Coronation Street TV 3 & UTV, Sunday, Monday & Friday
The Work Of Angels? The Book of Kells RTE 1, Sunday
Life After Life BBC 1, Wednesday
At the end of each episode of Coronation Street this week, Georgia Taylor has read out a helpline number for any viewers affected by the storyline. The storyline is rape, and Taylor plays Toyah Battersby, who was attacked in an hour-long special last Friday.
She is an excellent actress, her character one of the best loved in the show. She gave a harrowing, convincing performance that night, then again for half an hour on Sunday, 45 minutes on Monday and another hour last night. She will probably walk home with one of this year's soap awards.
It has not been easy watching, but a lot of people are bound to have watched anyway. A lot more people probably tuned in than did to recent storylines that resurrected the dull, prehistoric rivalry between Mike Baldwin and Ken Barlow. More, too, than those who have stuck with the unfolding of the anaemic love life of Sally and Danny.
Good Friday's episode, in particular, will have attracted a huge audience. It's one of the big television nights of the year, and the tabloids had flagged the attack for weeks, printing teaser photographs of Toyah cut, bruised and curled up on the ground.
This is not unusual. Soaps have been leaking their scripts for years in attempts to win ratings, although sometimes they have leaked a certain amount and held on to the rest, so as not to spoil the whodunnit. EastEnders has just had a story line in which Phil Mitchell, one of Albert Square's bad guys, was shot. The BBC released photographs of him, bloodied and lying face down on the ground, not unlike those of Toyah.
It guarded the identity of the culprit, though, ensuring massive ratings on the night it was revealed to be Lisa, Phil's spurned and pregnant lover. But where EastEnders had five suspects, Coronation Street has trumped it with 10. They were lined up in the tabloids last weekend, every one of them looking like the beast one of them will turn out to be. Who raped Toyah? Why don't you play the game at home?
Which brings us back to the addendum to each episode, where Taylor gives out the helpline number and a few soothing words. This is Coronation Street saying it is being responsible. Heaven forbid that it could be a smokescreen put up to choke any suggestion that the producers are merely trying to win back ground they have lost to EastEnders.
There have been reports that Coronation Street's writers got a slap on the wrist and were told to dump the sluggish storylines in favour of something that will get people talking around water coolers, at dinner tables or slumped on sofas. EastEnders shooting.
Where the attack on Phil was played out as pantomime, however, Toyah's rape has been handled with pure earnestness. It is still a whodunnit, though, set up so that as many men as possible have been left without alibis, potential rapists shuffling guiltily across every cobblestone of the street. There was a wrongful arrest in East-Enders before the true culprit was revealed. It will happen in Coronation Street, too.
REMEMBER, it could be anybody. Have you guessed who it is yet? If the rape story had popped up in six months' time - or six months ago - would it seem so distasteful?
That's the problem. Soaps have a habit of breaking new ground, dragging taboo subjects into the open, even if they sensationalise them. When they pull viewers into a dark alley and give them a storyline such as Toyah's, it's difficult to protest.
We've fed off a diet of adultery, incest, murder and abuse for this long. What's another Big Issue thrown on to the pyre? And it sure gives people something to talk about.
Which is why millions will tune in over the coming weeks to find out who raped her, why the tabloids will run regular updates and why bookies will give odds on her attacker's identity.
But when the soap unmasks him, and the stories go back to Ken Barlow's jumpers or Fred's sausages, perhaps the only ones who will feel violated are the viewers.
Coronation Street saw how well East-Enders was doing, panicked and broke the glass to get at the emergency storyline. It may regret it. The ante has been upped so far that it's a long way down from here.
If you persevered with an often confusing narrative, further muddled by a range of different, unseen narrators, The Work of Angels? The Book of Kells had its rewards as a glimpse at the origins of the ninth-century illuminated manuscript. I say glimpse, because you would need to give over all your soap-watching time, and then some, for years to come to fully explore the book.
Delicately filmed, Murray Grigor and Louis Lentin's documentary was at its most revealing when unearthing the hidden detail in the art: letters wrapped in letters, animals scattered about the pages, the humour of the artists. Some of the inks were extracted from a plant found only in the foothills of the Himalayas, and 185 calves gave up their hinds for the privilege of an eternity behind glass in Trinity College.
Three principal artists created the book, which was perhaps the pinnacle of Gospel manuscripts, but one that remained mysteriously unfinished. They had time, though, to include inhabitants of their monastery as characters.
You can imagine the monks gathering round, trying to pick themselves out on the pages. Perhaps somebody watching at home recognised a distant uncle in there. It's a small country, and the still rich colour of the book made it seem a short 1,200 years.
JOHN KAMARA spent a very long 19 years in jail for a crime he did not commit. In drama, this is normally the catalyst for something preposterously heroic - the fugitive trying to prove his innocence, the scoop of a reporter out for justice, the lawyer pulling that last, lifesaving bit of evidence out of nowhere.
Reality, as the fly-on-the-wall documentary Life After Life showed, is always more horrifically mundane. Kamara was framed for the murder of a Liverpool betting-shop worker by a man out for revenge over a woman. He spent 16 years of his sentence in solitary confinement, writing 300 a letters a week - some 300,000 in all. When his mother died, he was refused permission to attend the funeral, even though the appeals procedure was in full swing. He had already lost contact with the rest of his family, after swapping visiting rights for stamps for his letters. Visits were too heart-breaking, it seems.
Kamara walked out of prison with a set of clothes, a travel pass and a few quid that the court had given him. He received no apology, no counselling, no home, no money while he waited for his compensation. He made a wish early on that he would not be yearning for prison after his release. It was achingly predictable when he later did.
Without Paddy Hill to look after him, he may have ended up back there, or worse. Incarcerated for 17 years as a member of the Birmingham Six, Hill still has the look of a man whose life has been stolen from him. He breaks down regularly, is living on income support of £72 a week and has a volcanic anger unabated since the day he emerged for prison to tell the crowd that the people inside didn't even know how to spell the word justice. He met Kamara in the early 1980s, and was there for him 20 years later, offering a bed, money and wisdom. A human, sympathetic and emotional film, Life After Life brought home the consequences of a wrongful conviction when Kamara went in search of Wayne Darvel - jailed for murder after, it was claimed, police falsified evidence. He found him destitute, suicidal and zombified on the streets. Television rarely pokes its way into the filthy cracks of society with such brutal honesty.
Thanks to Hill, Kamara didn't end up on the streets. He hung in long enough to benefit from his compensation, began working with Hill to catch others being flung out of the system, met the father of the victim - who publicly backed his innocence - and ended the film hunting for wedding rings for his impending marriage. It was a rebirth of sorts for Easter Week.
tvreview@irish-times.ie