Christopher Jefferies found it "impossible" to watch his arrest in ITV drama

The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies has been written by Peter Morgan – the man behind critically acclaimed Frost/Nixon and The Queen – with W1A actor Jason Watkins (in character above) playing the retired schoolteacher.

It dramatises the month after Jefferies was arrested on suspicion of killing landscape artist Joanna Yeates in December 2010, and the shocking way he was subsequently hounded and demonised by the tabloid press.

Jefferies was later released without charge and another of his tenants, Dutch engineer Vincent Tabak, was ultimately convicted of Yeates' murder.

During filming the director – Roger Michell, a former pupil of Jefferies – invited him on set to watch the arrest scene but the retired schoolteacher found he couldn't watch.

"It didn't seem to be to be necessarily the most sensitive thing to invite me to go and see," Jefferies told Radio Times magazine. "There were 13 takes and because my arrest is done in the film exactly as it happened, I found it quite impossible to watch Jason in that scene."

Otherwise he says he was dispassionate watching Watkin's replay that traumatic episode in his life.

"Although I appear played by a character who looks remarkably like me, or who was made up to look remarkably like me, probably what comes across – but obviously I am not the best person to judge – is that this is somebody who represents or caricatures certain aspects of me, exaggerated and separated, as it were, from the whole, in order to make the point Peter Morgan wanted to make.

"So, in a sense, I suppose the writer was using me and what happened to me to say something that he particularly wanted to say about British society."

Originally broadcast in 2014, The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies is repeated on ITV beginning tonight (Monday, 17th August) at 9pm – check out what else is on with our TV Guide