TV Review:And tonight, Matthew, I'm gonna be . . .Matthew Kelly, having escaped from the purgatory of 18,000 years as presenter of Stars in Their Eyes to be a serious thespian again, reprised his role as wet-lipped serial killer Brian Wicklow this week in Cold Blood II, another shivering offering on the blood-soaked table of the ITV drama premiere, writes Hilary Fannin
There are two entirely irrelevant things you may (or may not) like to know about Matthew Kelly: one, he is from a family of poodle-breeders; and two, he has a Celtic cross tattooed on his bottom (apparently - I've never actually seen it).
For the record, he is also a rather good actor whose girlish masculinity and fleshy delicacy are entirely and villainously suitable for this oddly compelling but murkily depressing strand.
As with most ITV drama premieres, gristle, gore and sexual abuse (preceded by a tip from the supermarket sponsor to wrap your Parma ham tightly around your ever-so-big mushrooms) were the order of the day. But with Jemma Redgrave providing a bit of class as Det Insp Eve Grainger (with whom Wicklow is creepily infatuated) and John Hannah (everyone's favourite Scot, the skinny one who carries centuries of feudalism and oppression on his intelligent bony shoulders) as her lover, Jake Osborne, completing a talented cast, this particular menu of warped psyches, sexual repression and toe-curling violence was not as unpalatable as might have been feared. It's just that when you catch yourself yawning as some bulky amanuensis (Wicklow is incarcerated, having murdered eight women and a child in series one, and has a kind of remote-control heavy doing his dirty work) stabs himself in the groin while straddling some terrified blood-splattered woman gnawing on her gag for dear life, one is compelled to ask if one's own palate for TV drama has been exhausted by previous helpings of the slaughter and join-the-dots psychology so beloved of the genre.
"I suppose you think I am a repressed homosexual killing my female side?" cackled Wicklow in his malevolent tank-top. No, not really, Brian, I was just wondering what to put in the lunch-boxes while that bloke whose nose you bit off was searching in his satchel for the chainsaw.
SPEAKING OF SLAUGHTER, you could scoop every drop of food dye (or whatever it is they use to bloody the ITV corpses) out of the bottom of your LCD screen and not come close to the rivers of blood that gushed from the eviscerated cattle carcasses (or should I say corpses) that hung twitching, like dreaming dogs, from the great big hooks in Steve the slaughter-man's Derbyshire abattoir. Kill It, Cook It, Eat Itwas a jaunty little series, shown over three evenings, that pretty much did exactly what it says on the tin. Earnestly presented by journalist Richard Johnson in a nice stripy shirt, the programmes invited members of the public to dine in a temporary studio restaurant with windows on to a working abattoir. In the first programme, dealing with beef, the diners got to see their four-legged dinner walk gingerly into a metal pen before they ate it.
Once in the pen, the animal, witnessed by viewers and studio audience, received a blast from a stun-gun and a hefty whack of brain damage before it was hoisted, unconscious, on to a meat-hook, slit down the middle and "blooded out" (a competent and encompassing phrase that requires no further explanation, believe me).
"The animal is now dead," said Johnson, perhaps a tad unnecessarily and with the solemnity of a grieving royal correspondent, as its head was chopped off and hung up by the nostrils so that the vet could check the cheek meat for parasites.
"We don't intend to shock or upset, but to make you aware," said Johnson, explaining his wish to "reconnect" consumers with where their meat comes from.
Personally, methinks Johnson wouldn't have been averse to a stronger reaction from his dinner guests, who unsentimentally snuffed out the flames of controversy in what became a sludgily unremarkable exercise in TV extremis. As the heavy little rectum sack was delicately disgorged from the skinned beast and its fleshy tongue slithered to the floor like a Christmas drunk, the audience reaction was as mute as the headless beast.
