True Crime Tuesdays: Joan
Review Overview
Sophie Turner
10Script
4Fun
3Helen Archer | On 22, Oct 2024
You may have noticed the publicity for Joan, the much-touted autumn offering from ITV – much of which is focused on Sophie Turner’s flawless face. It is a savvy campaign, given that Turner is the best thing about the six-part dramatisation of Joan Hannington’s 2002 autobiography, a rags-to-riches tale that tells of her rise in organised crime in 1980s England.
The series, created by Anna Symon, has an impeccable opening that promises so much – The Pretenders’ Brass in Pocket plays as Joan sits at a dressing table in a plush London hotel, the scars on her back, from a childhood of abuse, still red and raw. She dons a glamorous wig, speaks in an upper-class American accent to a concierge on the phone, before dropping some jewellery and reverting back to her authentic southern English to express her annoyance. We quickly cut back to four months earlier on the Kent coast, to quite a different Joan, then on the tail-end of a marriage to a thuggish criminal who runs out on her, leaving her to deal with his associates, who break into her flat in the dead of night, threatening the lives of both her and her young daughter.
Joan apparently feels her only choice, at this point, is to put her daughter, Kelly (Mia Millichamp-Long), into care for her own safety, then go to work at her sister’s hairdressers. But when her ex turns up there, it’s time for her to move on again – this time to London, where she promptly gets a job at a jewellers, run by Bernard (Alex Blake), whose sexual harassment she punishes by swallowing some of his diamonds. While they’re still swirling about in her gut, she gets picked up at a bar by Boisie (Frank Dillane), who turns out to be a slightly more successful career criminal than her ex, and before long they’re planning heists together, occasionally bringing in Boisie’s former cellmate and sometime partner-in-crime, Albie (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr). Most of these heists involve Joan doing what she does best – putting on a wig, a costume and an act, in order to gain access to diamonds and, in one case, a Stubbs oil painting.
Her motivation throughout is presented as a desire to create a stable environment to get back her daughter – now happily ensconced with a loving foster family. The logic of this is deeply flawed, and the viewer watches in horror as time and time again Joan and Boisie embark on one terrible decision after another. Each seems to think the other is a criminal genius, bigging themselves with the endless mantra, “It’s a good plan!” – and presumably the audience is meant to agree, despite the glaring holes in each caper and the fact that Joan herself knows she is being constantly monitored by not only the social services, but the Old Bill – one of whom has been openly following her movements from the beginning.
Though apparently Joan earned the moniker of “The Godmother”, there is little here to see why she deserved such a title. The programme – presumably in line with the book – seeks to present her as a plucky feminist heroine, with men underestimating her criminal genius because of sexism. She periodically declares that she wants to make her own money, and never to rely on a man – and yet she is forced to team up with a slew of unreliable male partners, and it is only through her relationship with Boisie that she was introduced to crime’s high society in the first place. It all results in a strange, unappealing – though perhaps not entirely incongruous – mash-up of 21st-century notions of girlboss white feminism and the free market values of Thatcher’s Britain. Despite the costumes, the wigs, the 1980s soundtrack – despite the would-be glamour of it all – Joan remains a surprisingly dour, regressive experience.