Death, it had seemed, was yesterday's news. Towards the end of the last decade some journalists had realised that the imminent end of their own lives was the ultimate scoop.
John Diamond wrote about his terminal cancer for the Times, Ruth Picardie serialised hers for the Observer. These were poignant, witty columns, genuinely ground-breaking, enlightening and inspiring. They were also columns that spawned an industry that, like most trends, brought with it books, documentaries, dramatisations. Death became the Bridget Jones of the day. Then, one morning, an editor somewhere decided that death had been done, and moved on to something else. This year, it's men charting their clumsy arrival into fatherhood, thanks to the successes of Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons. Maybe the next big trend will be for wisecracking television critics fitting in their lives between the commercials, though probably not.
Death explained that it had followed the lives of 12 people over three years. It's a time-scale which makes sense if you can imagine a producer fishing around for the next idea back then and finding it staring up from a column under the dirty coffee ring on his newspaper. With Death, Channel 4 has gone for the BIG title. The definitive title. It has also gone for a definitive boast. This, apparently, will be "death as we've never seen it before", a statement that could be met with a polite cough by Diamond or Picardie, and by a loud objection from anyone who has ever nursed a dying relative or friend.
This was television summoning up all its hubris, implying that it is the arbiter of our experience. If it hasn't been on the box, split by ad breaks and rounded off by a comforting voice reading out a helpline number, then it hasn't happened at all.
Ultimately, the opening film of this five-part series proved far more modest. It followed three women - Nora (78), Louise (28) and Liz (59) - each suffering from terminal cancer, each dealing with it to a varying degree of acceptance. There is the immediate sense that people who are willing to have the final, possibly undignified months of their lives recorded on television are already people who have struck some sort of compromise with their fate.
It was moving and deeply sympathetic towards its subjects, who displayed the courage all of us hope we would unearth in their place. The major themes of faith, immortality and remembrance were touched on, before the film finally settled on the quantity-of-life versus quality-of-life debate. It seems that young mothers, like Liz, tend to abandon treatment in order to concentrate on quality time with their children. Elderly patients, even the most religiously devout such as Nora, generally eke out some extra months through medicine, even if they are lived out alongside the ill-effects of chemotherapy.
Otherwise, it was a relatively straightforward documentary, which would have stood up perfectly well if it hadn't laid down cracked foundations.
Television cannot trademark death. The next time a producer pitches a series on death, somebody in the room will probably scoff that it has already been done. And that even then, it was ages after the papers had done it. Death is dead.
WHAT'S been happening in Nick Hornby's life? Death, of course, is a long way from the minds of teenagers, as we know. Still, the BBC has made Teen Species, a "major series" which hopes that some Junior Cert biology and basic anthropology will distract the viewers from realising that they are being given information they already take for granted.
Episode one focused on teenage girls. They are obsessed with fashion. Buying a bra has more than just "practical significance". They are interested in boys. If you have been living in a lead box since 1949, apologies if this information is coming a bit quickly for you.
The people to really feel sorry for are the teenagers themselves. The embarrassing milestones of their pubescence have been filmed and broadcast for primetime entertainment. Meet the twins, Rebecca and Jessica. When they were first introduced, they were 11 years old. "They've not yet started puberty," said the narrator. Ah now, leave them alone. Later, "the twins are now 12 and they're still pretty flat-chested". Oh, please. "Even so, they're shopping for bras." And first thing Thursday, they probably went shopping for therapists.
They could try the Big Brother studios;there are more anthropological revelations in an episode of that. No, honestly. The Sunday episode of the show wheeled in the psychologists, who imparted a studied wisdom on both group and individual personalities with the calm vigour of David Attenborough at a gorilla dinner party. Their dissection of events added a welcome gloss of scientific justification for those too embarrassed to admit the true reasons why they enjoy the programme.
This series has developed into far more of a study in conflict than the previous two, which were about boredom and diplomatic politeness. The queen bitch, as the narrative has developed, is Jade, a 20-year-old with a mouth like Mick Jagger's pressed against glass, and a voice that would drive a Trappist monk to violence. She has largely got away with it because the housemates assumed she was just a bit (as Jade would put it) "fick".
According to the sexy boffin on Sunday night, however, she is a highly manipulative player, who inserted herself as the baby of the group so as to find protection from it. She even employed baby language to emphasise this role, and played upon her lack of knowledge. This is why she thought Mother Theresa was related to "Mr Heinstein". She will, warned the sexy boffin, be found out.
The sexy boffin was right. This week, all six of her fellow housemates voted for her eviction. It would be much more entertaining if she stayed. And safer. When she leaves the house, Jade is going to receive a crash course in the consequences of fame. On Friday nights a mob gathers outside the house to receive the latest evictee. When it hears Jade's name it responds with a roar of disapproval that would make a gladiator soil his toga.
So much did Treasure Island like the idea of a couple of psychologists that it dragged in a couple itself. But their insights related only to the limited footage brought back from the Pacific rather than to the 33-camera, 24/7 sweep enjoyed by the Big Brother pundits. So they became commentators on the action, rather than analysts, George Hamiltons to Big Brother's Sigmund Freuds. The show has stolen the components for the engine, but isn't quite sure how to put them together into something that works. It is belching out some noises, but going nowhere.
THIS week's mandatory detective-on-the-edge drama, Lenny Blue, never disclosed which city it was supposed to be set in, only that it was a northern English place twinned with either purgatory or one of the levels of hell. If the sun had come out, the characters would have begun desiccating on set.
This may explain the literary hint contained in Lenny Milton's surname, as well as the fact that his own head is populated with a growing army of the dead. He works on that level of the law at which he's likely to bump into Inspector Rebus, Harry Callahan and a couple of lost cast members from The Sweeney. Suspects get roughed up, chiefs get lied to, and grasses get guns put to their heads when they need a little encouraging.
However, the success of Lenny Blue, a sequel to a previous drama, Tough Love, is in acknowledging that you can bring a character to this point but you don't always have to placate the audience by dragging him back. The script chucked Lenny off a continental shelf. By the closingcredits, they didn't need to add any extra black to the screen.
First, the ghosts. "It's raining corpses," spat Lenny at one point, and not only was he literally right in one gruesome case, but it had finally dawned on him that he was a lightning rod in the eye of a storm. Death came with regular brutality, but most notably with the character of Barry Hynes. He had been set up as the criminal kingpin, killer of Milton's former chief and nemesis of the piece. Then, just as you had been trained to boo and hiss every time he appeared on screen, it went and had him shot.
Then it had the assassin killed by a jeep, so we were left scrambling around for a new bad guy. But, fortunately, it had a plot with the deliberate pacing of a good crime novel rather than the now traditional attempt to head off predictability with escalating absurdity.
Much rested on the shoulders of Ray Winstone, a big-screen actor who has always been best in small-screen movies. And what shoulders. He had the gait of a man carrying not only the ghosts, but their chains as well. When he pressed his unkempt face right up to that of a suspect, you winced along at the stink of booze. He never detoured on his descent into madness and revenge, and when he pointed the gun at the head of the snitch that had double-crossed him, you knew the snitch had better duck. He didn't. More importantly, neither did the script.
tvreview@irish-times.ie