The heinous, evil, shocking, barbaric world of true-crime TV

TV3 HAS DONE well in recent years, finding its niche, building on its strengths, targeting its audience and adopting an almost Ryanair-ish tone in portraying itself as the commercial champion up against a monopolistic, State-supported RTÉ.

But perhaps the least noted aspect of its growth has been its remarkable addiction to true-crime TV. At this stage its station idents could feature one of those cute animated 3s bouncing across the screen before being bludgeoned for several minutes.

Mondays and Wednesdays are the fright nights. This week you could start with Ireland's Bogus Beggars,then move on to Gangland Ireland: Murder and Mayhem (both repeats). Midweek you could catch Beware Irelandand T oo Easy on Our Criminals. They follow such recent series as 24 Hours to Kill,while other shows touted by the station include Inside the Mind of a Murdererand Ireland's Most Shocking True Crime. These are not titles that leave you clueless as you flick through the channels, even if they are a little too eager. Could there possibly be a programme in "Ireland's Most Shocking Fictional Crime"?

Style often belies the content. Bogus Beggarsended with far more challenging conclusions (there's not much organised begging) than the title purported. Beware Irelandcould easily have been called Rest Easier Ireland,as it had to acknowledge several times that the crime rates had declined significantly in recent years. But that won't do. The trade is in fear of crime as much as the reality.

The music is industrial and foreboding, even over perky animated graphics. The talking heads are interviewed in what look like dark warehouses, so that as the man from the Automobile Association is gabbing about car fraud you wonder if, just out of shot, someone is bound, bloodied and handcuffed to a radiator.

The reporter Jim McCabe follows the recent convention of journalists dressing down, Donal MacIntyre-style, so that they appear to be both above and part of the world they’re reporting on. Or perhaps it’s a nod to Ross Kemp, the most unlikely influence on current-affairs broadcasting of the past five years. It’s all in keeping with a style that has emerged in ads for newspaper crime teams, portrayed as hardened gumshoes, haunted by the things they’ve seen but determined to seek out justice in a dark world.

The language of these shows is hard and repetitious. In programmes related to fraud, you’d quickly fill a bingo card containing words such as “shady”, “underworld”, “dodgy” and “scams”. In the violent-crime programmes you’d shout “house” after two minutes of “heinous”, “evil”, “shocking”, “barbaric”, “brutal” and “sinister”. The thesaurus has been slaughtered.

But it is in the reconstructions that this genre truly extends itself. This is where the narrative tension and attraction are; the crossover between drama and truth. Crimewatchhas a lot to answer for.

Crimewatchfirst appeared in Thatcher's Britain, where the debate about law and order came together with the police force's increasing interest in PR. It also coincided with the new availability of CCTV footage, which turned every criminal into a cameo performer in a reality-TV show.

There followed a proliferation of real-life footage shows, so that any time of day or night you can be certain of finding car chases, burglaries, hold-ups or night visions of warm blobs sprinting through a hedge as seen by a hovering police helicopter. Britain has the highest concentration of CCTV cameras of any country, which has proved a nice boon to early-evening schedules. In turn, this aspect of true-crime TV has also helped normalise surveillance society.

But Crimewatch's reconstructions, loaded with the knowledge that something awful is about to happen, proved just as ground-breaking. Yet whereas it, and subsequent copycat shows such as Crimecall, could claim a public-service function, a whole branch of true-crime TV realised the reconstruction's function as grim but thrilling entertainment.

RTÉ, it must be said, has also developed a habit for true crime during the past decade. Bad Fellasbrought a cheeky pun that immediately undercut the worth Paul Williams's show had as serious current affairs. Far worse was 2008's Death Duties, which took Marie Cassidy's insights and experience as State Pathologist and interspersed them with unnecessary and graphic reconstructions of cases.

It had followed the success of Cracking Crime, which built the template for supposedly serious but worryingly salacious shows about Irish murders.

At the moment, however, TV3 is a particular offender, most recently in the gratuitous 24 Hours to Kill. Because there's nothing interesting in hearingabout a woman strangled to death. There's nothing dramatic in just describing a man being beaten with a wheel brace. Talking heads? Boring. Battered heads? Now that'sentertainment.