Believe Me (ITV1)

Rating: Five out of five stars 

One detail about the worst night of Sarah Adams’s life, 20 years ago, could never be repeated today. But the appalling fact is that, aside from this single factor, everything else might be taken from 2026’s headlines.

The young single mother was heading home from a night out in London when she was raped by her black cab driver. Police were openly sceptical of her claims, ignoring evidence including statements from witnesses, and implying that whatever happened to Sarah was her own fault because she’d been drinking.

Writer Jeff Pope’s four-part drama, which continues tonight, seethes with anger against the Met and its ingrained resistance to investigating sexual assault. Pope is currently working on a parallel series, about the murder of Sarah Everard in 2021 by a police officer.

Believe Me, about the predatory cab-driver John Worboys, focuses not just on his crimes but, as the title implies, on the refusal of authorities to treat the victims as credible and truthful. For Sarah, played with a pungent sense of frustration by Aimee-Ffion Edwards, that starts with the purse-lipped disapproval of the NHS nurse, when she wakes up fully clothed on a hospital bed.

It continues with the dismissive, judgmental attitude of detectives who take her initial statement, and the utter lack of empathy from the police medic who checks her for sexually transmitted diseases.

Another officer tells Sarah she isn’t showing the requisite amount of emotion – though she was earlier told the police wanted ‘facts, not tears’.

All of these charges against the Met have a horrible familiarity. We still hear them from women who say their stories of domestic abuse as well as rape and sexual assault are not treated seriously.

The force has made concerted efforts, since the Macpherson report in 1999, to redress what that inquiry termed ‘institutional racism’. But it has apparently not taken the same pains to reverse its attitudes to crimes against women.

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Daniel Mays as ‘black cab rapist’ John Worboys in the ITV true crime drama Believe Me

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The series follows the refusal of authorities to treat the victims as credible and truthful, including Sarah, played by Aimee-Ffion Edwards

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Miriam Petchie as Carrie Symonds who, before she married Boris Johnson, was drugged by Worboys but escaped assault

What has changed in 20 years is one incidental but crucial detail. Sarah Adams forgot to take her mobile phone on her night out. Nothing unusual at the time, but today, that would be unthink-able – and the device might have provided crucial evidence to find and stop Worboys much earlier.

Daniel Mays, who plays the taxi driver, specialises in a blend of creepy chirpiness, and he turns this up to maximum. Little of him has appeared on screen – just his eyes in the rear-view mirror, his face in shadows, his hands as they prepared a cocktail of crushed sleeping pills – but what we have seen is enough to turn blood to ice.

Later episodes feature Miriam Petche as Carrie Symonds who, before she married Boris Johnson, was drugged by Worboys but escaped assault. Has any other PM’s wife featured as a victim in a true-crime drama? I think this is a grim first.