Showing this at teatime was simply callous

JEKYLL AND HYDE ITV, 6.30pm NO STARS

THE concept of the watershed is dead. There is no longer any point in pretending that TV executives will hold back explicit violence or scenes of terror and sadism before 9pm, to protect young children. Jekyll And Hyde (ITV) featured shocking, nightmarish sequences that would have earned any Hollywood film an 18 certificate only a generation ago.

These included a middle-aged couple being bound and tortured in their home, and left to burn to death with the unconscious body of their teenage son beside them. The man had been shot in the stomach, and then forced to watch his wife questioned with a gun at her head.

In other scenes, a chained creature – half human, half dog – was shot dead by gangsters as it snarled and frothed.

A man in a top hat was clubbed to a pulp, a hotel-keeper was pinned to the wall by his throat, and the story’s depraved ‘hero’ was brutally stabbed: we got a close- up of the knife’s massive haft embedded in his back.

All this was not merely shown before the 9pm watershed. It started at 6.30pm, following the afternoon rugby, in a slot once reserved for religious shows such as Sir Harry Secombe’s Highway. Highway belongs to a forgotten time. When Jekyll And Hyde’s writer, former Fast Show comedian Charlie Higson, was challenged last week over the relentless violence, he claimed even small children had been desensitised by graphic content on the internet.

ASKED what he would say to parents of youngsters who were traumatised by the show, he answered, ‘**** them.’ The man is an idiot and a disgrace. He’s a disgrace because he has no sense of responsibility to his audience and an idiot because, by allowing it to be shown so early in the evening, he has wrecked his own show.

This comic-book fantasy about a superhero held hostage by his darkest urges could have screened after 9pm, and been appreciated for all its good points – the stylised action, sumptuous sets, riproaring plot, inventive monsters and diabolical villains.

The storyline took Robert Louis Steven- son’s classic fantasy novel and updated it from Victorian London to the Thirties. Filled with lurid colour and gorgeous clothes, it looked like an Hercule Poirot mystery imagined by Stephen King. Tom Bateman was having huge fun with his double role, as the clean-cut young medic, and the drooling madman who started a bar brawl with 0 drunken sailors just to pass the time.

At 9pm, parents could watch it, and decide whether their children would enjoy it. Some bold young viewers might, of course, but as an experienced father I know for certain that other small children will have been seriously upset.

Allowing little ones, aged eight and under, who could easily be watching unsupervised at 6.30pm, to see those scenes and perhaps suffer nightmares for months was so utterly inappropriate and callous that it is impossible to give Jekyll And Hyde any star rating at all.

Better than showing it at teatime would be not to broadcast it at all.