n Close Relations (BBC1, Sunday) n Out of Hours (BBC1, Wednesday) n Secret History (C4, Monday) n The Human Body (BBC1, Wednesday)
NOT much of a title is it? I mean, Bouquet of Barbed Wire sounds positively classy by comparison. Even Family Affairs would have been preferable, had Channel 5 not bagged it first. Could they not have chosen something less coy, more candidly descriptive? Lots of sex in Aga-land, perhaps. But we assume that the cheesily clinical note is entirely deliberate. Close Relations (BBC1, Sunday) is soft porn dressed in a white coat, a look down the microscope at the mating habits of middle-class middle England, a Kinsey Report on Blair's chosen people.
Deborah Moggach's script has gone for sociological sweep, within the narrow world of its concerns. The relations in question are a northern English matriarch and patriarch who have clawed their way into suburbia to produce three effortlessly middle class, RP-speaking daughters. He (Keith Barron) is a heart attack on legs, cigarette in one hand, mobile phone the size of a housebrick in the other (a prop more eloquent than most of the dialogue). She (Sheila Hancock) is a housewife girning about the fact that her husband runs a building firm and can't get round to putting the doors on her kitchen cupboards. No sex for them so far.
But Louise (Alice Krige), the Hello!-reading country wife with her something-in-the-City husband, is being stalked by the village shopkeeper whose business is under threat from the local Tesco (sex, sociology, and economics, too!). That's stalked as in lovesick swains, not inner-city psychos - though even in Joanna Trollope-land, lurking outside a lady's window ranks as pretty creepy behaviour. Her
16-year-old daughter is casting lubricious glances at the Lawrentian blacksmith who believes ''we're all animals with our clothes on''. Auntie Pru (Amanda Redman), a publishing executive permanently stitched into that little black dress,
is the career woman breaking her heart over a married lover (''urgh - men!''). And little sister Maddy (Kelly Hunter) is the virginal idealist awakened to her true sexual nature by the buccaneering Erin (Kate Buffery).
Erin came as a great relief, a character with a bit of honest-
to-badness hokum about her, in
contrast to all those tediously recognisable female types. Erin is a rebel. We know this because she drives a Land Rover, says ''screw'' at the dinner table, smokes while others are eating, and kisses on the first date (no tongues, so far as one could tell). I'll spare you the disclaimer about some of my best friends being lesbians and cut straight to the admission that I was faintly unsettled by Maddy and Erin's love scene. Partly because
it was so self-conscious, fairly screaming at us ''full-frontal lesbian sex on British television!'', partly because it seemed to have been styled by World of Interiors magazine, but mostly because it didn't look all that much fun. Quasi-spiritual sapphic ecstasy is just about permissible, it seems; seamy, sweaty, grunting sex is still out of bounds.
But any quibbles about Close Relations have to be set in the context of Out of Hours (BBC1, Wednesday), as dully unimaginative a debut as I have seen for a long time. Medical dramas are almost as common as cop shows these days, and their efforts to carve out an idiosyncratic niche are looking increasingly desperate. We've had country GPs, junior doctors, casualty departments, pathologists, police surgeons, district nurses, and, now, medics on call. And what's so special about medics on call? Er, they work at night. That's about it.
John McArdle plays the handsome divorcee with a nasty case of empty fridge syndrome. Dominic West is the pouty heart-throb with a complicated private life. And Lindsey Coulson is the woman (in episode one, it seemed that was characterisation enough). Now, there is no reason why a tired
old formula like this shouldn't be lifted into another class by ingenious plotting and a sparkling script. Sadly, Out of Hours has neither. Instead we were given a familiar combination of jokes (the
bride with food poisoning after
the groom's ex-wife catered for
the wedding), social comment (drunken driving, the mother-of-two killed by her violent husband), and the gruesome detail of lumbar punctures and defibrillators which the British viewer seems to find
so fascinating. Maybe that's the secret of the genre's allure: hypochondria by proxy.
Secret History: The Porn King, The Stripper, and the Bent Coppers (C4, Monday) recalled the days when policemen arrived at work in red Alpha Romeos, dressed to the nines; holidayed in Cyprus, all expenses paid, with London's most notorious porn-seller; received gifts of canteens of silver, silver goblets, jewellery for their wives. Whole criminal investigation departments were wined and dined on the
profits of Soho. Meanwhile, the few straight coppers filled their desk drawers with unwanted ''bungs'', their cut of the criminal support industry known as the Scotland Yard Obscene Publications Squad.
This was not a new story, but the researchers had tracked down some priceless wit-nesses, including Jim Humphreys, the porn king, and his consort Rusty, a former striptease artist. It was a tale well worth the retelling, evoking a Kafkaesque world where honest coppers had to pretend to be on the take. The evocatively-named Wally Virgo, head of the serious crime squad, was receiving #2000 a month, the equivalent of #20,000 today, in bribes. An investigation of the porn squad's activities was set up - headed by the most corrupt detective of them all. A whistleblower who named 100 colleagues was given #2000 to leave the country. Meanwhile, Humphreys, the man who should have been their number one target, was playing
golf with senior officers every morning. When Robert Mark took over as commissioner in 1972, around 500 officers were pros-
ecuted or forced to resign.
Did you know that there were 15,947,041 fascinating statistics about the human body? The Human Body (BBC1, Wednesday) seemed determined to acquaint us with every last one. Apparently over a lifetime a woman grows 28 metres of fingernails, 950 km of hair on her head, and more than two metres of it up her nose; produces nearly 40,000 litres of urine, and sheds
19kg of dead skin. I would go on, but after a while the blizzard of facts became next-to-meaningless. Professor Robert Winston has a Groucho moustache and glinty glasses, reduces complex biology to statements of near-idiot simplicity and is willing to play the sweetly-bonkers boffin when required. Which is another way of saying that he's perfectly suited to the role of television scientist. And when it comes to special effects, the inside of the stomach beats Invasion Earth every time.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article