What’s even less fun than a night in a leaky caravan? January telly!
WheReVeR you turned, things were grim. Channel Four featured real footage of graphic mortuary scenes as the body of a retired teacher was exhumed in Catching A Killer.
A corpse crawling with maggots was dragged from a ditch on Silent Witness ( of which more in a moment). More gruesome still, Cold Feet’s larky fiftysomethings — the television equivalent of the undead — were back for a 304th series on iTV.
There wasn’t much light relief either in a probe into how devious Bishop Peter Ball was able to keep his dog collar after being cautioned for sexually abusing novice monks, on Exposed: The Church’s Darkest Secret (BBC2).
All in all, the telly was less fun than an evening spent in a leaking caravan with the lights out, eating Spam and cold beans, to a soundtrack of Morrissey singing heaven Knows i’m Miserable now.
Why do TV execs schedule all this for the second Monday in January, when they know everyone is skint, tired and fed up? it’s sadistic.
The documentary about the predatory Ball, who wheedled and bullied young men into submission at his ‘spiritual retreats’, pulled few punches. One of his victims, now middle-aged, commented at the start of the programme: ‘how rotten and corrupt and even evil the pervading culture and leadership of the Church of england is.’
The Church was accused of a cover-up, going all the way to Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, who first heard stories of Ball’s abuses in the early nineties and did nothing about it.
The BBC’s righteous indignation at this would be more convincing if Broadcasting house bosses had not obstinately shut their ears in this same era to rumours of sex attacks on children by some of their bestknown presenters, most seriously Jimmy Savile and Rolf harris.
The nearest the producers came to acknowledging that parallels exist between the BBC and the Church was a recording from the archives of a prime-time interview with the smooth-talking bishop.
We saw Terry Wogan, on his teatime chatshow in the eighties, introducing Ball to applause. But the excerpt included just one brief question, and both snippets lasted less than ten seconds.
i would have liked to see the whole interview: it might have given us an indication of how the bishop looked when he was exerting his charm.
instead, we watched reenactments of his interrogations by police, with Donald Sumpter playing the cleric. Usually, true crime documentaries use unfamiliar actors: picking a wellknown star from Game Of Thrones and les Miserables was a strange and distracting choice.
Police interrogations and everything else were carried out by crime’s greatest multi-tasker, nikki Alexander in Silent Witness (BBC1). Dr nikki (emilia Fox) isn’t just a pathologist: her duties included visiting parents to tell them their son’s body had been found and briefing a team of detectives on their duties. She still found time to counsel a copper with marital problems.
But her colleague, forensics expert Jack (David Caves), easily outpaced her — quizzing witnesses, chasing and arresting suspects, and even turning up at one place with a search warrant. Jack Of All Trades, indeed.
Still, this was a well-paced episode, with plenty of twists. To keep characters up to speed with the plot, tellies were left blaring wherever they went, screening news bulletins.
One farmer came back to an empty house, to find he’d left BBC news 24 on all day. instead of being cross with himself at the waste of electricity, he watched the headlines and went off to burn some evidence.
There’s a handy tip if you’ve got a guilty conscience: always have the TV on.