John Simm

This acclaimed BBC adaptation of Crime and Punishment remains faithful to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic novel. Set in St Petersburg in the second half of the 19th century, the psychological thriller tells of a desperate young murderer caught in a web of his own guilt. Rodya Raskolnikov is a poverty-stricken student living among the fetid alleyways and crumbling tenements of St Petersburg. Intense and highly intelligent, Raskolnikov believes he is among a class of men destined for greatness and as such is permitted to breach ‘normal’ moral values. He decides to test his courage and integrity by killing a pawnbroker, a mean old woman whom he is sure nobody will miss. The murder, however, only serves to draw Raskolnikov into a nightmare world in which he is dogged by guilt, paranoia and alienation. Faced with the wily investigator Porfiry, who sets up a complex series of traps, encounters and conversations, can Raskolnikov escape his own conscience or the seemingly inevitable punishment?Read More »

Review from BBC news:
Newly released audio tapes of interviews with John Lennon’s assassin reveal Mark Chapman’s self-confessed “compulsion” to kill the former Beatle.

“It was like a train, a runaway train, there was no stopping it,” Chapman told interviewers in a New York prison more than a decade ago.

The singer was shot by Chapman in New York on 8 December 1980. The tapes were recorded in the early 1990s by journalist Jack Jones, who wrote a book about Chapman and his crime. Chapman describes how he shot ex-Beatle Lennon five times in the back outside the Dakota apartment complex, adding “nothing could have stopped me”.”I was under total compulsion,” he says. “I’m thoroughly convinced in my conscience and in my heart that there was nothing I could do beyond that point to help myself, totally convinced of that.”Read More »