THE opening shot zooms in on a hamburger frying. Two coppers are getting a take away. Minutes later, one of them answers a call. He goes to a quiet, suburban street and knocks on the door. It is by an enormously fat woman, drenched in blood. Sticky, red footprints lead to the kitchen. The copper follows them, opens the door and sees a human abattoir. He retches and vomits his burger.
So began The Sculptress, a histrionic - even by TV thriller standards - and ghoulish gore `n' grub opera. Blood, food (a zoom shot of a vegetarian platter was to signal a lightening of mood) and candles, sculpted into voodoo dolls, provided its dubious imagery. It was quite distasteful really, and even though much of it was so theatrically gothic that it could have passed as a Halloween advertisement for the Big Mac, it was more sinister than a mere Ronald McDonald with fangs promotion.
Certainly, the recentness of the Rosemary West case made The Sculptress appear exploitative and prurient. Pauline Quirke as eating machine Olive Martin, the title character, padded out to look like she weighed about three hundred weight, confesses to the murder of her mother and sister. She is serving a 25 year sentence when a pushy publisher in a purple power suit commissions a female writer (Caroline Goodall) to produce a book on the case.
"Serial killers are almost as hot as diet books these days," the vixen tells the troubled, soulful writer. And there you have it. Not surprisingly, our heroine scribe becomes convinced of Ms Martin's innocence. Why then, has she confessed? This was the first of a four parter and the remaining three episodes will unravel the mystery. Already, we've met a criminally smarmy solicitor - who wears a violent pin stripe suit - and he's a prime suspect.
The convict and the writer meet in prison. There is a detailed account of how, in butchering the victims so that their bodies might "fit into suitcases", the dismemberment caused confusion. "I got all mixed up and put my mother's head back on my sister's body," Ms Martin says on tape. The guff is unnecessarily horrific, more video nasty than TV thriller, but it may be the way we're headed.
That's the frightening aspect of this drama. Perhaps, like serial killers, it is just an aberration. But maybe not. Already, many mainstream cinema thrillers are little more than gore fests. Prime time television drama could easily follow suit. If it is true - and sadly, it probably is - that serial killers are almost as hot as diet books these days, we can expect more and more series doused in ketchup.
Anyway, the first episode ended with Ms Martin burning holes with a cigarette in her sculpted wax dolls. As she does so, a driverless car crashes into the remote retreat of the traumatised former copper who spewed up his hamburger in the opening minutes. Mournful violins begin playing and the credits roll. The Sculptress is no Cracker, which invariably justifies its gore with the power of its writing and its themes.
Instead, it is a telly nasty. The characters, despite attempts to give them depth by suggesting motivation (the separated writer is haunted by the death of her young daughter and Ms Martin claims she was forced to have an abortion) are scarcely real. They have been constructed to comply with the cheap, gratuitous horror. They are not expertly sculpted; they have been cast in a mould borrowed from video and cinema schlock. That's what disturbs about this one.
IT wasn't the "world's weirdest ads" which disturbed on After The Break. It was presenter Patrick Kielty's confidence. Mr Kielty is from the North and does a wicked Ian Paisley impersonation (or umparsonayshun) but he's taking a big risk by crashing in on Clive James's territory. Ironic, sneering and dedicated to writing prose with rumba rhythm, James has done nicely ridiculing TV ads.
Kielty, in contrast, is a stand up comedian. Oh, he can deliver a joke alright, but he shows no evidence of a capacity to link his script with the ads being mocked. Still, in fairness, this first in a new six part series did find some hilarious ads. It opened with some pretty nifty parodies of Eric Cantona's devil killing ad for Nike; Cadbury's Flake fellatio; the smug opera that is Nicole and Papa and the infuriating, inexhaustible Duracell bunnies.
But compared to Australia, the ads on Irish and British television are thoroughly tame. Down Under, it would appear, they are sex obsessed. One crotch grabbing mini series turned out to be a plug for boxer shorts. Another seedy effort extolled the benefits of No knickers. A third, ostensibly flogging some gear to make breasts firm, concluded with a smiling bloke demonstrating to his lover the starching results the stuff produced on his manhood.
Mind you, the French, old world masters of the suggestive, can still manage a turn too. An ad for bottled water showed a nail varnished female hand stroking the bottle as it grew and grew in size. Inevitably, the climax of the thing resulted in the bottle thinking it was a fountain. This was, in its way, a blue ad version of the Guinness dancing man. But, primarily, it was schoolboyish vulgarity.
