Television: The total generosity of body donors in ‘A Parting Gift’

Parents of small children can conjure up so many 3am worries that the expression “every parent’s nightmare” covers a very long list. Though there is one universally terrifying moment – those panicky seconds when a young child slips from sight in a crowded place.

It's the pivotal, heart-stopping scene in the first episode of the eight-part thriller The Missing (BBC One, Tuesday). A nice British family are temporarily marooned mid-holiday in a sleepy French town while their car is being fixed. Dad Tony (James Nesbitt) brings six year-old Olly to a crowded café bar in the park. The World Cup is on TV, it's 2006, France are playing, the atmosphere is exuberant: it all seems very real. In the brief moment he lets go of Olly's hand, the child is abducted.

The sombre, slow-paced drama – small part exploration of family dynamics and obsession, large part thriller – explores what happens next. The action shifts between then and now and the present-day opening scene sees a dishevelled Tony returning to the town following up yet another clue. “I’ve lost everything,” he says, his face crumpled into a permanent scowl of despair and anger – Nesbitt does that face like no other actor.

His marriage to Emily (Frances O’Connor) hasn’t survived the abduction and he has spent the intervening years chasing clues. He’s not welcome in the town – an abducted child has been bad for business – but he convinces the original French detective Julien (Tchéky Karyo) to help and there’s a terrific revelation in the final scene that creates a satisfying cliffhanger, propelling the action into next week’s episode.

Maybe it's because Nesbitt is so strong and such a voracious screen presence and he's given so much to do, but O'Connor as the mother is oddly muted – her reaction to the abduction is too restrained to be credible. Her casting also makes me uncomfortable. There are obvious echoes of the Madeleine McCann story in The Missing, so casting O'Connor, an actress who could easily play Kate McCann in a biopic, seems almost manipulative – her hair is even lightened and straightened in the flashback scenes.

It’s nearly masochistic for a parent to watch such a realistically presented take on this theme – a child abduction story is never going to end well. The first episode is littered with tantalising puzzles and gaps, which makes The Missing a thoroughly compelling character-driven thriller.

Fans of crime dramas have seen any number of pretend dead bodies on slabs in bright dissecting rooms but seeing the real thing is shocking and powerful. In A Parting Gift (RTÉ One, Thursday), the new intake of Trinity College med students are gently introduced to their anatomy module – they're warned about the smell of the embalming fluid – and just as gently but firmly reminded by Siobhan Ward that the "cadaver" on the table was once a real person, that he had a family and people who loved him.

The young students are told his name and age (Maurice, 83) – you can almost see images of their granddads whirring though their brains. One has to sit down, most are wide-eyed and pale. Their first lesson is to be respectful of the body of the person who generously agreed to be their first patient.

The documentary genre that promises "unprecedented access, behind the scenes" is often an overstretched one. Recent RTÉ examples about The Shelbourne hotel and the Probation Service were disappointing and too close to their subjects for objectivity, but A Parting Gift is superb. The first episode of this two-parter unhurriedly packs in an enormous amount of information as it looks at every aspect of the process. (People can leave their bodies to be used to teach medical students, and the college needs 12 a year.) It broadens the process beyond the form-filling and reasons why people donate – pure altruism is the common thread and the pragmatic idea that your body is no use to you when you're dead. We see the same Maurice interviewed for RTÉ news in 2006 saying it's because when he's dead his body will be "surplus to his requirements".

Interviews with grieving relatives of the deceased are raw and heartfelt, giving depth to the documentary; we hear wives, a husband and the children of some of the 12 donors in their homes, a stark contrast to the chilly room in the anatomy department. The key to Trinity's programme is its coordinators. These two lively and remarkable women, Siobhan Ward and Philomena McAteer, define the expression strong people skills with the living and the dead. Gerry Hoban's direction is cool and reserved avoiding sensationalism or squeamish scenes and while it doesn't chase an emotional response, it's a moving, deeply affecting documentary.

TV3's new cookery programme The Lazy Chef (Thursday) is a good-looking, quality production even if it is searching for an identity. The chef presenter Simon Lamont is engaging and low key but the "lazy" in the title seems tacked on. The familiar recipes look nice and doable but involve the same amount of shopping, chopping and sweating over a hot stove as any other cookery programme.

And so this week I learn of two new jobs – body donor co-ordinator and cow masseuse. Lamont visited a guy in Tipperary who massages his cows several times a day to make wagu beef. He brings wagu embryos in from Japan and gets surrogate cows in Tipp to carry them. Seriously, who knew this is even a thing?

The Lazy Chef is sponsored by a cat food company but happily the product doesn't make it into Lamont's recipes – TV3 doesn't go that far to please its sponsors. There's a "PP" on screen to indicate product placement as he drives a supplied car. So what to make, then, of The Taste of Success (RTÉ One, Tuesday)? The idea is that small food producers compete to win a prize worth €100,000 – to get their product into Lidl. But Taste of Success starts with a lengthy brand promotion section for Lidl with voiceover Derek Mooney listing facts and figures about the discounter's business over footage of its delivery trucks, a tour inside a supermarket and factory, and a puff interview with one of its execs. This is all ideal stuffing for a boring corporate video, but apart from being exceeding dull primetime TV, it prompts the question of how far does a programme have to bow to a sponsor? Is Taste of Success a food programme or an example of the new world of native advertising where the line between advertising and editorial blurs into indistinction? Whatever it is, the starter was hard to swallow.

One to watch: Get ready to fall all over again

Spoiler alert: The end of series one of gripping thriller The Fall (RTÉ One, Sunday) saw Belfast serial killer Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan) get away (DSI Stella Gibson, Gillian Anderson, really should have got him). The new BBC/RTÉ series starts right where the last left off and Spector comes back.

Sure, Modern Family (Sky Living, Monday) has a woeful tendency towards end-of-episode schmaltz but the multiple award winning show still delivers the laughs – for all the family. It’s back for new a sixth series.

tvreview@irishtimes.com