Anybody's Nightmare

Anybody's Nightmare is a single British television crime drama film, based on the true story of the imprisonment of Sheila Bowler, that broadcast on ITV on 7 October 2001. The film starred Patricia Routledge as Bowler, a 62-year-old music teacher who was wrongly arrested, tried and convicted for the murder of her husband's 89-year-old aunt Florence Jackson in 1993 after she drowned in the river Brede in East Sussex in 1992. The film chronicles the investigation, trial and the subsequent four years of Sheila's sentence in Holloway and Bullwood Prison before her successful appeal in 1998. The film depicts Sheila's son Simon (Thomas Arnold) and daughter Jane (Georgina Sutcliffe)'s quest for justice, as they are aided by friend of the family, Angela Devlin (Nicola Redmond), whose real-life book on the case, first published in 1998, was the basis of the film. The film also co-starred David Calder as prosecution barrister Anthony Glass QC, alongside Malcolm Sinclair as Nicholas Purnell QC and William Armstrong as Jeremy Roberts QC, Bowler's defence lawyers. The initial broadcast of the film drew 9. 11 million viewers. The film is often repeated on satellite and cable channels True Movies 1 and True Movies 2, with the occasional broadcast on True Entertainment. Notably, the film is Patricia Routledge's last acting role on television to date.