TVReview: You can tell by the scheduling that summer's lease is almost up.
Time to put our exhausted bodies back under the duvet, switch on the telly, and redistribute the cellulite.
The intense and lumpen Ken Stott heralded the start of autumn with a return of the drama Messiah. Stott played baggy-eyed and weary Detective Chief Inspector Red Metcalfe, as he waded through a veritable Shakespearean bloodbath over three long and tedious episodes. Episode one was promisingly grizzly and gently horrific, and despite some nasty shocks, such as a bee crawling out of the nostril of a young woman in the throes of rigor mortis (the girl, not the bee), it was a drama populated by easily recognisable stock characters: a libidinous English professor and his plump wife; a controlling father in an unattractive anorak; his oppressed wife with her roots showing - all comfortingly familiar and designed to have you reaching for the Horlicks rather than the remote control.
By episode two, however, the body count was enough to merit UN intervention. There were women swinging off meat-hooks, a gargantuan Italian restaurant-owner solidifying in a vat in a disused brewery, someone in silt with their ligaments cut, another whose chest had been caved in by a baptismal font. Cue a bony and highly strung Dante aficionado - Metcalfe's serial killer was, apparently, set on recreating the Inferno - just another routine day then.
By the start of episode three the continuity announcer was offering access to a website that would explain the significance of Dante's Inferno to the plot. At that stage, with more blood on the telly than in an abattoir full of spring lambs, we should have been offered counselling. Stott, meanwhile, was doing a lot of chin-rubbing and middle-distance staring as he tried to get inside the mind of the killer, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, was getting him nowhere. By the time the minimalist apartment of the tough lady journalist (she was a heretic apparently) was discovered daubed in her blood (it's a well-known fact that all hard-nosed career women live in minimalist apartments) and the poor hack was being cremated alive in her brother's coffin, it was time to abandon hope and throw in the towel.
In the end - which took a long time to come - it turned out that the recently bereaved pathologist with the noisy stilettos had done it. She was trying, we were told, to save her daughter's soul. I have no idea how she managed the slaughter or where she found the time, but when she eventually back-flipped off the roof of a very high building and splattered on the pavement - causing a nasty ladder to her tights, a lot of food-colouring to seep out of her cranium and a dent in Metcalfe's professional reputation - it was difficult to give a monkey's.
HAPPY-GO-LUCKY fornicating monkeys featured in Channel 4's late-night delight, The Truth About Female Desire, and, predictably, primate sexual activities proved to be far more fun than the circles of hell. The Truth About Female Desire was a quasi-scientific exploration of female sexuality, a kind of "Big Sister" without evictions, where eight young women with varying lifestyles agreed to live together for a week and undergo "experiments" dreamed up by a team comprised largely of "former" Kinsey Institute professionals. There can be no doubt, however, that the primary objective of this series was to capture a television audience, not to better mankind's understanding of what was continuously referred to as the "mystery" and "enigma" of female sexuality.
As well as the eight young women who were "unravelling under the microscope", (seven of whom said things like "when I was in drama school" a lot), there were a couple of sheepish sexologists and a bespectacled Liverpudlian evolutionary psychologist (try saying that quickly while sitting in a birthing-pool contemplating your underwater 3D vaginal probe, and you get an idea of the nature of the "experiments").
The women took plaster-casts of their genitals, watched hours of pornography while strapped up to electrodes, and held hands with unknown and unseen men through a hole in a shower curtain.
Discussing their sexual predilections and adventures over a couple of cocktails and a game of "match the snatch" (it would be better if you didn't ask, but, as the narrator put it, "most women can spot a bargain at 100 yards but wouldn't recognise their own vagina"), one young woman, undaunted by her potential audience, described an evening spent wearing a pair of vibrating knickers, operated by remote control, that her boyfriend had bought for her. When he turned the knickers on in the back of a taxi, the driver, apparently, was deeply perplexed about his radio interference.
It was difficult to spot the science and even more difficult to believe that this intense week and "battery of experiments" had any relevance whatsoever.
And some of the assertions of the practitioners seemed borderline offensive: measuring subjective and physiological responses to sexual stimuli, the scientists claimed that "women respond to almost anything with a sexual content".
Then came the parlour games. The women were asked to assess the desirability of the 10 unseen men they had been holding hands with behind the shower curtain. Having fingered the digits, the majority of the women chose the man with the longest ring finger (unknown to the women, ring fingers longer than index fingers supposedly indicate high testosterone levels and that the subject is virile and well-endowed). Then the callipers were used on the women but refused to confirm the predicted outcome: the blonde with the steady boyfriend had a long ring finger (indicating high testosterone), while the lesbian of the group had a long index finger (indicating increased oestrogen). The "scientific" explanation was that the blonde must be promiscuous and the lesbian a "femme". Give us a break, doc.
"THERE WERE TWO bombs dropped on the Palais Schwarzenberg in Vienna, the first by the RAF during the second World War, the second tonight by Kerry Katona." This was the considered view of a young and alarmingly hairless Austrian aristocrat, who, along with two of his mates (sorry, contemporaries), were judging whether Warrington's jungle queen, Katona, had cut it as an Austrian "lady". My Fair Kerry challenged Katona, who trades on being common and cuddly, to pass herself off as a thoroughbred English aristo at the ludicrous peaks of Austrian society, where real ladies unobtrusively croon national ballads in the chilly halls of their Austrian castles or indulge in a bit of small talk about dining, travel or the arts, as their tweedy menfolk shoot stags and wonder if they'll ever need to start shaving. Katona didn't stand a chance.
After a week of being taught by a manners coach ("nice man, but when he's talking to you, you lose the will to live") to eat her banana with a fork, and an elocution session with a tensely rigorous voice coach ("I sound like I should be doing phone sex"), Katona was paraded at a "high society dinner" where "elegant guests had jetted in from all over Austria". Katona, who obviously thinks that a taboo is something you get needled on to your shoulder blade, got plastered at the dinner and dropped her received pronunciation and her food all over her dress. Happily, she didn't convince anybody that she was who she wasn't and was duly punished by not being invited to Europe's most prestigious social gathering, the Viennese Opera Ball. Katona, standing on the street corner in a big white dress and borrowed diamonds like a misplaced Christmas decoration, had had a narrow escape.
THERE WAS A tiny gem hidden among the baubles of the TV week, Anne Roper's Where Did You Get That Hat?, a film of the last day, in May 2004, of Coyle's hat shop on Dublin's Aungier Street. Proprietor William Coyle, the the last professional hatter in the country, ran the business, which had been established by his father in 1925.
He sold 144 hats a week, he told us, to priests and politicians, to undertakers, barristers, horsemen and first communicants. As the shutters were pulled for the last time, after 80 years of trading, one of Coyle's distressed clients remarked that "another part of Dublin is gone, like Nelson's Pillar".
As Coyle cut into his retirement cake, his five daughters (all of whom had worked with him at some stage) raised their glasses in a toast to their father. Aungier Street, as Roper said, her camera surveying the empty hat boxes, is now home to noodle bars and futon shops.
William Coyle's retirement was brief; he died almost exactly one year later. Where Did You Get That Hat? was a gentle and moving tribute, and a poignant reminder of a recent past that already feels far distant.
