1.1 Sir Ian Rankin

I got access to a guy who was on death row in Texas, a drug addict, a member of a gang who had broken into a woman’s house and killed her to rob her in order to get drug money. And he’d been on death row for 12, 13, 14 years at that stage.

And unknown to me, the producer/director got in touch with Ian Brady’s mother, the Moors murderer Ian Brady, to see if we could interview her about what it’s like to have a serial killer in the family. She passed that on to Ian Brady, who then replied to the director from Broadmoor Secure Hospital to say, no, no. Mr Rankin doesn’t talk to my mother. He comes here and talks to me.

And that was another point at which I said, no, I don’t want to do that. Thank you very much. Because once Ian Brady is inside your head, he ain’t leaving. It’s one thing to talk about and think about and write about fictional psychopaths, but when you meet these people in real life, you cannot then unmute them.

And Brady, I knew from a reading of his horrible nonfiction book, The Gates of Janus glories and gets a thrill from playing mind games with people. That’s all he had left to him in Broadmoor was playing mind games with researchers, with people who communicated with him, wrote to him and with the families of the victims.

And he wouldn’t give them closure by telling them where some of the bodies were buried. So I said, no, I don’t want to meet this guy. And I won’t meet this guy. So I shied away from that, which is a roundabout way of answering the question.

But I am fascinated by evil. I am fascinated by the existence of evil. But very often when you talk to historians, psychiatrists, they will tell you that these people are very bland. The people who carry out these acts and themselves are very bland, nondescript people. They almost have no personality. It’s an incredible thing. You’re looking for Hannibal Lecter, and you end up with the blandest person imaginable carrying out a terrible act of evil.