Murder in a Teacup

I loved "The Young Poisoners Handbook" when it came out and Graham Young's story is a sad but true one. This was a documentary rather than a film and had interesting interviews with those involved BUT I want to take this time to address British media production values from a loving american viewpoint. I love the content of British TV and Movies overall. They can be a bit dull to some americans or the dialects difficult to suss out at times but otherwise better curated content than US overall. But look we have to talk about professional production values in this day and age. Brits took FOREVER to figure out lighting for sets, and often in the past relied in a baffling manner on natural light of which there is generally little in UK lol. Then came the 1000000W PAR cans burning holes in the video tape etc through the 80s and 90s. Thankfully when HD came, there was nowhere to hide the bad lighting anymore and people there seemed to learn how to light better and give a more current and polished appearance. They have the formula for murder pr0n now thankfully adopted for content flow that americans like too BUT holy cow the audio in all of these is so incredibly bad it ruins the story. You either have voiceover work of murderers and victims done by cartoon workers and the interviews are unintelligible because old brit men refuse to use inflection or emotion so it is always a low drone punctuated by....punctuation. The brit grans are always sing songy and sound absolutely silly in the middle of a murder doc and worst of all the audio levels just go in and out like no sweetening was done save to top n tails edits. Heck every single dsp app has NORMALIZATION in it and I suggest you guys learn how to use it by clicking on it. That is all you have to do. It will fix the levels while you nip out for a cuppa. Just please take note and get this part up to match the gloss of the lighting and flow and you will find much better reviews. I notice many feel the same way I do about the character voice overs and how silly they sound. Now just fix the mumbling and levels... Overall I enjoyed learning the real details of his life and its twisted path. Keep bringing this caliber of interesting content and I will overlook some of the production foibles.

I recently read the book 'Obsessive Poisoner: The Strange Story of Graham Young, by his sister Winifred Young' and it was excellent, I feel the documentary should have been more based on that book and its timeline and interviewed his sister as this documentary seemed to miss out alot of interesting and important parts and repeated its self.

The timeline of the events didn't work jumping forward then back and on a technical level the direction, framing and random extreme closeups where distracting and like others have said the voice over of Graham was comical, I'm sure he didn't talk quite like that!

I would read his sisters book or watch his episode on 'Great Crimes and Trials of the Twentieth Century' or the film 'The Young Poisoner's Handbook'.

Sorry, would love to have seen this, but from the getgo the beginning was disjointed. When the programme eventually started, it was again disjointed and appallingly put together.

If I wanted to listen to music whilst the important and essential witnesses were talking, I would have put some background music on Alexa.

The music was an absolute distraction and simply unnecessary. I switched off after 29 minutes hoping it would get better??? Nope not worth my time and effort. It was and is simply awfully produced and such a shame given the subject and the amount of people who were talking about the terrible crime, firsthand.

A very interesting dive into serial killer Graham Young. Very in depth, but not quite the high level of production value we've come to expect from True Crime documentaries in recent years. Great interviews, and experts that are able to explain clearly without overly "dumbing down". It does seem to run longer than needed, but that may be due to the 'but'...

The only, and honestly rather glaring, negative point is the actor providing voice-over readings of Young's letters. It is such a wildly over-the-top, cartoonish, comic book villain type performance that it's just in such stark contrast to the very serious interviews & expert analyses so as to take you out of it.

I found myself more put off by this than the subject matter, and I'm certain I sprained my eyes rolling them so hard. I am convinced he specifically grew a little moustache to twirl just for the role.