ABOVE: Trevor Eve as hard cop Boyd in Waking the Dead
There’s a woman at Shepperton film studios who runs a props company called Animated Extras. The name is hardly a perfect trades description since her most popular product is anything but animated. Pauline Fowler makes the lifelike cadavers that television pathologists now dissect in such intimate and excruciating detail. I learnt this from Watching the Dead (BBC4) which traced a history of forensic detection in television drama.
Police fiction in the 1970s relied on car chases and squeezing confessions out of suspects, as indeed did our real-life police forces. New methods involving thorough investigation were required. And along came Alec Jeffreys who, at Leicester University in 1984, came up with DNA profiling. This revolutionised crime detection. Much more importantly, it also allowed writers to create a new generation of television sleuths. Even before that, the rapidly developing techniques of “forensics” gave birth to the pathologist as heroic crimefighter. But rather coyly to begin with—we had to imagine the corpse.
Jack Klugman played Quincy in the US series of the 1970s and 1980s. Interviewed years later he confessed, “I never had a body on the table, ever.” Marius Goring, who played The Expert on BBC1 at roughly the same time, was similarly fastidious. As far as US shows were concerned, we could put this down to a morbid fear of nudity on the main networks (remember the hysteria unleashed by Janet Jackson’s exposed right mammary only five years ago?). In English culture, there seems to be a bit of a taboo about dead bodies themselves. When our revered statesmen and royalty lie in state it is within a closed coffin. Catholic countries have always been less squeamish. But now, suddenly, anything goes for the Anglo-Saxons as well.
Since 2000, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation has made a fetish of burrowing through victims’ entrails to hip-hop music. They have turned endoscopy into pop art. CSI, plus CSI: Miami and CSI: NY, can all be found on Five on Tuesday evenings, with repeats on Saturdays. This is one of the most successful television franchises ever, sold to 200 countries. It has turned into a billion-dollar business for its co-owners: CBS, CanWest and Goldman Sachs private equity. The characterisation is shallow, the storylines trite—but boy, the effects are amazing. A case in point was an edition of CSI in early October in which a congressman had contracted chlamydia from a prostitute and generously given it to his wife. Cue a flesh-creepingly convincing computer graphics sequence in which the wife’s vaginal passage is explored by a probe in order to recover a sample.
The British approach, while graphic, has been rather less gory. Silent Witness (BBC1) started in 1996 and will return again shortly. Its rival is the shocking and compelling Waking the Dead, also on BBC1, which has just finished its eighth series. Both rely on highly-detailed silicone cadavers and we groan but can’t help watching as they are sliced up. In Waking the Dead the characterisation and casting is probably the finest of any series on television at the moment: the chillingly arrogant Trevor Eve plays the hard cop, Boyd; the incomparable Sue Johnston is a profiler, Dr Grace Foley; and Tara Fitzgerald is the latest pathologist, Dr Eve Lockhart.
The penultimate double episode was unusually under par, but the final two programmes, over the usual Sunday and Monday, were back on form. In “End Game,” written by Daniel Percival and Andrew Holden, Waking the Dead resurrected its best-ever villain. Previously the diabolical prison wardress, Linda Cummings (Ruth Gemmell), had decapitated her prison governor and buried various of her charges in a field. According to the script she is a “highly organised, mission-orientated killer. She has an extremely high IQ with a control mentality.” In other words, she’s a raving psycho. She kidnaps Dr Foley, taunts Boyd with how his drug addict/rent boy son died, posts a severed finger to Dr Lockhart and sets a homicidal maniac loose on a psychiatrist. All in a day’s work and gripping stuff. When she falls from Boyd’s grip during a rooftop climax we have to hope she survives. We could do with a third confrontation between Cummings and Boyd.
In this latest series it is very much Boyd mark two who is featured—neurotic, unpredictable, grey-haired with stubble. If you preferred Boyd mark one you can watch the old repeats of Waking the Dead on the Alibi channel. There the younger Boyd is clean shaven with softer hair and slightly better manners. But he remains a control freak whom only Dr Foley can influence. And the plots, crimes and dissections are just as satisfyingly gruesome. So, choose your Boyd.
