I Fought the Law’s Sheridan Smith “couldn’t stop hugging” real-life subject Ann Ming: “I am completely in awe”

Sheridan and Ann Ming are nearly 40 years apart in age, but there’s visible kinship between the star and the octogenarian from Billingham on Teesside. At the press screening they hugged and held hands, and it wasn’t the West End queen but the retired nurse from the industrial North East who eased the mood to laughter. In a dryly mocking aside towards the screen she observed: “When southerners come up to make programmes they always have lots of shots of cooling towers. They’ve been redundant for years!”

Talking to me afterwards, both women tumble out their thoughts and experiences of the story, blinking tears, laughing, close and easy together. Following Ann’s book, For the Love of Julie, and a BBC documentary, Sheridan was keen to take the role, “but nervous. I didn’t want to let Ann down, I wanted to make her proud.”

Ann remembers their first meeting: “I thought she’d be right posh, designer clothes and handbag. And there she was with a Tesco plastic carrier… She’s dead ordinary!” “We couldn’t stop hugging,” adds Sheridan.

The drama is more than a crime story: indeed, the scriptwriter Jamie Crichton has quietly said that he dislikes “harrowing” true-crime drama and was drawn to it because he likes superheroes. Certainly the name of Ann Ming MBE will stand in British legal history – a citizen who used grief and anger to reform the 800-year-old law of double jeopardy, which prevented prosecuting someone twice for the same offence.

She fought police, the Crown Prosecution Service and contemptuous lawyers; enlisted a Home Secretary and the Law Commission; and addressed the House of Lords without notes. “Well,” she says now, “nobody’s better than you, so if you see something that’s not right you have to try.” Sheridan shakes her head in wonder: “I am completely in awe”.

The story begins starkly. In 1989, Ann’s daughter Julie was viciously murdered in her Billingham home by William Dunlop, a local, who was drunk and fired by porn. Ann and her husband Charlie were looking after Julie’s three-year-old son Kevin that night, and the next morning – when Julie didn’t turn up at court, where she was due to apply for a leave of separation from her husband – reported her missing.

The police fobbed them off for days, saying that 22-year-old Julie probably “hitched down the A19 to London”. To this day, Ann feels rage at their presumption that her daughter would walk out on her child. “What goes around comes around. Years later after the court case, I’d lost my purse and a policeman came. He had his cap pulled right down on his face, but it was him again. I said, ‘I know you, community relations extraordinaire! You lot should have been sacked. Your attitude was disgusting – I was telling you about my daughter, but you knew better!’”

Worse still, when the police finally checked Julie’s house, they said that, “highly trained forensic officers” found nothing suspicious: “No dead bodies here, if that’s what you mean”. Weeks passed, an empty Christmas, still hoping. Then the family got Julie’s house keys back, and her husband – with whom she was still close and who had moved into the house to take care of Kevin – complained of a terrible smell. Ann came round and pulled back a bath panel. There was her daughter’s body, two months’ dead.

The screaming horror of that moment closes the first episode: discreetly shot but vivid. Ann, who was involved and consulted on the script, watched much of the filming distantly on a monitor. Had Sheridan asked her advice about playing that life-shattering moment, or her distressed outbreaks in court that followed? They look at each other… “No, your book said most of it.” Ann nods in agreement. “You thought it might upset me?” she asks.

It wasn’t just that. Sheridan, whose performance is frighteningly electric in these scenes, simply says, “No, I didn’t want to get caught up in the detail – asking, ‘Was her hand here or there?’, all that. If I get too much in my own head about acting – over-rehearsing, over-thinking – it doesn’t work. So, I just tried to feel how you’d feel, Ann. Not beat myself up over detail.”

Her own son, Billy, is five now: her scenes with little Kevin felt heartbreakingly real. “It’s changed me a lot, having Billy,” she admits.

Dunlop, already known to police, was an obvious suspect, but juries twice failed to agree and he was acquitted. The family struggled, says Ann. “When we sat round that closed coffin, Charlie and me and my son and daughter, the funeral director said, ‘You’re together as a family now’. But we can’t ever be. Never.”

