Warning! This will debunk all your favourite crime dramas
Forensics officers have a name for the gathering of evidence after a violent crime — the DnA, the fingerprints, the fibres of clothing. They call it ‘the harvest’.
crime scene officer Alan sayers told us at the outset of Forensics: The Real CSI (BBc2) that ‘if you don’t get the harvest, you won’t get the results’.
More than anything, i really want to see a police thriller about the tensions and rivalries within a highly trained forensics team, called The Harvest. Line of Duty creator Jed Mercurio, are you listening?
This documentary, the first of three, took us through two investigations in newcastle, including one that debunked just about every detective show you’ve ever watched.
We all know the moment when our sleuth puts a hand on the shoulder of the murder victim, lying face down in a pool of blood, and turns the corpse over to reveal its identity.
Klaxon! That’s wrong. Turning the body destroys the blood spatter evidence. once the body could be moved, the scenes became too graphic and gruesome to be described in a family newspaper. Though the victim, an unfortunate man in his 50s with
STATISTIC OF THE NIGHT: Satellite lenses gazed down on carpets of yellow rapeseed in China, on Earth From Space (BBC1). Bees in the fields had to visit two million flowers to get enough nectar for one jar of honey. All that work just for us to enjoy a bit of toast.
serious mental illness, appeared to have been murdered, the pathologist concluded this was suicide, and showed us the evidence in close-up detail.
Lord knows the least of the poor man’s problems was ending up as a posthumous telly star. nevertheless, it did seem an intrusion that once would have been unthinkable. if you needed evidence television has become desensitised, this was it.
The other investigation was less disturbing, as police investigated a shooting, apparently a gangland attempt to intimidate a witness. A gunman burst into a backyard on a housing estate and fired a 12-bore shotgun through the patio window at 1am.
incredibly, from the pattern of shattered glass and the spread of pellets, experts were able to say how close to the house the gunman was standing.
equally incredibly, despite arresting a suspect who left his DnA over the shotgun shells, police weren’t able to bring the case to court. Unlike police dramas, real life rarely reaches a neat conclusion.
The neat conclusion of doctors Xand and chris van Tulleken, in Planet Child (iTV), is that kids these days are far too mollycoddled and would benefit from a little more freedom.
Few of us older parents would disagree, though i wasn’t convinced by some of the arguments. For starters, we were told that three- quarters of today’s youngsters spend more time indoors each day than the average prisoner, which i just find impossible to believe.
Many inmates in UK jails spend 23 hours a day banged up. surely it isn’t true that only a quarter of children spend 60 minutes or more in the open air each day?
The story behind the main experiment seemed dodgy, too. The docs took a handful of bold boys and girls aged five to seven, and let them loose in south London. Their task was to find their way alone to the London eye.
Well, not quite alone. Hidden guardians stalked them every step of the way, which was probably necessary but also a little creepy. And they were tailed by a camera crew, literally looking over their shoulders at the map. They weren’t exactly Just William and his outlaws, running wild.
in a brief digression, we also met a boy of seven from a remote village in Africa. Getting lost didn’t frighten him, but he was scared of elephants. sounds like he has good instincts.