2025 Nominees

Lucan

Five Mile Films, BBC Studios, BBC Two

UK

- Crime & Investigative

What is exceptional about this series is its narrative evolution across the episodes. After starting as a programme about the missing murderer and aristocrat Lord Lucan, it becomes a series about the man who is trying to track him down. Episode 1 tells the story of Lucan and his escape through the eyes of Neil Berriman, a man who has discovered at the age of 40 that his real mother was the nanny murdered by the Lord in 1974. Episode 2 follows Neil’s increasingly creative investigation into the idea that Lucan may have escaped and still be alive – and his heroic tracking down of a Buddhist monk living in one of the remotest corners of Australia who he believes has murdered his mother. Episode 3 records a gap opening between Neil’s conviction in his own detective work and the filmmaker’s growing scepticism about his findings. The focus of the director’s attention shifts from the spray of intriguing evidence about the missing aristocrat to the study of a man in the grip of an obsession.