There’s a woman at Shepperton film studios who runs a props company called Animated Extras. The name is hardly a perfect trades description since her most popular product is anything but animated. Pauline Fowler makes the lifelike cadavers that television pathologists now dissect in such intimate and excruciating detail. I learnt this from Watching the Dead (BBC4) which traced a history of forensic detection in television drama.
Police fiction in the 1970s relied on car chases and squeezing confessions out of suspects, as indeed did our real-life police forces. New methods involving thorough investigation were required. And along came Alec Jeffreys who, at Leicester University in 1984, came up with DNA profiling. This revolutionised crime detection. Much more importantly, it also allowed writers to create a new generation of television sleuths. Even before that, the rapidly developing techniques of “forensics” gave birth to the pathologist as heroic crimefighter. But rather coyly to begin with—we had to imagine the corpse.
Jack Klugman played Quincy in the US series of the 1970s and 1980s. Interviewed years later he confessed, “I never had a body on the table, ever.” Marius Goring, who played The Expert on BBC1 at roughly the same time, was similarly fastidious. As far as US shows were concerned, we could put this down to a morbid fear of nudity on the main networks (remember the hysteria unleashed by Janet Jackson’s exposed right mammary only five years ago?). In English culture, there seems to be a bit of a taboo about dead bodies themselves. When our revered statesmen and royalty lie in state it is within a closed coffin. Catholic countries have always been less squeamish. But now, suddenly, anything goes for the Anglo-Saxons as well.
Since 2000, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation has made a fetish of burrowing through victims’ entrails to hip-hop music. They have turned endoscopy into pop art. CSI, plus CSI: Miami and CSI: NY, can all be found on Five on Tuesday evenings, with repeats on Saturdays. This is one of the most successful television franchises ever, sold to 200 countries. It has turned into a billion-dollar business for its co-owners: CBS, CanWest and Goldman Sachs private equity. The characterisation is shallow, the storylines trite—but boy, the effects are amazing. A case in point was an edition of CSI in early October in which a congressman had contracted chlamydia from a prostitute and generously given it to his wife. Cue a flesh-creepingly convincing computer graphics sequence in which the wife’s vaginal passage is explored by a probe in order to recover a sample.
The British approach, while graphic, has been rather less gory. Silent Witness (BBC1) started in 1996 and will return again shortly. Its rival is the shocking and compelling Waking the Dead, also on BBC1, which has just finished its eighth series. Both rely on highly-detailed silicone cadavers and we groan but can’t help watching as they are sliced up. In Waking the Dead the characterisation and casting is probably the finest of any series on television at the moment: the chillingly arrogant Trevor Eve plays the hard cop, Boyd; the incomparable Sue Johnston is a profiler, Dr Grace Foley; and Tara Fitzgerald is the latest pathologist, Dr Eve Lockhart.
The penultimate double episode was unusually under par, but the final two programmes, over the usual Sunday and Monday, were back on form. In “End Game,” written by Daniel Percival and Andrew Holden, Waking the Dead resurrected its best-ever villain. Previously the diabolical prison wardress, Linda Cummings (Ruth Gemmell), had decapitated her prison governor and buried various of her charges in a field. According to the script she is a “highly organised, mission-orientated killer. She has an extremely high IQ with a control mentality.” In other words, she’s a raving psycho. She kidnaps Dr Foley, taunts Boyd with how his drug addict/rent boy son died, posts a severed finger to Dr Lockhart and sets a homicidal maniac loose on a psychiatrist. All in a day’s work and gripping stuff. When she falls from Boyd’s grip during a rooftop climax we have to hope she survives. We could do with a third confrontation between Cummings and Boyd.
In this latest series it is very much Boyd mark two who is featured—neurotic, unpredictable, grey-haired with stubble. If you preferred Boyd mark one you can watch the old repeats of Waking the Dead on the Alibi channel. There the younger Boyd is clean shaven with softer hair and slightly better manners. But he remains a control freak whom only Dr Foley can influence. And the plots, crimes and dissections are just as satisfyingly gruesome. So, choose your Boyd.
