The film shows us the role played by a detective, Steph Farley (Chanel Cresswell), in bringing the perpetrators to justice — though I was a little taken aback to discover that ‘witness’ Michael Gorman (Reiss Jarvis), eventually persuaded by Farley to shop his guilty friends, was a dramatic invention of the writer.

Murdered For Being Different manages to be a nailbiting, tearjerking drama even though it must be assumed the fact of Sophie’s non-survival is already known to the viewer.

Her fate is withheld from the narrative until Rob wakes from his coma and can be taken to see her on her life support machine.

His gradual realisation that he is there to say goodbye before the machine is turned off is one of the film’s most poignant moments.

With its first screening close to the tenth anniversary of Sophie’s death (on August 24), Murdered For Being Different is a worthy addition to BBC3’s strand of serious social commentary programmes.

These days, due to greater mainstream understanding and acceptance, a lot more goths and fetish folk undoubtedly feel safer looking and dressing how they want to in public than they would have ten years ago.

But it’s worth remembering that this is a luxury not yet afforded to all those who embrace difference around the world.

And — as the end credits of this powerful film remind us via the statistic of 70,000 hate crime incidents recorded in the UK just last year — even with our supposedly admirable tolerance of ‘eccentricity’, we Brits are evidently still some considerable way short of being a truly civilised society.

bbc3/iplayer/murdered-for-being-different
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