WHAT you see as arrogance they (patients) see as confidence. They need to see that - even at the expense of their own dignity," heartless cardiac surgeon Edgar Pascoe (Nigel Hawthorne) tells his GP wife, Lileth (Dearbhla Molloy). Ed, cold, scheming and high-flying, is at the top of British medicine. Lil, warm, caring and compassionate, is, in contrast, the undervalued and disappearing heart of the profession. Fundamentally, Ed is science, Lil is humanities.
As TV medical drama goes, The Fragile Heart, despite its Mills and Boon title, adopts an unusually tough-minded approach towards medicine. There is talk of "the medical Mafia" (though, in London, Masons might have been more accurate). Written by Paula Milne, this follow-up to her The Politician's Wife might have been called "The Surgeon's Wife". The formula is much the same: ruthless, megalomaniac hubbie has humane, martyred wife; the family (callous daughter and callow son) is emotionally delinquent; the plot is knotted with conspiracies.
Of course, medicine itself is the heart of the matter and, in truth, the drama is not schmaltz-free. As Ed prepares to lead a PR delegation to China, to begin arrangements for the setting-up of an interactive tele-medicine centre there, Lil is at the bedside of a dying, old man. With his guruesque beard and soft, benign eyes, he looks ludicrously wise - the sort of man who probably has worked out the mystery of the big pint.
When Lil discovers that the ancient is her own family doctor, who, long ago, treated her mother for cancer and, in so doing, inspired her to study medicine, the symbolism is screaming. The old ways are on their death bed and the healing arts are about to be coffined as the healing sciences gear up for cyberspace. As a dramatic device, such characterisation is understandable, but it does somewhat overstate the point.
It is melodrama and just about admissible on the grounds that a more mellow drama might lack the theatricality to sustain tension. But, like open heart surgery, it is a risky procedure. Ed, though he is insufferably arrogant, is not quite Dr Mengele (or even Mr Mengele - "Call me Mr, physicians are Drs," he tells one patient). He is corrupt - dodgy financial dealings - and ignoble but he is not a monster in the league of the politician of The Politician's Wife.
Curiously, he has a recurring dream. In it, a young man chases a rumbling goods train across a scrubby desert. It looks like an ad for denim jeans. What can it mean? Beside the generally screaming symbolism, this is cryptic indeed. As there are still two episodes to follow, best leave it for the present. Suffice to say that it may be a nightmare vision of medicine's uncertain future. But, perhaps not.
It is strange that Ms Milne's dramas seem to echo so many TV advertisements. The Politician's Wife included scenes that were eerily similar to ads for Fairy Liquid, Renault cars and Vicks Vapour Rub. This time around, Guinness and Wrangler jeans came to mind. Then again, maybe it's just me and all that television, voluntary and dutiful, is beginning to spill into some weird hybrid.
Anyway, the lines of tension: surgeons v doctors; science v humanities; East v West and daddy's despicable girl v mammy's ineffectual boy are well established now. As the opening episode ended, Ed was readying himself for a clandestine operation on a Chinese political head honcho. Given Boris Yeltsin's medical problems, there was a topicality about this. But maybe that's just the news spilling into TV drama.
IF the heart surgery scenes in The Fragile Heart had you covering your eyes as you retched, Animal Cannibals: To Eat Their Own was among the most disgusting programmes ever screened on television. Ready? In one scene, a male chimpanzee, hulking around like a prop forward with piles, sucked the brains out of the skull of a baby monkey he had just bashed to death.
That was, if you'll excuse the term, for starters. As the hirsute prop forward gorged on the jelly-like brain, a dolly-bird primate offered him sex, with a flashing genital display which would make Sharon Stone blush. The dolly chimp, it was made clear, would do anything for a taste of freshly-killed, baby chimp brain. Even the lure of diamonds and Ferraris have seldom prompted such female frenzy. For the record, the vile prop forward ran the hussy.
But it wasn't just chimpanzees which engaged in cannibalism. Because they look more like people than do bears, lions, spiders, crows, alligators or frogs (well, usually, they do) their devouring of their own kind was especially repugnant. Mind you, listening to the crunch of live baby alligator in live adult alligator jaws is not for the squeamish. Nor is the cannibalism of any of the other creatures, although, among insects, even with zoom lens and slo-mo replays, the horror seemed much more muted.
