End of the McVeigh show

Timothy McVeigh Executions - all stations

Dispatches - Channel 4, Monday

Big Brother - Channel 4 every night

Sodium pentathol to send him to sleep. Pancuronium bromide to paralyse his lungs. Potassium chloride to stop his heart. Eyes rolled back, but remained open. A gulping breath. Cheeks bubbled. Then his skin turned yellow.

"Bub-Bye Timmy," as one of the banners outside the prison read. "This concludes the execution," said the warden. The show was over. God Bless America.

No, we didn't see Timothy McVeigh's execution live on television - terrestrial, satellite or pay-per-view - but all our channels did their level best on Monday to make us feel like we were seated in the front row.

All commented liberally on the media saturation of the story; all contributed generously to it. The irony seemed to be lost on Sky News, whose reporter Keith Graves - live from the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana - remarked on the intense US media interest in McVeigh's execution... on the hour, every hour.

While the media witnesses scrambled to the nearest television cameras to give us their post-execution analysis, it was time for Your Call on Sky News.

I'm not sure what it is about programmes such as Your Call, but they seem to attract, with some exceptions, much the same audience as ITV Teletext opinion polls. Based on the results of the last Teletext poll I saw before the British general election, for example, William Hague would now be prime minister, with an overall majority of the around 200 seats, with the opponents of the most vocal "Save the Pound" candidates guaranteed to lose their deposits.

And home secretary Ann Widdencombe would have a hefty mandate to bring back corporal punishment and round up all asylum-seekers and ship them back to wherever they came from. And fox hunting would be safe. Not to mention deer hunting. (Although it should be noted that Teletext was infiltrated by an unprecedentedly high number of woolly liberals last week - only 83 per cent voted for the restoration of the death penalty in Britain.)

Fiona from Falkirk, for example, appeared to be driving when she phoned Your Call on her mobile simply to say that she was happy McVeigh was dead.

Thank you for that Fiona. Drive safely.

The near-consensus on Your Call, with two or three dissenting voices? First, if you found the whole execution business even a touch harrowing you were as good as condoning McVeigh's murder of 168 people, including 17 babies, in the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in April 1995.

Black or white, take your pick: either McVeigh or the 168 deserved to die.

Second, the man put to death in front of a live audience got away lightly.

"Lethal injection was too good for him," reckoned Roy in Dover. "Bring back the guillotine!" Geneva, an American living in Hull, had a better idea.

"Yes, he should have paid for it with his life, but it was too easy," she said. "Would you advocate a more brutal form of execution?" asked the Sky man. "Yes," she said. "He should have been sat on a bomb that was wired to 168 different switches and each family member should have been let come and hit the different switches."

"Mmm, it's imaginative, Geneva, if nothing else," said the Sky man, before swiftly moving on to "Jack from Liverpool" who confidently predicted that the victims' families would feel a whole lot better now that McVeigh was no more.

Not Larry Whicher, though. The brother of one of the Oklahoma dead conceded on the BBC Six O'Clock News that evening that he "expected more of a sense of closure or relief, or something like that, but it really didn't provide as much as I thought it would".

Closure? It was the word of the day, it was what most of the relatives of the dead, interviewed by Donal MacIntyre on The Oklahoma Bomber on BBC1 on Monday night, hoped to feel once McVeigh took his last breath. But when MacIntyre caught up with one of them, Jannie Coverdale, after the execution, it was evident that the chemical cocktail injected into McVeigh's leg had done nothing to repair her crushed life.

Coverdale lost her two grandsons in the bomb and had life-size dolls made of the boys, with photographs of their faces stitched in, which she sat in their stroller in her living room. When one of McVeigh's lawyers, Richard Burr, spoke of the "goodness and virtue" he discovered in his client it was difficult to resist feeling it was an observation he should have kept to himself, if only out of respect to the likes of Coverdale, now one of Oklahoma's living dead.

If she can think of him as "Satan", as she does, rather than an inherently decent stoic soldier whose paranoia about his government drove him to inflict carnage on the people of Oklahoma, as Burr argued, it might be just a little easier for her to make it through the day.

Most poignant of all, perhaps, was the testimony of Jack McDermott, an elderly man who was a close family friend of the McVeighs. "I have a son and I've often said I'd like him to grow up like Tim McVeigh, he was such a good kid," he said. McDermott gave evidence on behalf of McVeigh at his trial.

"What was I going to say? I told them he was a good kid, but I don't think I did anything for him. I just broke down. He was the boy next door," he cried, like Jannie Coverdale, trying but failing to make sense of it all.

Jon Venables and Robert Thompson are to Liverpool what, perhaps, Timothy McVeigh will always be to Oklahoma, names that stir up only rage, horror and anguish and reminders of a black day both cities would like to, but never will, forget.

Eight years after the then 10-year-olds murdered Jamie Bulger, Channel 4's Dispatches (Tuesday) examined their story in the context of their possible release from their young offenders' institutions.

"I would have hung them and cut them into pieces," said the caller to Liverpool DJ Pete Price's radio phone-in. "Really, you would have hung two 10-year-old boys?" asked Price. "Well, when they were old enough to appreciate their punishment," said the caller.

Such is the level of feeling in Liverpool about the British justice system's handling of Venables and Thompson, when most, it appeared, would prefer them to meet with the same fate as Timothy McVeigh.

If seeing that shopping centre video again, the one with the two boys leading Bulger away by the hand, remains as chilling today as it was in February 1993, the audio tapes of Venables and Thompson's police interviews played by Dispatches for the first time were only marginally less distressing.

We've had to demonise them to come any way close to coming to terms with what they did, but then you listen to those tapes and you understand they were only babies themselves. Disturbed babies, but babies nonetheless.

"We kept throwing bricks at him but he kept getting up again, he wouldn't stay down - we were saying 'stay down you stupid baby'," said Venables, in the voice of an angel, as if he was trying to explain away breaking a window with a football. "But I never killed the boy Mum, never, never." And then we hear that the boys roamed around the streets until after midnight with nobody appearing to notice their absence from their homes. And we hear about the times Venables cut himself with scissors in school, on the rare occasion he was there, and nobody doing anything about it.

And then we hear they came from violent, alcoholic, broken homes and only received the attention of adults when they had murdered a three-year-old child. And then we're reminded of the fact that 30 people saw the two dragging Jamie Bulger along the road that day, head bleeding, and not one of them intervened, perhaps the most upsetting, depressing aspect of the entire Jamie Bulger story.

But then you look at that video again and you understand why the "Justice for James" campaign demands punishment, not rehabilitation. And in the end you switch channels to find some bubble-gum for the brain because the less you think about Timothy McVeigh, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson the better.

Bubble-gum for the brain? Take a bow, Big Brother. "I'm really missing my husband, it's really hard in here," cried Narinder in the diary room. Her housemates? Most of them bored out of their minds, most missing their families and loved ones, most worried about what the tabloids will say about them when they get out, some worrying about their jobs, some hardly able to bear being in the same room as some of their housemates.

Obvious question? Why are they there? Why don't they walk out the Big Brother door and go home to their families? The maddest thing of all? Some of us are still watching this stuff. Why? God knows. But, maybe, after the week that was in it, it's not difficult to understand why.

Shane Hegarty is on holiday.

tvreview@irish-times.ie