The BBC iPlayer has broken a record for the first week of January, with Sir David Attenborough's new series and The Serpent attracting big numbers for 2021.
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In a world in which we re conditioned to disregard nuance in favour of labels which denote good, bad and little else, Marie-Andrée Leclerc poses a problem.
The medical secretary from Quebec, Canada met Charles Sobhraj in 1975 on her travels in India and became enmeshed in his web of deception and murder.
If you had asked her if she was capable of not only tolerating such monstrosities but performing an active role in them before her path crossed with that of Sobhraj s, Leclerc would, in all likelihood, have been appalled at such a question.
But she did, only stopping when forced to by the authorities.
Mary Magdalene star Tahar Rahim for
The Serpent, a new BBC One crime drama based on a real-life prolific killer from the 1970s.
Rahim stars as serial killer Charles Sobhraj while Coleman plays Marie-Andrée Leclerc, Sobhraj s partner and frequent accomplice, and the story follows a team of investigators as they try and catch the duo after a series of murders across India, Thailand, and Nepal.
The first episode aired on TV yesterday (January 1), with new episodes dropping every Sunday from tomorrow until mid-February. But they are also doing that thing where every episode is also available on BBC iPlayer already as well.
Watch the trailer for The Serpent
Tom Shankland took me out some time late in the summer of 2013. He had a story, so he said, something he thought I should write…
The sequence of events that entwined the lives of Charles Sobhraj and Herman Knippenberg is a tale that worms its way into you. There are circularities, coincidences and synchronicities so awful and outrageous you gape. But, at the end of that night, Tom had me. I was in.
Three years later, I had the great privilege of meeting Herman for the first time. There is nothing awful or outrageous about him. Which I was grateful to have established for me in the flesh because it was the discovery of Herman s part in the Charles Sobhraj story - and his altogether more straightforward character - that had allowed me to see a way through the lysergic maze of swaggering claim and counter-claim that had always distinguished accounts of his crimes (most of it, it must be said, driven by the man himself).