Not that our own ads eschew vulgarity. But they tend to be more aurally than visually offensive. It's the voiceovers - cloying, clipped, caring managerial and receptionists on acid accents predominate. They gush Prozac prose. There's something molesting about many of them. Trying to convince, they often sound like the most insincere and drivelling seductions. There is the note of the pervert - albeit, the commercial pervert - in many of them.
It's the gross insincerity, the sanitised, problem free contexts and the pestering, cast as concern, which make them objectionable. Bank staff glow with tenderness when the gauche, nervous newlyweds get a mortgage or we get the bloody life stories of the bank's chess playing, flower arranging, hockey playing, Irish dancing, TV watching, sailing, fishing, smiling employees.
But then the Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland sees nothing wrong with such gross misrepresentations of the real world. Using sex to flog your wares is cheap enough, but it's hardly any more unethical than the modern, twisted fairy tales which they allow financial institutions to tell us. Always though, it's the voices and accents which grate most. Some of them are so kinky that their degeneracy can induce a shiver of revulsion.
Kielty's show will not seek out such insidious advertising. Fair enough - he's playing it for quick laughs and some of the ads were genuinely funny. He can be funny too, but really, he is as loud as the Paisley he mimics. Some toning down of the almost hysterical confidence would improve him. He doesn't need to be a cerebral, reflective comedian. But he doesn't need to be a cartoon character either. With more mind and less face, he could be a winner yet.
WORLD In Action screened a disturbing documentary. Peer Pressure reported on a Florida "teen court", in which teenagers act as defence, prosecution and jury in cases involving other teenagers. The offenders were not as offensive or disturbing as the "teen lawyers", some of whom are "building reputations as tough, no nonsense prosecutors".
A 17 year old named Tracy is building such a reputation. We saw her in action prosecuting 13 year old Tangela, who had spun a cock and bull yarn to her parents and the police about being kidnapped. Tracy is white, more confident than Patrick Kielty and gives the impression that she is 17 going on 45. She really believes in the system.
Tangela is black, dreamy and obviously prepared to chance her arm. She appeared bemused by the teen court. It was hard to blame her. It's not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with the notion of young people judging other young people. It's just that acting as prosecutor can bring out the worst in teenagers: fogeyism is not maturity, even if we should not blame the immature for not understanding this.
But the programme did raise some serious issues regarding the law. Certainly, the remoteness from defendants, which is a source of the most ignorant pride for some judges, is disturbing. A British judge, in a case involving Paul Gascoigne, shortly after the 1990 World Cup - when Gascoigne had been on the front page of every newspaper and on every TV news bulletin - revelled in the claim that he did not know who "Gazza" was.
Signalling his entrenchment in what he, undoubtedly, considered high culture, he wondered if "this Gazza" was a character in Italian opera. Hilarious, your honour. Pity it was also so dismissively ignorant. Even though that was an extreme case of wallowing in personal ignorance, complacent and smug remoteness is inevitably widespread within law.
In that sense, the idea of peer juries for teenagers on minor offences is worthwhile. But turning some of them into spotty legal eagles is repulsive. In fact, that part of the deal ought to be against the law. Anyway, it's unlikely that teen courts will reach Ireland for some time. Where there's a court, there's money and where's there's money, there's lawyers. By the way, Tangela went down: 30 hours community service and an essay on "Lying and the effects of lying". Rough.
FINALLY, Celluloid Icons and Black Divas. Actress Jodie Foster and a bevvy that's the collective noun, of black female singers have been elevated to iconic status by gays and lesbians. Why? Well, in Ms Foster's case, many non heterosexuals believe she's on their side. With the black singers, it's because of their screaming make up, body hugging clobber and general flamboyance.
All fair enough, I suppose. But it was clear from both of these documentaries that reading gayness into films and popular music has often more to do with wishful thinking than with considered criticism. Jodie Foster was described by one generally thoughtful contributor as "visually fem and mentally butch". Perhaps, but could say the same about Joan Collins.
Not that anything that's said matters very much in these cases, people see what they want to see. There was talk of "divas with dicks" (an arrangement which should ensure successful careers in Australian TV advertising) and of "the iconic moment" in films. It made some sense, even though it was wildly overstated. In the end though, it was hard not to think that it was all about such acknowledged, common or garden aphrodisiacs as success, power and glamour. Nothing very disturbing in that.