TV REVIEW: PAUL WILLIAMS sits hunched over his notepad in his discreetly parked car, five o'clock shadow wrestling with his chin as dusk settles over the fearless journalist's ragged stamping ground.
Dirty Money: The Story of the Criminal Assets Bureau TV3, Monday
Beneath the victorious stubble his golden necklace reflects the day's dying rays, hopelessly wilting over the deceptively elegant Dublin city skyline, the fading sun crumpling like a warm corpse over the shards of a life . . . Dah-dah-daaaah.
Williams, journalist, author and chronicler of gangland Dublin (who took up the mantle after the murder of Veronica Guerin), tore out of the starting blocks this week in his series, Dirty Money: The Story of the Criminal Assets Bureau.
Despite a penchant for moody shots of Williams with his shirt undone and his slightly silly and dramatic linking voiceovers ("criminals are like rats, a lot closer than you think"), the first of six programmes based on his book, The Untouchables: Ireland's Criminal Assets Bureau and its War on Organised Crime, was a riveting re-examination of the absurd and terrifying state of play that prevailed in this country in the run-up to the murders of Guerin and Detective Garda Jerry McCabe in the summer of 1996.
Tracing the roots of Ireland's gangland problems back to 1979 (a year when the young people of Ireland welcomed not just a seemingly benevolent pope but also its first shipments of heroin), Williams offered fascinating portraits of the criminal bosses who went on to control violent, volatile, drug-funded empires which, it was widely voiced in the programme, threatened democracy. "The Dunne family did for heroin what Henry Ford did for the motor car," he asserted.
Williams went on to show CCTV footage of John Gilligan (subsequently charged with, but acquitted of, Guerin's murder) depositing £20,000 in a bank (in £50 notes), then leaving with a draft which he soon used to purchase a property. A few minutes later, on the same footage, helmeted raiders arrived at the bank to steal the cash back, one of them asking "where's the rest of the fifties?"
Anecdotes about guys finishing their prison sentences, then picking up bags of stolen cash that the legally hamstrung police had been obliged to keep warm for them; home movies of Gilligan and his family on the Costa; recollections of gang bosses driving to the dole office in spanking Jaguars; footage of Padraig Flynn posing by a pretty fountain while resisting political change - all of the amusement in these vibrantly ridiculous nuggets paled to misery when Williams interviewed Veronica Guerin's steady but grief-stricken mother, who had spoken to her daughter by telephone on the day she was murdered. "Three minutes and 48 seconds after we spoke, she was dead," Bernie Guerin whispered.
The deaths of Guerin and McCabe, Williams argued, galvanised a faltering state into action against the crime lords. Whether its strategy is still working is a question that will perhaps be answered over the remaining five weeks of this jaw-dropping series.
Transsexual in Iran BBC2, Monday
THE SURGEON ALMOST whistled through his teeth when he saw the size of the young man's penis that he was about to lop off with his scalpel. It was an uneasy sound that came from the elderly doctor's mouth, a sigh of admiration and regret and, lurking within it, a half-breath of triumph, interrupted by a chuckle.
He had carried out more than 450 such procedures, removing the genitalia of young men and creating vaginas from oesophageal tissue, since setting up his clinic in Tehran 12 years ago, 10 times more operations than he would have performed had he been practising in Europe.
Transsexual in Iran, Tanaz Eshaghian's disturbing and unforgettable film, followed three young Iranians who, faced with their country's rigid morality and a fundamentalist society that prescribes death by stoning for those who perform homosexual acts, turned to transgender surgery, the "legitimate treatment" permitted by Iran's clerics for their "abnormality".
Iran is a global leader in sex-change operations (second only to Thailand, we were told) and, initially, the film appeared to be mildly sympathetic to a system whereby the government pays half the cost of such operations and provides a few days' shelter for young people abandoned by their families, to facilitate their recuperation after surgery.
