In plain English
Summary based on third-party reviews and Channel 5 listing material. This site does not host the documentary or a transcript.
Lucy Letby: Did She Really Do It? aired on Channel 5 at 9pm on Sunday 6 October 2024 and was narrated by the actor Lucy Briers. It is the first mainstream UK television documentary to engage directly with the post-conviction expert critique of the Letby verdicts, predating the Netflix release of The Investigation of Lucy Letby (4 February 2026) by roughly sixteen months. UK viewers can find the programme on the My5 catch-up service; the broadcaster restricts access outside the UK.
The framing question is the one the title asks: did Letby in fact do what she was convicted of doing. The documentary works through the evidence used at trial — the medical-causation theories, the shift-rota chart, the handwritten notes — and features insights from medical and legal experts who have publicly sought an official review of the convictions. Verifiable named contributors include Dr Faye Skelton, programme lead in Applied Criminology and Forensic Psychology at Edinburgh Napier University, who is reported to have spoken about the psychology of the handwritten notes and the framing of Letby as a clinician under sustained accusation. The Sheffield DocFest industry panel subsequently described Channel 5 as “the first broadcaster to openly question the Letby verdict”.
Critical reception was split. Some reviewers described the film as “insensitive to the victims”, arguing it under-weighted the trauma to bereaved families. Others treated it as a legitimate exercise in mainstream-media engagement with the post-conviction expert evidence — the first British television to do so — and placed it within the broader 2024-2026 arc that runs from the May 2024 Rachel Aviv New Yorker piece through the February 2025 Shoo Lee International Expert Panel report and on to the February 2026 Netflix documentary. The film’s significance, on the public record, is more procedural than substantive: it changed what UK mainstream audiences could see being asked about the case on a flagship Sunday-evening slot, before any of the broadsheet-led broadening of coverage that followed.
The Free Lucy review reads the documentary as effective evidence-led summary that surfaced what readers of the specialist independent coverage already knew, in a format accessible to a much wider audience — mainstream prime-time on a free-to-air channel. The Sheffield DocFest panel discussion in 2025 (under the title “Channel 5 and the Strange Case of Lucy Letby”) treated the broadcaster’s decision to commission and air the film as a documentary-industry test case for whether terrestrial-TV current affairs can still meaningfully engage with active criminal-justice questions in the streaming era. The IMDb listing pages preserve the broadcast credits and third-party user reviews, which run from strongly affirmative to strongly critical along the same evidence-versus-trauma fault line. None of these third-party assessments alters the underlying public-record point: this was the first time a UK terrestrial-broadcast documentary devoted prime-time airtime to questioning the safety of the Letby convictions.
How to watch. UK viewers can stream the documentary through the My5 catch-up service at channel5.com (free, advertising-supported, account required). Outside the UK the broadcaster’s CDN returns HTTP 403 and there is no official non-UK mirror. As of 1 June 2026 a WebFetch attempt on the Channel 5 listing page from outside the UK confirmed the geo-block. Some user-uploaded clips have circulated on YouTube but we do not link to them: they are unauthorised mirrors that may be removed at any time and their reliability cannot be independently verified.
Sources: Sue Terry Voices (production-credit and broadcast-date confirmation); Channel 5 listings (broadcast date and time); Sheffield DocFest 2025 panel summary; Free Lucy (third-party review); IMDb. The documentary itself is geo-restricted to the UK.