Because of the grotesqueness on view, this animal programme (with part two to come next week) had to be allotted a post-watershed slot. Children, in bed with cuddly, furry, stuffed toy-creatures, needed protection from such scenes. But anthropologists explained, quite convincingly too, the rationale behind the savagery. Cannibalism, they argued, can be in the common good, or, at any rate, the tribal good. It certainly put a new spin on utilitarian ethics.
Eating your own kind, it was said, both sharpens and, of course, eliminates competition. There was a kind of Harvard Business School managerial logic to this explanation. The survival prospects of the species can be enhanced, apparently, by keeping individuals on their toes (or brains, in the case of chimpanzees). Perhaps, but like the notion that it is our failures which civilise us, a little can go a long way.
Pity though, the randy male redback spider. The female redback, even more than her better-known relation, the black widow, loves to feast on her lover during copulation. We saw the poor, little cratur approaching her ample ladyship. He had prepared assiduously for his date, rubbing against flowers and generally trying to make a good impression. Then, as he was having his way, she pumped digestive juices into him and began to dine on his extended abdomen.
Satisfied with her nuptial snack, she then bound the remains of her lover's corpse in silk to dine on later. It was like putting him in the fridge. You really had to hope that the wee fella had had a good time. It seems that these male spiders are genetically programmed to offer themselves as sacrifices to the future of the species. Some future! You'd wonder how much of this kamikaze-love gene has made make its way across the bio-aeons to people.
THE tastiest television of the week turned up on American Visions. Presented by art critic Robert Hughes, it is an eight-part history of the US.
More specifically, it is a kind of personal essay on America, telling the story of the place by concentrating on the art (fine art, buildings, cities) that Americans have made.
It is obvious that Hughes is a fine prose writer. His script is expertly crafted, perhaps at times too much so. Certainly, there are some strains of literary rococo when the plain style would appear to offer greater clarity. But almost anything literate on TV nowadays runs the risk of sounding overblown, so used have we become to soundbites, fragments 9f sentences and cliche's. Still, when he has pictures to do the work of words, Hughes might ease off the lettered erudition a little bit.
Really, though, that's a quibble. In this first episode, The Republic Of Virtue, the presenter addressed the Founding Fathers' search for a national identity. He found that they were heavily influenced by the ideals and architecture of classical Greece and republican Rome. For obvious reasons, they wanted to make a public rejection of imperial Britain. So, it was back to classic hits like the Roman Forum and the Parthenon of Athens. A day-trip to Washington DC provides the proof.
In its way, American Visions, is part Alastair Cooke and part-Sister Wendy. But it is also in an even grander tradition and is reminiscent of the television we watched when Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent Of Man and John Roberts's The Triumph Of The West could attract, respectively, a mass audience and a significant one. There are things to learn here too. Did you know that Jefferson and Washington were both Freemasons? They could have done well in London medicine.
THE mass audience draw of the week, Absolutely Fabulous, absolutely wasn't. So, who's surprised? Like a champion boxer lured back to the ring once too often, Ab Fab showed glimpses of its old style, but, really, its game is up. Curiously, it's gone both coarser (Patsy mistakenly used a bleeper as a vibrator) and flabbier (Edina lapses into unfunny dream sequences).
This two-episode special ("definitely the last ever") was titled The Last Shout. This was apt, considering that the rip-off of The Beatles's skiing scenes from Help!, Peter Sarstedt in the background and Marianne Faithful as God, bellowed out the 60s references with no mercy. Written by Jennifer Saunders, it really was Ab Fab by numbers and it lacked its former backbeat - the ability to giggle at itself as it raced through the gags.
FINALLY, Leading Hollywood. The first in a new series about Irish male stars in Tinseltown featured Gabriele, Liam Neeson, Pierce Brosnan, Aidan Quinn, Patrick Bergin and Stephen Rea will complete this six-pack on the Pat Pack. Byrne visited sites from his childhood and told his story, while sitting on a barstool in a village pub.
The tone was anecdotal and light, only wry smiles suggesting that much more could be said. As such, it was neither simple star PR nor hard-edged autobiography. It pitched itself somewhere between the two and while it was on the surface quite pleasant, it was ultimately unsatisfactory. In fairness, Byrne's recollections of 1970s Dublin and the Project ("a marijuana-smoking, drinking, partying place") rang true.
But two decades on, it's easy to be wistful. There's a squalor to Bohemian Dublin too and, in every generation, it produces more casualties than stars. Gabriel Byrne knows all that anyway. Had he addressed the reality, the programme would not have seemed quite so slight. Maybe it's asking too much to expect our Hollywood men not to become Hollywoodised.