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Honour, episode 1 review: Banaz Mahmod is reduced to a bit part in her own murder

Keeley Hawes stars as DCI Caroline Goode - ITV
Keeley Hawes stars as DCI Caroline Goode - ITV

"This is a true story," we were told at the beginning of Honour (ITV), and it was one you are unlikely to forget. Banaz Mahmod, a 20-year-old woman, was murdered on the orders of her father and uncle because she escaped an abusive arranged marriage and fell in love with another man. Banaz had begged the police for help on no less than five occasions, warning that her family was plotting to kill her and even providing a list of names, all to no avail.

Those approaches to police took a great deal of bravery. Yet writer Gwyneth Hughes chose another heroine for her story: DCI Caroline Goode, the detective who brought the killers to justice and was awarded the Queen’s Policing Medal for her efforts. Banaz (Buket Komur) was little more than an image on a screen, a voice on a tape. The BBC’s excellent 2016 drama Murdered By My Father covered similar ground but gave us a fully-rounded picture of the murder victim.

Here, we heard in great detail what happened to Banaz – repeatedly raped by the husband she had met only twice before their wedding, escaping from what she feared was an earlier murder attempt by her father – but learned nothing about her as a person. It was a glaring and disrespectful omission; a victim allowed no agency in life, here reduced to a bit part in a star vehicle for Keeley Hawes.

There is little doubt that Goode did a sterling job in catching Banaz’s killers. But the story was told entirely from her perspective, which translated as endless shots of Hawes looking sad. Bizarrely, Hughes has referred to this as an “uplifting”drama. There was no evidence of that in the first episode. An attempt to lighten the mood with a bantering relationship between Goode and her detective sergeant, Andy Craig (Mark Stanley), who kept calling her Smudge, felt incongruous.

These issues aside, the drama shone a light both on the failures to save Banaz and on the shocking subjugation of women within some immigrant communities. It did not shy away from the cultural issues at the heart of the case, and Hughes put the argument in the mouth of the real-life women’s activist Diana Nammi (played here by Ahd Kamel): “Sikhs, Pakistanis, Turks, Kurds – there are men from these cultures who bring their frozen values to this country. And, by the way, there is no honour in it.”

It was a provocative statement, and one that applies to only a minority, but it is a truth that needs to be confronted. A drama written by someone with real insight into these communities could have explored it further.