Around a decade ago, I discovered that an acquaintance very sincerely believed Madeleine McCann’s parents were involved in her disappearance. This acquaintance was by all appearances deeply normal. She had a job, paid her taxes, and enjoyed going to gigs and movies. She also insisted that Kate and Gerry McCann, whose pained expressions had been splashed across the world’s papers and news bulletins with slightly punishing regularity since 2007, weren’t telling the truth about the night their three-year-old vanished, and that tales of kidnappings, wide open windows, and German paedophiles in the shadows were all a hoax. She came to this conclusion after reading about the case on the internet, trawling vast sub-Reddits and conspiracy threads on Twitter in between Angry Birds and Zoella videos.
She and other Madeleine McCann truthers, of which there seem to be many, will be delighted by the arrival of Under Suspicion: Kate McCann, a Channel 5 docudrama – following hot on the heels of their grim Huw Edwards drama in March – and somewhat improbably the first TV dramatisation of the Madeleine McCann saga in the 19 years since she was last seen. It is, according to its makers, designed to spotlight the unjustness of a notable episode in the aftermath of Madeleine’s disappearance – 98 days after the night she vanished, to be specific – in which Portuguese police officially declared the McCanns suspects. (This “arguido” status was lifted in 2008, with the police formally apologising for their handling of the case five years later.) But in its slavish devotion to two specific police interrogations and its arbitrary arrival in the schedules – pegged not to an anniversary, or new revelations, or really much of anything – Under Suspicion has the unintentional effect of seeming like a referendum on the McCanns. Armchair detectives will have a field day. Likewise those who’ve seen a few TikToks and therefore insist they know the specific micro-expressions and physical tells of when a person is lying.
“Really? Again?” Kate McCann sighs, exasperated, at the top of the hour-long show. Played with visceral frustration by the actor Laura Bayston, she’s been asked by police to relive the events of the night Madeleine disappeared. She can’t bear to do it – it’s painful to repeat the minute-by-minute trauma of the worst hours of her life. Or, you know, she can’t bear to do it because she’s a neglectful mother who’s been lying the whole time, as the conspiracists believe. The moment sets the template for what follows: actions that can be read in two different ways, one human and logical, the other damning. A choose-your-own-adventure experience separating the rationally minded and the conspiracy theorists among us.
Only a quick postscript before the end credits explains that much of the supposed evidence of the McCann’s guilt was bogus, or at least so inconclusive that it was largely worthless. So you’re essentially watching an hour of a panicked mother being pilloried by very convincing police officers, who allude to contradictions and suspicions, and the existence of incriminating evidence. Just admit you killed Madeleine, they tell Kate, and your sentence won’t be too bad. It may only make things worse, Kate’s lawyer tells her, if she attempts to properly answer the police’s queries. So she reluctantly answers “no comment” to every question.
The McCanns weren’t involved in the making of Under Suspicion, and declined to give any feedback to its makers when they were contacted for comment. But it would have been a mess whatever decision they took, being that quite literally everything the pair have done in the past 19 years has been dissected and judged – whether they cried enough, whether they were too public-facing or not public-facing enough, whether their late-night visits to priests were a mark of their faith or suggestive that they killed their child.
That’s the ultimate horror of the Madeleine McCann story, though, isn’t it? That it just never ends, with each possible conclusion a non-starter, each additional plot turn just bringing more Sisyphusian misery for everyone involved. Perhaps Under Suspicion could have worked if the case was over. Then this would be a shameful footnote arguably worth dramatising – the few months where two innocent people were falsely accused of doing something unthinkable, based primarily on vibes. But in 2026, with the Metropolitan Police still trying to bring German suspect Christian Brückner to stand trial in Britain for the abduction and murder of Madeleine, and little to no material progress in finding out what actually happened to her, Under Suspicion just seems icky – an unhelpful bit of true-crime Reddit-baiting that at best will be ignored, but also may kickstart a whole new era of “the McCanns totally did it, didn’t they?” conspiracy. It’s a pointless, arguably dangerous endeavour.
‘Under Suspicion: Kate McCann’ is on Channel 5 tonight at 9pm
