Smashbomb

Entirely unnecessary

Whilst I know the story of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance (I was 20 when it happened), I don’t claim to know the full detail and have never watched a documentary on it before. After seeing Netflix’s effort, I don’t think I would ever need or even want to watch a documentary on this story ever again.

For starters, similar to the Leaving Neverland documentary, this manages to draw out even the tiniest of details and unimportant interviews with barely involved witnesses to a staggering 8 episodes, and a total runtime of nearly 8 hours. This is far too long. I’m pretty sure it could’ve been cut down by half and still had no noticeable effect on the important content they were trying to get across. There is a lot of nonsense guff in this, like the history of the Algarve and interviews of people who happened to be in the same resort or journalists, yet none of this provided anything of value.

That said, it did at least have interviews with some of the suspects at the time and having never seen them before, I found it quite interesting. This documentary also went a way to changing my point of view - I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m on the side that thinks it was the parents, but seeing some of this documentary made me doubt some of my aspersions.

The problem though is that this documentary doesn’t tell us anything new. There’s no new evidence or insights and it’s just rehashing the same old story. And it just made me think what’s the point? It just highlights the amount of resource and money being put into a case that is still no closer to being solved and now 12 years have passed, it’s very unlikely it will ever get solved now. I don’t mean to sound heartless about that, but when you work for the police it’s frustrating to see hundreds of thousands of pounds being shelled out for an operation that is seeing no results when that money could be invested into the front line that desperately needs it.