TV Review: The Woman in the Wall makes fun of the horrors of the Magdalene laundries

Ruth Wilson as Lorna Brady in The Woman In The Wall.

You don’t want comedy cops in a drama about the Magdalene laundries.

In The Woman in the Wall (BBC One and iPlayer), when a detective patiently explains to his mother that Columbo wasn’t a whodunnit because they showed us who did the murder at the start, it feels tone-deaf. 

And not just because I’ve heard it before in a stand-up comedy routine that was actually funny.

A few scenes later, one guard is explaining number plates to a younger guard in a scene that is straight out of Father Ted.

It jars, given the subject matter. You’d nearly prefer if they went all out and made a comedy musical about the shocking treatment of women in these laundries. 

But parts of this show are creepy and credible, with the stand-out performances you’d expect from actors such as Ruth Wilson and Phillipa Dunne.

Wilson plays Lorna Brady, a woman in modern-day Ireland who is haunted by her experience in a local mother-and-child home. 

She gets a message from an unknown source asking her to meet in a pub because this character knows what happened to Brady’s child. 

Brady goes and gets stood up and ends up shouting at a hen party. It was a pointless scene — time that should have been used to move the story along.

There’s a compelling story in here somewhere, so fair play to the writers for managing to keep it under wraps. 

Ruth Wilson as Lorna Brady in The Woman In The Wall.

Brady discovers the body of an old woman in a room in her house that is lit red, for reasons that aren’t made clear. The old woman seems to attack her, or is it all in her head? 

It seems like a bit of a horror show, dropped in here in case a UK audience wasn’t hooked by the story of religious orders abusing Irish women.

In the meantime, the patient detective arrives in town to investigate the apparent murder of a priest. 

It turns out the priest had kept an eye out for him when the detective was a young-trouble maker. 

This felt like another show again, one of those cosy crime things that air on a Sunday evening about strange happenings in peaceful villages.

It felt like I was being bombarded by four different shows in the first 30 minutes, in the hope that one would stick and I’d stay watching. 

When Sgt Massey from the comedy cop scene told the visiting detective about a local banshee, I felt the ghost of Ballykissangel rising from the grave.

There’s a twist at the end of the first episode, but by then I didn’t care. If you’re going to make a show about an open wound in Irish society, don’t fold in a murder-mystery/Father Ted/David Lynch tribute compilation. Just tell the story with a straight face. 

There’s no need to add in a woman in a wall because the fact that Irish women were locked up and had their kids taken off them is shocking enough as it is. 

And it’s still terrifying that so many people turned a blind eye.