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Tahar Rahim as serial killer Charles Sobhraj Credit: BBC The problem with The Serpent (BBC One) is that it is a whodunit where we already know who did it. As this retelling of the true story of Seventies serial killer Charles Sobhraj meandered through the second of eight episodes, no attempt was made to conceal the French ex-pat’s criminality or to cloak him in a veil of mystery. He was a greedy, grubby sociopath preying on naive backpackers travelling to Thailand in search of a hippy paradise. The strength of the drama instead flowed from its evocation of the Bangkok of half a century ag...

▶︎ This eight-hour true-crime drama opens with what nowadays might be termed a non-denial denial. Interviewed by a US TV reporter in Paris in 1997, Charles Sobhraj, a French national of Vietnamese and Indian extraction, is questioned about his criminal past. “The question is whether I have committed murder,” he muses – actor Tahar Rahim keeping a serene poker face: “The courts they have decided, no,” is his somewhat evasive assessment. What follows is a vividly mounted, if somewhat partial, fact-based narrative, attempting to uncover the truth of Sobhraj’s nefarious exploits,...

In the spring of 1975, Sobhraj met Canadian medical secretary Marie-Andrée Leclerc (Jenna Coleman). Leclerc soon became his main accomplice in many of his scams but had denied being aware of any killings. In July 1976 in New Delhi, Sobhraj and Leclerc alongside Barbara Smith and Mary Ellen Eather tricked a group of French students into accepting them as tour guides. Sobhraj then drugged the group, which took effect faster than anticipated and when some of the students realised what was happening to their peers, they overpowered Sobhraj and called the police. Two years later, he was sentenced...