Then, in 1997, Dunlop was jailed for attacking another young woman, and in prison he bragged about killing Julie. But the double jeopardy rule meant that someone couldn’t be tried twice for the same offence. His admission was recorded, but he could only be tried for lying at the first trial: six years for perjury. And so, Ann’s campaign began, arguing that if compelling new evidence turns up (often it’s DNA), a killer can be retried.

Eventually she won the argument and the law was amended, coming into effect in 2005. In 2006, William Dunlop was sentenced to life in prison for Julie’s murder. Since then, several other killers have been brought to justice as a direct result of the amendment, including two of the men who murdered Stephen Lawrence. “Scotland and Australia have changed the law, the safeguards are stringent. Mr Trump, if you’re listening, think about it,” says Ann.

Nor had she finished with Dunlop: he was up for parole last year and the family argued against it, thinking him still dangerous.

Every advance and frustration is detailed in the drama, taking a heavy toll. Colleagues talk about Sheridan’s unusually intense “process” as an actor – as the show’s producer says, “she goes into every scene completely immersed, and she was in virtually every scene and shot.” Ann says that it’s like watching “a tornado”.

“Well,” Sheridan admits, “those nine weeks were the hardest thing I’ve ever done. When I do make-believe, fiction, I can turn off. But with a massive, true, courageous story and someone trusting you, if I don’t let myself feel that raw emotion it’s not doing Ann justice. I did relax just a bit, at the end of the day – when I took the wig off!” (She ages, very convincingly, over the two decades of the story.)

“But,” Ann observes, quietly motherly now, “you were a right mess by the end.” To which Sheridan agrees. “I was fried and exhausted, living on my nerves, thinking about all that trauma. But having Christmas with my Billy was lovely. And I do yoga now; I meditate.” And actually, having interviewed her before, over the past 16 years, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Sheridan Smith so centred and happy.

Dramatising real lives is tricky: I ask whether there are any moments in the series that Ann disputed, but she says not many. It doesn’t show where she finally got therapy for her PTSD. “A place called Ticehurst. That was important; it helped me to cope with my anger towards the police.” Her trauma, though, is deftly indicated in odd moments – when she seems to see her daughter or, terrifyingly, thinks a patient is Dunlop. “For [the series] they make me a ward nurse, really I was a theatre nurse. But it’s fine.”

Sheridan relates another change she made. “There was a moment when they put a beer in my hand. And I suddenly thought, ‘No, hang on – Ann Ming wouldn’t!’” “I would not!” agrees Ann. “It would have been a gin and tonic!”

There is also decent care for others involved in the tragedy, like Julie’s siblings, who were obviously hugely impacted by what happened but were not part of the legal fight. The real Kevin came unobtrusively to the press launch. “He likes to look after his nan!” Ann says.

As for her late husband Charlie, played by Daniel York Loh with truthful, stricken pathos, recoiling from the public battle, Ann is happy with how he is shown. “He was a man of few words. Never got a chance with my big mouth! But he said once in the middle of the night that if he’d been the one to find Julie, he’d have dropped down dead, couldn’t have borne it. You realise how emotionally weak men are.”

Did she never hesitate? Perhaps at the last hurdle, insisting that the law was made retrospective, to cover Dunlop? “Never thought about it. It was common sense. Told them so in the Lords.” Sheridan, after years dealing with the spotlight, finds that moment awesome – “I could never have done it.” Indeed, says Ann, Lord Mackenzie told her that “he hadn’t thought an ordinary northern woman could [do it]; he said hardened speakers dry up in that chamber. He offered to send me a Hansard copy, signed. I didn’t know what Hansard [the official report of all parliamentary debates] was.”

Her MBE is for services to the criminal justice system; she still addresses police training conferences. “I do West Yorkshire, I do national police. I don’t pull any punches, don’t skirt around the fact that they didn’t get it right, didn’t search the house properly, didn’t find my daughter.”

“Just completely in awe,” says Sheridan again. “I wish I had your strength and determination.” “It was just common sense,” replies Ann, “and that’s part of love.”

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I Fought the Law arrives at 9pm on Sunday 31st August on ITV1 and ITVX.

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