The three-part Moors Murders (Channel 4) documentary represented a new low for forensic psychologists on the true-crime circuit. A woman called Kerry Daynes shared her insights into Ian Brady’s habit of visiting a cemetery in Glasgow, where he spent hours drinking alone. “I think that the rather morbid fascination that Brady shows with graveyards is because this is a quiet environment where he doesn’t have people to annoy him, because all the people are dead,” she declared. Very profound. “But also, there is something more sinister here.” Do you think?

If you were unfamiliar with these murders, then the details were laid out. And the vivid opening testimony of David Smith, Myra Hindley’s brother-in-law, was certainly riveting. Smith was present when Brady attacked teenage victim Edward Evans with an axe and it was Smith who raised the alarm with the police.

But the interview with Smith was recorded in 2003 (he died in 2012) and he recounted events with a practised air. The twisted relationship between Hindley and Brady has been picked over for decades. The programme promised “never-before-seen prison letters” from Brady and Hindley to Janie Jones, who befriended Hindley in Holloway Prison. But Jones has spoken about that friendship for decades, and published many of these Hindley letters in a book. The programme muddied the waters over what was new and what was not.

Photographs of Evans’s bloodied body were shown repeatedly. Worst of all, though, was the decision to jazz up those infamous mugshots with digital technology, allowing Hindley and Brady to come alive and blink at us. What on earth were the programme-makers thinking? The lapse in taste was so bad that I remained braced for that terrible recording of Lesley Ann Downey to be played. Mercifully, it was not.

Clive Entwistle, a reporter who covered the case at the time, discussed events in an unsensational manner. But towards the end, he said of Brady and Hindley: “It’s unfortunate that they will be long remembered. I think it would be better if they were totally forgotten.” Which begged the question of what he was doing on a programme such as this.