Daniel Mays Shines as John Worboys in ITV Drama

's new drama Believe Me has earned acclaim for it's depiction of black cab rapist John Worboys.

The four-part drama aired its first episode on Sunday night and critics have penned a string of rave reviews, focusing on the performances from Daniel Mays as Worboys and Aimée-Ffion Edwards and Aasiya Shah as two of his victims.

Worboys drugged and assaulted his victims in the back of his London taxi, with the drama focusing on a handful of his 100 estimated victims who came forward.

Christopher Stevens for the Daily Mail wrote in his five star review that Mays 'specialises in a blend of creepy chirpiness, and he turns this up to maximum.'

'Little of him has appeared on screen - just his eyes in the rear-view mirror, his face in shadows, his hands as they prepared a cocktail of crushed sleeping pills - but what we have seen is enough to turn blood to ice.'  

Written by BAFTA winner Jeff Pope (See No Evil: The Moors Murders), the drama in later episodes also tells the story of Carrie, played by Miriam Petche, the future Mrs , who took the fight public when Worboys came up for parole.

Pope spoke to all three of the women fictionally represented in his script. 'A long process... to gain their trust, it took a number of years,' he has said. 

Lucy Mangan for The Guardian in her four star review opinioned that the drama gives the 'spotlight to the survivors... and rightly pushes the perpetrator into the background,' calling it 'a sensitive, compelling look at their fight for justice'.

Johnathon Hughes from the Radio Times also gave four stars, declaring that 'Jeff Pope is a maestro at crafting dramas that eloquently voice the public’s anger towards a system that too often gets it so spectacularly wrong.' 

Anita Singh The Telegraph gave the drama three stars, writing that 'As Sarah and Laila, Aimee-Ffion Edwards and Aasiya Shah give powerful performances conveying the victims’ horror, anger and despair. Elsewhere, the drama has missteps.'

'There needs to be a justification for these programmes, otherwise they can tip into queasy entertainment,' Singh concluded. 

Nick Hilton had a similar opinion in his write-up for The Independent, awarding the drama three stars.

Hilton said that whilst 'the cast handle their characters with sensitivity, and Pope does redirect the series’ focus, in its second half, towards bigger concerns about the justice system... Believe Me appears to feel an obligation to show the offending, so that it can fully demonstrate the establishment’s complacency.'

'In doing so, it punctuates an important story with something jarringly tawdry.'

Ben Dowell for The Times disgreed though, deciding that 'once again Pope marshals a complex web of material, including the legal action brought by Sarah and Laila against the police, into a punchy, dramatically coherent whole.'  

'Some people don’t like true crime dramas, thinking most are prurient and exploitative. This is not one of those shows. It’s a must-watch.'

Believe Me airs on ITV1 and is available on ITVX