Story of UK’s last executed woman will make you shiver

‘A Cruel Love’ explores Ruth Ellis’s case and inspires another superb performance by Toby Jones, writes Phil Harrison

- Phil Harrison

While it’s still frequently hard to escape the feeling that the world is designed around the whims of rich, careless, selfish,white men, this was even more emphatically the case in 1955. As ITV’s new drama A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story suggests, men held the cards – whether they were trying to exploit you, save you, get you drunk, get you into bed, prosecute you or defend you. And it was in this context that nightclub hostess Ruth Ellis, mired in an abusive relationship and struggling with at least a couple more, shot her lover David Blakely dead outside The Magdala Tavern in Hampstead and became the last British woman to face execution.

In some ways, this four-part dramatisation of these events is a tough sell. Viewing the story through modern eyes, you’ll find it impossible not to sympathise with many elements of Ellis’s situation, ponder the fairness of the verdict delivered against her, and shudder at the brutality of her final fate. But she’s perfectly capable of deception and cruelty herself, and her flaws aren’t whitewashed here – even though that sometimes makes her difficult to root for. The excellent lead, Lucy Boynton, is equal parts insolent charisma and wary vulnerability, a woman so accustomed to withstanding life’s hard knocks that she finds it difficult to let her guard down under any circumstances.