The Murder Trial, Channel 4, review Is it possible to accurately and fairly reflect the enormity, drama and complexity of a long-running murder trial in two hours" worth of television? Nick Holt's powerful documentary The Murder Trial (Channel 4) made a valiant attempt to do so tonight. This was the first time permission had been granted to film a British murder trial and Holt had no shortage of real-life drama to work with in last summer's trial of Nat Fraser in the High Court in Edinburgh. This was the retrial of a man who was found guilty, in 2003, of the murder of his wife Arlene, but whose conviction had been quashed. That neither Arlene Fraser's body nor a murder weapon were ever found, as well as the fact that Fraser had accounted for his movements on the day seemed to qualify prosecutor Alex Prentice QC's introductory description of the case as "tricky" for understatement of the year. In Monday's Daily Telegraph Neil Midgley outlined some of the main arguments for and against allowing cameras in court, and without addressing those points again it is fair to say that the two-hour distillation of the six-week trial that followed made for utterly addictive viewing, illustrating both the minutiae of court proceedings and the extraordinary complexity of a case being prosecuted (and defended) on entirely circumstantial evidence. Few of us ever have an opportunity to see the judicial process at work in such detail - or to see someone accused of a major crime, and the witnesses and family members affected by it, this close up. Along with the process and testimony, cleverly interpolated snippets captured the enormous behind-the-scenes effort that goes into a trial of this kind: the mountains of paperwork, the mundanity of the photographic exhibits (an empty kitchen, an empty bedroom, an empty street - nothing remotely dramatic, yet full of portent). Behind the heavy formality and regalia of the court, a human face poked out occasionally, such as when opposing advocates relaxed the mask of rivalry once the courtroom was clear, and chatted about their plans for the weekend. All of which made for a fascinating, worthwhile documentary, although much of that could be attributed to the "novelty" of its subject matter and the voyeuristic nature of television itself. The inescapable fact is that The Murder Trial was compelling, in large part, for the same reasons as crime fiction compels - mystery, suspense, the creeping sense that perhaps the wrong person could be on trial. If I had not deliberately avoided discovering the verdict beforehand (all it would have taken was a quick check on Google) this would have been an entirely different viewing experience - like reading the last page of a crime novel before turning to the first. Of course there was the added weight of it being absolutely real. A man's freedom really was at stake. A vulnerable fellow human being's disappearance (and we were left with no reasonable doubt that Arlene Fraser was dead) really did have to be accounted for. The only jarring note in Holt's handling of the material was his reliance on external interviews. Entirely understandable from a film-making point of view when it came to helping viewers with context or getting across the enormous, and lasting, emotional impact of such a crime on the friends and relatives, even the children of both victim and accused. But powerful as some of these interviews were, they seemed entirely at odds with the impartiality of the judicial process that was being represented. Ultimately, Fraser was found guilty by a majority verdict and the film's biggest shock emerged - a history of domestic abuse that had been inadmissible in the trial. As TV it worked a little too well, pressing uncomfortably close to the borders of entertainment. Given the difficulty of editing so much material into such a short time span it was impossible to ignore the fact that we were being drip-fed only carefully selected moments of a very long and involved process. For the viewer what determined that selection - accuracy or the desire to tell a good story - was impossible to judge. So did The Murder Trial provide a persuasive case for cameras to be allowed in British courts? I would say it didn't. While it was an absorbing, original and at times shockingly close-up look at an individual murder case, I was never able to forget the guiding hand of the director in the background. In the end, powerful as it was, I wasn't convinced the presence of cameras told me substantially more about our justice system than is already available via the news and other media outlets.