I have been off work for the past two weeks. No, I didn’t go anywhere or do anything exotic, thanks for asking, unless “my front room” and “changed 15 nappies a day” count as the last word in aspirational holidays these days. For all I know, maybe they do: I’m too busy buying industrial-sized tubs of Sudocrem online to keep up with hipster trends. Otherwise, my time off was dominated by two – for want of a better word – storylines. The first was the new documentary The Keepers. The second was the life and afterlife of Martyn Hett, the 29-year-old killed at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.

Let’s talk first about The Keepers, the true crime documentary that is the new Making A Murderer, that itself was the new Jinx, which in turn was the new Serial. Except, really, it’s none of those things, because The Keepers is wholly concerned with the victims, whereas those previous sensational series focused on the accused. I devoted hours to the sagas of Adnan Syed, Robert Durst and Steven Avery, but, mortifyingly, I can’t remember the names of any of the women they were accused of killing, who were reduced largely to backdrops. In fact, the only line I remember about the murdered teenager from Serial – Hae Min Lee, for the record – was a quote from her poor mother: “When parents die, they’re buried in the ground. But when a child dies, you bury the child in your heart.” That line has frequently come to my mind since the Manchester terrorist attack, in which so many people’s children were killed and injured.

Anyway, as I said, The Keepers is different. Ostensibly, it focuses on the 1969 murder of a nun, Sister Cathy Cesnik; but it becomes about something so much more, and involves so many more victims, many of whom are – unusually, thrillingly – able and willing to speak. The real villain of the documentary, Father Joseph Maskell, who sexually abused boys and girls for decades, was never tried for his crimes and died in 2001, denying the documentary the obvious satisfaction of confrontation, justice and closure. But that is not the point of The Keepers: rather, it is giving his victims the last word. This happens all too rarely. After all, many newspapers, including this one, put Ian Brady on the front page when he died, blessing him with the kind of posthumous lionisation he always wanted. So it is a genuine relief to see, for once, some victims getting the spotlight, as opposed to the egomaniacal psychopath who tried to destroy people’s lives.

Which brings me to Martyn Hett, the much beloved young man who liked to write – as he put it – about “strong women and low culture”, especially the women on Coronation Street, Mariah Carey and Michelle McManus, the winner of Pop Idol in 2003. A lot has been written about how girls and women make up the bulk of Ariana Grande’s audience, and therefore suffered disproportionately in the Manchester attack. But not enough has been said about Grande’s gay fanbase, who were also at the concert that night, and the unashamedly fun camp culture of which she is a part, and which Hett celebrated.

Fundamentalists – of all stripes – are boring. They parrot the identikit, braindead lines fed to them by others about how women should behave, how gay people are evil, how pleasure is suspect. Hett exemplified the opposite of all that. He was so comfortable in his glorious originality, he got a tattoo of Deirdre Barlow on his leg; whereas the man who would go on to kill him, whose name I feel no need to record here, looked to others to tell him how to behave and think.

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As a (very) reform Jew, you might say I don’t know much about the afterlife of terrorists, and you’d be right. But I do know that no God rewards someone who sets off nail bombs in crowds. Hett, on the other hand, has reached the ultimate posthumous camp paradise. Mariah Carey has Instagrammed a photo of him. Corrie is going to pay tribute to him. Michelle McManus has written a genuinely moving tribute to him. Best of all, Katie Hopkins left her job at LBC after her stupid tweet about the Manchester attack, and given that Hett had recently tweeted, “Katie Hopkins: queen of using child abuse to push her racist agenda”, after some predictable blether from her about the Rochdale abuse scandal, I like to think he’d have especially enjoyed that development.

Sometimes, winners look like victims – abused, battered, even dead. But they are winners, because their truth remains long after their attackers have faded into deserved ignominy. I had to Google Father Maskell’s name, but I’ll always remember Jean Hargadon Wehner, one of his victims, boldly exposing him. Similarly, Hett’s articles and tweets make me cry, mainly with laughter. Theirs is the world I want to live in.