The pathologist’s corpses were more lifelike than this twaddle
Dr Nikki Alexander’s hair always looks like she’s on her way to an awards ceremony, not a mortuary. Maybe it’s all the formaldehyde in the air at the morgue where she dissects her corpses, but those tresses are rigid. They’d break any hairbrush. They could probably stop bullets and deflect lasers.
Still, they are more lifelike than the plots of Silent Witness (BBC1), where nothing makes sense, least of all the grinding political messages.
The show is in its 20th series, so we accepted a long time ago that the pathologists and forensics experts at the Lyell Centre are supersleuths, able to solve any murder while the Scotland Yard detectives are still scratching their heads with their pencils.
But the gory clues that Dr Nikki unravels are plain balderdash. None of them add up, and it’s so irritating that the show can become unwatchable.
One victim was stabbed in the neck and hurled off a balcony. There wasn’t a single drop of blood on the rooftop terrace, but his severed artery had hosed the side of the building all the way down.
And when Dr Nikki and her stainless steel hair examined the body, there wasn’t one smear of blood on the man’s throat either. Apparently, between going over the railing and hitting the ground three seconds later, he had managed to empty himself of all eight pints without so much as staining his shirt.
That didn’t puzzle our pouting pathologist. But she did wonder what secrets were concealed on the victim’s smartphone. He had one of those posh ones, activated by a thumbprint.
To make that work, Dr Nikki had to wire his hand up to a 12-volt car battery, which seems like a serious technical flaw to me. Who would buy a phone designed for Frankenstein’s monster?
Most ludicrous was the moment she uncovered the location of a lorryful of bodies, by studying the skies and looking for the circling buzzards. For heaven’s sake! Vultures do that, not buzzards . . . and this was supposed to be Surrey, not the Serengeti.
Equally maddening was the show’s dewy- eyed view of illegal immigrants. According to Dr Nikki, most of them are teenage girls desperately searching for their mothers, while the fascist forces of the British State hunt them down.
Even the people-smugglers in Silent Witness are nicer, kinder people than the Uk border agents. The traffickers give free rides and fistfuls of spending money to children, so they must be friendly chaps really.
One young woman, on the run from police and without any form of iD, burst into the pathology lab to plead for help. ‘How did you get in here?’ wondered Dr Nikki aloud, and then dropped the question — perhaps aware, at the back of her mind, that pursuing it could lead to a gaping hole in the plot.
instead, her expert medical eye quickly spotted that the teenager had a broken arm, and she took her to hospital.
But as soon as the heartless matron at the reception desk realised the patient was foreign, the immigration Gestapo were summoned. in the space of an hour, Dr Nikki managed to comprehensively insult the police, the NHS, and our intelligence. All without getting a hair out of place.
Stylists on the island of Anguilla in the Caribbean are more concerned with dyeing the grass that perfect shade of green.
Anna, the head horticulturalist at one exclusive resort, revealed on documentary An Island Parish (BBC2) that she goes round the gardens each morning with a spray can, touching up the foliage wherever the sun has bleached it yellow.
You’d expect no less, if you were paying $17,000 a night (£13,800) to stay in one of the beachfront villas. That sounds steep, but it does look like paradise.
The island has its own government but the Queen is head of state and appoints a governor, whose chief duty appears to be sailing out to deserted islets and coral reefs to catch green turtles and fit them with electronic trackers.
There’s an idyllic job, and one that no doubt comes with a civil service pension.
On a cold January evening, this was utterly delightful escapist television.