There was something strange about 5’s latest drama, Number One Fan. Something… uncanny. And no, I’m not talking about the staccato acting or the barely stitched together storyline (or the idea that a personal trainer might take a client out for a glass of post-workout wine, as happened in episode two). No, I mean the fact that it all felt a little too familiar… haven’t we heard the story of a stalked TV presenter before?
Ah yes, that’s right. It happened in real life. To Holly Willoughby.
The similarities between Willoughby and Lucy Logan (played by Jill Halfpenny) are obvious: they’re both known as smiley hosts of breakfast shows; both are the face of beauty brands; and – crucially to Number One Fan – they both have stalkers.
At the beginning of the four-episode series, it looked as though their stalkers were interchangeable too. We know that Willoughby’s would-be attacker, 37-year-old Gavin Plumb, currently serving life in prison for plotting to kidnap and murder the presenter, spent his days in a “rubbish-strewn” flat, surrounded by over 10,000 of pictures of the former This Morning presenter and surveilling her social media accounts.
Lucy Logan’s stalker (or at least the man we’re led to believe is sending her disturbing packages of chocolates made of cow poo) also lives alone in a comically dingy house, throwing darts at a photo of Lucy.
Willoughby left her job at This Morning five days after she was taken into protective custody, saying, “I have to make this decision for me and my family”. It is ghoulish and opportunistic if Number One Fan took unofficial inspiration from such a traumatic and terrifying experience to spin it into entertainment (though I use that word extremely lightly). But that was just the beginning of 5’s vulture-esque storytelling.
Much of the drama was similar to real life stories (Photo: Jorge Salvador/Clapperboard)It turned out the miserable man watching Lucy on TV was just a red herring – her stalker was in fact Donna (Sally Lindsay), a woman who blamed the TV presenter for the suicide of her brother. Suddenly, another real-life story began to emerge – the death of Steve Dymond, a 63-year-old man who took his own life one week after appearing on The Jeremy Kyle Show.
Number One Fan eventually revealed that Lucy had been an assistant on a similarly derided TV programme, and that she had offered Donna’s gambling addict brother money to return to the show after he stormed off. When that didn’t work, she blackmailed him – he’d been falsely accused of being a paeodophile, and Lucy was prepared to air that fact (sans denial) on television. His subsequent suicide, according to Donna, was Lucy’s fault.
It was eventually ruled that there was “no causal link” between Dymond’s death and his appearance on The Jeremy Kyle Show, but the parallels between his story and the one told on Number One Fan were clear enough to make for very uncomfortable viewing.
There’s always a collective groan when TV execs hastily spin a real-life scandal or celebrity story into a sub-par series – 5 did it most recently with its dramatisation of Huw Edwards’ downfall. But at least with those, there is a sense of duty to reality – research, duty of care, even, as in the case of the Huw Edwards drama, conversations with victims.
I’d say sneakily using real life traumas to inspire such sub-par dramas as Number One Fan is 10 times worse – where is the thought for the real people who lived through such terrors, whether that be a famous TV presenter or an unknown bloke who once appeared on a chat show?
In the final episode, Number One Fan tried to turn Donna and Lucy into some sort of girl boss tag team on the path of righteousness, telling the world it was the host of the show – the man who created a hostile working environment – who was really to blame for the death. But by that point, it was far too late – the series had already convinced me it was parasitic. No amount of girl power was going to save it.
‘Number One Fan’ is streaming on 5
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