TVReview/Hilary Fannin: Yes, it's autumnal autopsy season again as cops and PIs ply their rough trade on our cosy screens and - rather like the football season, which never actually ends - the fixture list of dead platinum blondes is lined up for dissection from here until next summer.
Doubtless there are better ways to nurse a battered weekend psyche than slumping in front of the telly watching puffy-faced, middle-aged cops mull over marbled young corpses - but that's what we do. Fair play to UTV then, which, despite cauterising the sleuthing action with endless gory ad breaks (awash with dripping beetroots and pulped passion fruits), offered us two bloody nights of visceral fun, with Jane and Vince respectively.
But the fact is that some cop shows chop their corpses so much better than the competition. Unequalled in the foxes-ate-her-fingers genre is Prime Suspect, and this week's offering was an eloquently scripted and brilliantly played swansong for Helen Mirren as Det Supt Jane Tennison. Boozy, ratty, hungover and depressed, Tennison, on the eve of her retirement, set about investigating the murder of a pregnant 14-year-old schoolgirl who bled to death after a single stab wound to the uterus. The finely wrought story brought Tennison, numb and exhausted, face to face with her own mortality as she confronted both a generation of shooter-touting, frighteningly indifferent adolescents on a London sink estate, and the grim reality of paternal loss. Her flailing non-acceptance of her own father's imminent death was mirrored by the furious grief of the young victim's bereft father.
Mirren's interpretation of Tennison, a woman who, a month prior to retirement, is facing the possibility that her dogged pursuit of her career has eclipsed and destroyed personal happiness, was quite simply as good as it gets. Pirouetting between happy drunk and sad drunk, washing down a shaky sandwich with a mini-bottle of Chardonnay by the neck, in the front seat of her car as rain engulfed the crime scene and muddied the rotting corpse, or standing in a late-night supermarket contemplating the purchase of a lonely piece of fruit rather than a bottle of vodka - a symbolic act of hope, which she almost immediately rejected - she was the epitome of hard-nut frailty.
Mirren told Parky a couple of weeks ago that slipping into the Tennison character was an effortless transition. When we've sluiced out the pit of our screens after tomorrow's concluding episode, it will be apparent that those worn-out court shoes won't be easily filled again.
Monday rolled around and UTV, this time in the form of Ray Winstone's Vincent, was still battling hard for our attention. Winstone is a compelling actor, limited in this instance by his somewhat predictable "passionate and headstrong" character (according to the programme-makers), Vincent Gallagher. Unfortunately, the eponymous private investigator is just another one of the sweaty-grimy-panting-up-the- stairs/wife-left-me-for-a-younger-bloke geezers who says things like "tell your guv'nor to stick his 20G straight up his jacksie" (shoo-in for the part then, Mr Winstone).
In the first episode of the series, a weak and disjointed plotline at one point saw Vincent waking up in his bloodied flat, his tongue looking like a dead rat, next to a pretty but gory corpse in a chambermaid's outfit. This after Vincent had witnessed a shivering inmate get his throat gurglingly slashed in a prison visiting-room and had gleefully smashed some young bloke's nose into myriad pieces with the help of a bar table, twice.
Come to think of it, there was more blood in this jaunty little tale of Mancunian hotel life than in a chicken-drumstick factory.
Depending on the level of mind-numbing excess you require, and on whether manipulative eastern European businessmen, closeted backbenchers, disappointed brides and crooked concierges are your thing, you may have felt either sated or queasy. But hey, Vincent is certainly not worth missing that advanced sugar-craft night-class you enrolled for.
There are however, three more blood-soaked cases coming up for Gallagher and his sprucely intelligent team of sleuths to resolve and, given the young, flaxen-haired female body count evident in the first, one can only hope that someone is auditioning a plethora of special extras.
"Like a rock, only dumber" read a protester's placard, greeting the 43rd President of the USA hours before his fictional assassination in 2007. Much to the disgust of many of President Bush's supporters, his corpse was at the centre of the intriguing film Death of a President, the speculative drama in which Bush is gunned down in the lobby of Chicago's Sheraton Hotel. This much-hyped TV event, directed by Gabriel Range and produced by Ed Guiney, was an impressive piece of film-making, superbly executed technically but somewhat disappointing in terms of content.
Taking the form of a quasi-documentary, supposedly made a couple of years after the assassination, it featured interviews with fictional secret service men, witnesses, FBI operatives and the families of suspects. Range's extraordinary jigsaw of archive, drama and special effects (which, for example, digitally superimposed Bush's head on the body of an actor) placed the cast in the midst of real-life events, allowing invented testimony to dovetail with some of Bush's own unbelievable discourse ("It's a windy day out there, good for a windy speaker").
Against a not-so-fictional background of North Korean nuclear development, this darkly hypothetical tale saw the introduction by President Cheney of special powers under the "USA Patriot Act 3", the rounding up of terrorist suspects and, ultimately, the wrongful conviction of a Syrian man who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And this was where the film's spell began to weaken - with the inauguration of Cheney one was expecting it to spiral into a larger polemical story, in which the consequences of the assassination would be more profound. Instead, we got a domestic tale about far more familiar realities, with the assassin, somewhat predictably, turning out to be a former Gulf War veteran who had just lost his son in Iraq.
Challenging and imaginative as the film was, it was less ambitious than it might have been and seemed a relatively trivial experiment when weighed against the magnitude and chaos of real global events.
Meanwhile, back on RTÉ, truth was far more entertaining than fiction as Raging Bulls set about retelling the sorry story of Fran "bang for the buck" Rooney and Baltimore Technologies. Now, for someone like me with the numerical dexterity of a roof tile and all the business acumen of my wretched cat (who is still looking under the piano for that mouse she almost caught last September), the boom-to-bust dotcom saga justifies the comfortable superstition that anything you can't hold or imbibe is worthy of deep suspicion and primordial caution.
The innumerable facts and figures of Baltimore's meteoric rise and fall were strewn around this rather jocose programme like the empty bottles of Irish Mist and the flaccid Armani T-shirts that littered the hotel suite at the end of one of Baltimore's legendary Silicone Valley parties, for which Rooney would fly his entire staff of around six people (and their full duty-free allowance) out to California to throw a rollicking Irish knees-up and convince potential investors that his operation could "deliver on the dream".
A millionaire emerged from Silicone Valley every 90 minutes in the 1990s, we were told, and what a millionaire Rooney turned out to be. With an endorsement from President Clinton, a workforce that rose from six to 400 people in two years and a place on the coveted Nasdaq index, Rooney was the "get-big-fast king", sitting in his majestic abdominal cruncher in his private gym while his encryptographic minions squirmed around his trainers.
When the paradigm shifted (as it always does - hence the patient cat) and "with the wheels coming off the wagon", Baltimore's share price lost 98 per cent of its value in seven months and Rooney, like the naked emperor, was forced to relinquish his dotcom dream.
Hey ho. He looked fine, although - interviewed behind a shiny desk in front of a frothy tapestry - he appeared still somewhat astonished by the steepness of his dive.
In this game, apparently, success is always in selling early. Rooney's former mentor, Dermot Desmond, was one who got out on time. Rooney, Desmond implied, under cover of his prop-box moustache and immaculate pinstripe suit, had not heeded the warnings. "We all learned a lot of lessons out of it," concluded Desmond, the daintiest raging bull on the block and clearly master of the refined exit from the china shop.