Cultural Impact
A number of television programmes were produced about or in reaction to specific incidents in particular or the shoot-to-kill issue in general:
- Death on the Rock - an edition of This Week about the Gibraltar killings, produced by Thames Television for ITV, shown on 28 April 1988.
- Nineteen 96 - a BBC1 Screen One drama, broadcast on BBC1 on 17 September 1989 which, in relocating the Stalker inquiry to Wales in 1996 and combining it with some elements of the Kincora boys' home scandal, treated it as fiction set in the future. Keith Barron was cast as the investigating officer. The drama was written by G. F. Newman and directed by Karl Francis
- Shoot to Kill - a four-hour drama documentary about the Stalker inquiry, with Jack Shepherd in the lead role, David Calder as John Thorburn, and T. P. McKenna as Sir John Hermon. It had originally been intended to be a straightforward documentary, but in the words of the director, "all of the people we would have wanted to interview were either dead - in that they were shot by the RUC in 1982 - they had disappeared and were given new identities, or they were still serving policemen and weren't available for interview." The drama featured re-enactments of all three incidents investigated by Stalker - including information that Dominic McGlinchey had been the intended target in the third - and the course of Stalker's investigation. Written by Michael Eaton and directed by Peter Kosminsky, and produced by Yorkshire Television for ITV, it was shown in two parts on 3 and 4 June 1990, with the second episode being followed by a half-hour studio discussion between Kosminsky, Conservative Member of Parliament Ian Gow (assassinated by the Provisional IRA two months later), Social Democratic and Labour Party MP Seamus Mallon, Ulster Unionist Party MP David Trimble, and Larry Cox of Amnesty International.
- Hidden Agenda - a 1990 film directed by Ken Loach which based a fictionalised version of the Stalker inquiry in the context of the shooting of an American civil rights lawyer.
- Lethal Force - an edition of Panorama investigating a number of cases, including the killing by undercover members of 14 Intelligence Company of John McNeill, Eddie Hale and Peter Thompson, as they attempted to rob a Belfast betting shop armed with replica firearms on 13 January 1990, and the killing by soldiers of 3 Para of joyriders Martin Peake and Karen Reilly on 30 September the same year . It was shown on BBC1 on 22 July 1991.
- You, Me and Marley - a BBC2 Screenplay drama, written by Graham Reid and directed by Richard Spence, inspired by the killing of Peake and Reilly, and shown on the first anniversary of their deaths.
Read more about this topic: Shoot-to-kill Policy In Northern Ireland
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