How to Murder Your Wife

Any danger of a cup of tea, weak and white?

– Alf (Simon O'Connor) feels a thirst after being called into the police station

Alibis? They're overrated. You don't need one if someone just disappears...for good reason.

– Alf (Simon O'Connor) introduces the third 'chapter' of his story

It's not a marriage, Annie! He's besotted. It's a ménage à troy...him, me and that bloody dog!

– Elizabeth (Geraldine Brophy) has had it with her husband Alf (Simon O'Connor)

One day, just me and you, and no more her. Just me and you lovey. One day.

– Alf (Simon O'Connor) plots and plans with best mate Shep the dog

Bugger me. Still waters. Betty's hardly out of the country, Alf's got himself a bird . . . The good sort.

– Neighbour Jess Earp (John Chalmers) notices Alf's new house guest, Tracy Lee (Holly Shanahan)

Playing a "real" person is hard. If Alf Benning is remembered at all it will be, for the most-part, only for having murdered his wife. On the other hand, his next-door neighbour at the time recalled Alf having been very helpful and compasionate when their dog got his leash tangled and nearly choked. And by all accounts even some of the police had a kind of soft spot for "wee" Alf. All I could do was play the Alf in the script and hope to bring some sense of humanity to the character.

– Simon O'Connor on the challenge of playing convicted murderer Alf Benning, Stuff, 3 August 2015

Let's adhere to the facts, gentlemen if you please.

– Judge O'Regan (Ray Henwood) tries to keep order in his court

Lead actors Simon O'Connor and Geraldine Brophy are superb as the ill-fated couple. Director Riccardo Pellizzeri cunningly emulates the stagey style of NZ feature films of the 1970s, adding a jolt of the modern via brief surrealist touches. It's a tad gory, of course. Let's just say that the show's subtitle, A Black Comedy in Six Parts, is more significant than you might imagine.

– Grant Smithies praises TV movie How to Murder Your Wife, Stuff, 16 August 2015

I love that dog. That dog's kept me sane! The way he wags his tail, the way he looks at me...

– Alf (Simon O'Connor) is distraught at hearing that his beloved Shep might be dead

We don't do shy here, do we girls?

– The legendary Carmen (Boni Tukiwaho) welcomes Alf (Simon O'Connor) to her Wellington establishment

One night, I was having a beer with Peter Doone, who later became the Commissioner of Police. I got a call from the watch-house saying Alf was behaving strangely. When I got down there, there's Alf in the exercise room; he's drawn an effigy of a woman's head on the wall and he's doing a weird voodoo dance in front of it!

– Former detective Mark Everitt on the behaviour of the real Alf Benning, Stuff, 16 August 2015

Look murder...Well it's the worst possible crime. So if you killed her I suggest that you tell me, so that we can work out the best possible defence. Because if you did do it, even the New Zealand Police will work it out eventually.

– Lawyer Mike Bungay ( Mark Mitchinson) cuts to the chase with his client (Simon O'Connor)

The decision to make her [Elizabeth] the villain of the piece is bold, and perhaps callous, given her eventual fate: the film seems to suggest she had it coming. But it also makes the story bracingly free of the familiar judgments of film and television, with a deserving murder victim and a bumbling, sympathetic killer.

– NZ Herald reviewer Duncan Grieve, 23 August 2015