Oscar Pistorius: The Interview review – 'It's what Reeva would have wanted'

The famous man who killed Reeva Steenkamp doesn’t want to go back to jail, and thinks she wouldn’t want him to. “I don’t want to have to waste my life sitting there,” he wails. “If I was afforded the opportunity of redemption, I would like the opportunity to help those less fortunate, like I had in my past. I would like to believe that, if Reeva could look down upon me, she would want me to live that life.”

At which point it’s hard not to yell at your television: “She might also like the opportunity to have her own life back again and not be dead.”

Oscar Pistorius: The Interview (ITV) is often uncomfortable viewing. Uncomfortable because it relives a horrible killing; because of the apparently broken man at its centre; because it puts you in the position of the judge (no juries in South Africa), makes you decide the extent of the man’s guilt and how genuine his whimpering remorse is; and because it makes you wonder why the hell he’s doing this interview with investigative reporter and former copper Mark Williams-Thomas.

It starts with a bit of background – disability, strong mum, running, can-do attitude, can-do anything. Then meeting Reeva, how kind and bubbly she was. Then Pistorius takes Williams-Thomas through the fateful night in all its details – some really strange, such as her saying: “Come, let’s go brush our teeth.” (Really?) But, basically, he sticks exactly to his story from the trial – that it was all a terrible accident – except this time we get to see him, as well as hear him and read about him.

That was the right place for this, though: in court, in a proper trial, with prosecution and defence, rather than a television interview at his uncle’s house just before his sentencing for murder. That’s what this must be about: an appeal for leniency, less time in jail, the opportunity for redemption and to help those less fortunate. It is, after all, what Reeva would have wanted.

I have no idea if it will work. It may even backfire. But it certainly made me uncomfortable.