It took time for the facts behind this gentle, almost unobtrusive film to sink in. Iran's gay men and women are coerced into changing gender, mutilating their bodies in order to live free from persecution by the morality police or, worse still, from the attentions of self-appointed normality vigilantes who cruise the streets on the lookout for effeminacy or difference.
As evidenced in the film, these beleaguered young transsexuals, many of whom have already incurred the wrath of their families and communities, end up on the streets working as prostitutes.
Members of a strange abandoned sub-section of their society, gay men who have been castrated/neutered and who have been given their oesophageal transplant are thereby made sexually available. "First they turn you into lunatics, then they turn you into girls," our old friend the surgeon told his young charges when they came to see him in his consulting rooms.
Many months later, and having finally recovered from the coruscating pain of surgery, the young person whose genitals had been redesigned at the beginning of the programme was working the streets around Tehran as a "rent wife".
Now a tall and faintly beautiful woman, she wept for the loss of a previous life and family. Because of Islamic divorce, she explained, her eyes welling up behind their rings of kohl, she dutifully makes a "temporary marriage" before facilitating her customers, once every hour or so, in order not to cause further offence to her society.
Dexter UTV, Wednesday
SCALPEL-WIELDING, BLOOD-draining, stomach-churning fare continued this week with Dexter, the US hit brought to us by UTV, the broadcaster whose pastoral station links feature pictures of bonny sheep - somewhat incongruous given the grimly humorous farce that was about to be unleashed.
Featuring a pretty young actor, Michael C Hall, as the eponymous Dexter, a blood-spatter expert with the Miami police force, this is a cop drama with a wildly entertaining conceit at its centre. Dexter has been trained since boyhood, by his adoptive father, to channel his latent murderous instincts into a kind of high-art vigilantism. Dexter is also (apparently) devoid of emotion: a charming if robotic misanthrope, he neatly catalogues his victims' blood samples in a file before meticulously researching his next target. A paedophile and a pornographer (of the snuff video category) were this week's catch, men who ended up alive, trussed, gagged and sheathed in Clingfilm on Dexter's self-appointed altar. Awake to watch the meat cleaver fall, their muted screams through cotton-wool-filled mouths were chilling enough to haunt your dreams.
"I'm a very neat monster," said Dexter, packing body parts into his rucksack.
This is a cut above (sorry) the usual slash-and-cash TV thrillers; funny, brutal and silkily clever, it is most certainly one to follow. Episode one is repeated next Tuesday if you want to make Dexter's acquaintance.
Happy Birthday Brucie BBC1, Sunday
'I MADE IT through the rain and kept my songs protected/I made it through the rain and kept my point of view."
Despite his tendency to warble, the wrinkled spillage of flesh around his neck, the beady eyes and the indefatigable egotism of a creature that has spent decades in the spotlight, one has to take one's cap off to Dustin . . . Sorry.
God, what am I talking about? I can't stand the ruddy Euro-turkey, with his song like a lingering dose of salmonella (we should have the dignity to stay at home this year and give Serbia a miss). No, no, no, I meant Brucie.
Bruce Forsyth is 80. The BBC made him several cakes, some of them cardboard, which were badly decorated, in 20 seconds, with gaudy icing by B-list celebrities in the style of the chirpy chap's much-vaunted Generation Game.
During a "star-studded" evening of song and dance, well-rehearsed tears and the occasional glimpse of a leggy wife, one was transported back to a time when Brucie could rock the world with a hostess trolley and a cuddly toy.
I hate to admit this, but a long time ago, in my sunlit childhood imagination, I was Anthea or Andrea or Antonia or whatever his invariably blonde assistant/wife was called, capering around the Beeb in a flowery halter-neck dress and strappy sandals with Old Twinkletoes by my side, sprinkling beneficence and Magimixes like there was no tomorrow.
Watching Brucie belt out his tedium one more time, one was grateful at least for the relentless march of time.