Anne — ITV’s Hillsborough drama is devastating to watch

The new year is still in its infancy, but it doesn’t seem too bold to predict that there will be few shows in the next 12 months that will be as unwavering in emotional intensity as Anne. Nor will there likely be many performances as heart-rending in their fidelity to the experience of loss as Maxine Peake’s turn as Anne Williams — a mother whose teenage son, Kevin, was killed at the Hillsborough disaster in April 1989.

ITV’s new four-part series dramatises Williams’s tireless efforts to uncover the answers as to how and why her son and 96 other Liverpool fans lost their lives at a football match. Spanning almost 25 years, it follows her campaign as part of a group of bereaved relatives to secure a ruling that the victims were unlawfully killed by gross police negligence. An initial coroner’s inquest in 1991 declared that the deaths were “accidental”, while the media and police perpetuated a spurious narrative that the crush in the stands was born of hooliganism rather than the catastrophic failings of the authorities on the day.

Undoubtedly Williams was, and is depicted here as, an indomitable activist in the face of ceaseless setbacks. But the show never lets us forget that she was first and foremost a parent trying to do right by their child one last time. “Maybe it is about Kev for me,” she says at one point, conceding that she doesn’t always see herself as a crusader for a cause — she is a human, not a hero, and all the more compelling for it.

While it would have been easy for it to slide into inspirational hagiography, Anne is careful to outline how Williams’s relationships with her husband and children, her health and her personal identity gradually become abraded by her single-minded pursuit of justice. It shows that grief can be confounding, even paradoxical: coming to terms with a loved one’s death might mean a masochistic immersion in the horrifying circumstances in which it came about.

Anne unsurprisingly makes for a difficult, draining viewing experience — one that is weighed down by an occasional lack of sharpness in the scripting and pacing. But any limitations are offset by a number of affecting scenes, not least Anne’s devastating realisation that her son is among the dead and later her moment of catharsis as she hears the Hillsborough Independent Panel confirm the police’s accountability, just months before her death in 2013. Peake’s performance, in which she inhabits Anne’s sorrow and spirit as if they were her own, is as much a privilege as it is a challenge to watch.

★★★★☆

All episodes available now on ITV Hub