My review of “The Abuser: Fighting For Justice” by my teacher – I sowed that this predator will never receive proper justice, writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS

My Teacher the Abuser: Fighting for Justice (BBC1)

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The Art of Filmmaking with Ian Nathan (Sky Arts)

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The sad thing is that there can never really be justice. The sex offenders whose abuse went unchecked in British schools in the 1970s and earlier are now all dead or old.

TV and radio presenter Nicky Campbell and a group of his former Edinburgh Academy classmates worked tirelessly to expose the crimes of an evil man, a former maths teacher called Iain Wares.

But the shaky figure seen in the Panorama special “My Teacher The Abuser: Fighting For Justice” is no longer the monster that has plagued generations of students. He stumbled into court in South Africa, where he now lives, looking like a poisonous, wizened gremlin with no remorse. He knew that no matter what punishment awaited him, he could get away with perverted attacks on children throughout his career.

For Campbell and his friends, now men approaching retirement age, the frustration is not just that Wares, at Edinburgh Academy and later at Fettes College, was placed in a position to molest boys without restraint.

For Campbell and his friends, now men approaching retirement age, the frustration is not just that Wares was enabled by the Edinburgh Academy and later Fettes College to molest boys unhindered (Photo: Iain Wares).

It is also the case that he can confidently admit his behavior while downplaying or dismissing its importance – and he always does. Incredibly, the report found that he had already been charged with sex offenses and had undergone psychiatric treatment upon his arrival in Scotland when he first came to the UK in the 1960s.

Nevertheless, he was able to work as a teacher in a preparatory boys’ boarding school. Worse, when a series of complaints from his parents forced him to leave, he received a glowing recommendation.

Campbell said Wares’ predatory behavior had always been common knowledge among teachers — he called them “really bad men, terrible, disgusting men who did terrible things.”

But this documentary failed to apportion blame or blame multiple teachers. The focus was on Wares and a Fettes University teacher, Hamish Dawson, who died in 2009 without any disciplinary or legal action ever being taken.

As a former pupil at a boys’ day school in the 1970s, I understand all too well the struggle for survival in an atmosphere of distorted normality – how nicknames for teachers, for example, helped children to instinctively identify which teachers tended to thumb their noses thumb. hitting each other, sticks and feather dusters. Some were drunk, some were curb crawlers, others walked through the changing rooms and showers throwing in a wet towel.

However, “Weirdo Wares” does not capture the full horror of maths classes at the Edinburgh Academy, where boys were brought to the top of the class to be abused. Many of the statements made by the men who fought back tears are too moving and distressing to be repeated here.

Film critic Ian Nathan’s The Art Of Film series concluded with a retrospective of biopics, dramas loosely based on true events, from Queen Victoria to Charlie Chaplin and Howard Hughes

Like a stick stirring mud in a stagnant pond, it all brought very old mud to the surface. After the hour was up, I took the dog for a long, icy walk, boasting because it was now too late for real justice.

Judging the story is much easier when it comes to celluloid. Film critic Ian Nathan’s The Art Of Film series concluded with a retrospective of biographies loosely based on real lives, from Queen Victoria to Charlie Chaplin to Howard Hughes.

Contributions from fellow critics and filmmakers such as Stephen Woolley and Paul Webster shed light on the narrative techniques of biographical films. But the real fun of this show lies in the well-chosen segments.

This time we saw fragments of Greta Garbo’s “Queen Christina” and even a glimpse of Georges Melies’ “Joan of Arc” from 1900. This is film history.