front of his children. Ironically he’d just successfully applied to become a prison warden.
He got 10 years – four times as long as Bunting – but Fordham seemed naïve and desperate rather than evil. He didn’t even get paid. It seemed disproportionate unless more came out in court. Still as old lags say, if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.
Don’t miss…
Channel 4’s Manhunt documented the shocking case of Christopher Hughes who was kidnapped, mutilated, and murdered by an eight-strong gang of vigilantes who mistook him for a rapist. The ex-boxer was slashed more than 100 times, and the gang, who included men of Balkan and Kurdish ancestry, had attempted to behead him.
Rather than mining the story for melodrama, the documentary showed how Manchester’s Serious Crime team tracked down the killers by diligently working through CCTV images and WhatsApp messages.
Three of them received sentences of 33 years or more. You might think capital punishment would be a more effective deterrent, and certainly a cheaper one. But you never hear that option discussed on the ’s , which remains trapped in its little bubble of bleeding-heart groupthink.
Manhunt is a long way from the pacey escapism of Celebrity Hunted, which pretends to ape the powers of the state to pursue the famous and semi-famous.
It’s enjoyable enough as long as you suspend disbelief. If you were on the run, would you really pop in to a dog hotel to visit your pooch, as Strictly’s Kai Widdrington did, appear on TV (Denise Welch) or take a tourist trip on the Thames like newsreader Simon McCoy and ITV’s Lucrezia Millarini?
Hunter boss Ray Howard, a former Chief Super, relentlessly scorns his prey. He said McCoy looked like “a Sunday morning drunk in the cells”, called two (bleached) blonde soap starlets “the last of the Targaryens”, and wrote off Duncan James and Christine McGuinness as “Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dumber”.
She’s “a woman whose major skill is looking good in a bikini,” he said this week. Fair comment?
Yes, the Beeb resurged last month with the masterful Wolf Hall and the triumphant Gavin & Stacey finale, but they need to produce that kind of quality weekly not annually to justify their licence fee funding in today’s multi-channel world.
I doubt that their salvation lies in self-indulgent tosh like Amanda & Alan’s Spanish Job – returning Friday, despite public demand. They must either raise their game or acknowledge that the licence fee – a tax on watching TV – is a doomed anachronism.
misfired with the cop-out ending of Squid Game season two. They have duds too (Polo, anyone?) but their hottest current show is American Primeval a riveting western saga so bleak it makes seem like The Two Ronnies.
It’s set in Utah, in 1857 where the Mormon Militia, disguised as Native Americans, butchered a wagon train full of settlers migrating to the West Coast – a massacre that actually happened; and Sara Rowell and her son Devin are hunting for her absentee husband. Turns our there’s a price on her head for murder.
The six brutal six episodes hit like a Tomahawk attack, reminding you how sanitised ’s versions of the Old West were. There were no saloons in Utah, just settlements, warring factions, indigenous tribes and the US Cavalry. Sara – GLOW’s Betty Gilpin – is a difficult woman but tough and single-minded. You find yourself rooting for the Rowells, their reluctant protector Isaac, and mute native girl Two Moons, abused by her father.
Written by The Revenant’s Mark L. Smith, it’s a raw and initially uncomfortable viewing experience, but a rewarding and thought-provoking one that reminds us that barbarism is only ever a few lunatics away.
Which is true, even in Norfolk.