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Kieran Prendiville

Drama on 4: Two Minutes Hate

Two Minutes Hate

29/11/2012

BBC Radio 4 - Drama on 4, Two Minutes Hate

Implicated in murder but released from prison, Jennifer has a new identity. Will it last?

By Kieran Prendiville. Implicated in a child murder but released from prison, Jennifer now has a new identity. But at least one newspaper is determined to find out where she lives.

By Kieran Prendiville

"The horrible thing about the two minutes hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic" George Orwell, 1984

It isn't just the rich and famous who get super-injunctions. A small number of people in Britain, mostly on legal aid, have much more to lose from tabloid exposure than an expensive divorce.

This drama imagines what it is like to be the most hated woman in Britain - fearing the mob and the forces that will lead them to you. Two Minutes Hate explores the fault line between the public interest and the interest of the public. 

The protagonist is a young woman whose partner murdered a child. She didn't believe he could do such a thing, which is why she gave him an alibi.

She is of course inspired by the real life Maxine Carr, girlfriend of Ian Huntley, the Soham murderer. As one broadsheet observed: "It is - and will remain - Carr's particular bad luck to have come to public attention at roughly the same time as Myra Hindley died: there was a gaping Hindley-shaped hole in the tabloids Two Minutes' hate slot, and they have simply used her to plug it".

Produced and Directed by Clive Brill
A Pacificus production for BBC Radio 4.

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