"It was really quite nice," said a skittish young burger waitress as she and her mates sampled the fillet steak that had been butchered from the still-warm animal and fried in butter by the studio chef. Even the young woman who had earlier claimed to be borderline vegetarian, and who had little rabbit silhouettes dancing on her baby pink jumper, happily tucked in to the jelly-like steaks (rigor mortis had yet to set in), along with her companion, a self-proclaimed "meat-eating ballroom dancer", before the rest of the poor animal was repatriated to his herd in the freezer room.
In truth, the Derbyshire abattoir was, as the programme generously kept reminding us, run along lines of best practice. But notwithstanding the reassuring professionalism of this particular slaughter crew, in these days of BSE, bird flu and horror stories about dodgy meat production, there was nonetheless an itchy temptation to unearth the tofu from the freezer.
EQUALLY HARD TO swallow was the notion of skinny little Louise Redknapp - stage-school embryo, singer, TV presenter, mother, all-round friendly blonde Londoner, and wife of ex-England footballer Jamie Redknapp - attempting a 30-day transformation from a 7st 10lb "curvy" size eight (what!) to a US size zero (the equivalent of a UK size four) in 30 days, an ambition that would only be realised if the already minuscule woman went on a crash diet and lost a stone.
The size-zero culture was born (surprise surprise) in Los Angeles, and has spawned a clutch of "lollipop lady" disciples such as Desperate Housewives star Terri Hatcher - women whose heads are too big for their bodies and who probably weigh less than your toothbrush.
Redknapp's reasons for embarking on 30 gruelling days of extreme exercise under the tutelage of Bootcamp Barry, an LA-based fitness trainer, and for consuming less than 800 calories a day, were, she implied, to give her some insight into a dangerous and macabre world and, possibly, to protect young women from the tyranny of ultra-skinnydom.
Given that she has come of age in the era of the DIY celebrity, in which anorexia and eating disorders are almost a required by-product of fame, Redknapp was a suitable candidate to explore the lunacy and martyrdom involved in fitting into a miniature Little Black Dress. After 30 days, she was tired, hungry, irritable lachrymose, and lacking in concentration; she had halitosis, lousy skin and limp hair, and couldn't be bothered pursuing a conversation, so preoccupied was she with her weight and the empty orbit of her stomach. But she did fit into the size-zero dress.
There was no fanfare, just a dwarfed woman in a well-cut shroud propping herself up against a dressing-room door.
After her attempt at exposing a cruel and dangerous culture, Redknapp's body-mass index was dangerously low and she was suffering from sore throats, exhaustion and depleted oestrogen. Admirable as her intentions may have been, it's hard to believe that her self-persecution will have any impact on those she seeks to influence.
CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST DAVID Coleman is back for another series of the excellent Families in Trouble, once again speeding around the country in his shiny Beemer and calmly waving his behavioural wand over fraught families from Limerick to Leitrim.
Coleman has the usual tricks up his sleeve to deal with disruptive and unhappy children - behaviour-modification star charts, positive reinforcement, attainable goals, praise and confidence-boosting - and he imparts them to troubled families with an authoritative warmth.
As with series one, however, Coleman's real job seems to be to modify the behaviour of the parents, in this case the Thorntons, who, with six apparently uncontrollable children under the age of eight, had developed a nice line in barbed sarcasm as their brood (when they weren't whingeing and fighting) swarmed over the kitchen cupboards in search of grazing fodder (crisps, snacks and fizzy drinks) like locusts in grey school tracksuits.
Unlike the cynicism and disregard of the court-shoed Supernanny-esque programmes that proliferate across the schedules, Coleman's compassion and the success of his solutions makes for moving television. It is a mark, though, of how we have changed as a society that little Jordans and Joshes and Tobys are having temper tantrums in front of their Playstations while Daddy's leisure-craft sales business allows him the luxury of popping over to the UK to learn to do wheelies on his motorcycle. God be with the days of grim catechism, occasionally illuminated by an extra fish finger, when Jordan was a river, josh was what English boys did in foreign playgrounds and Toby was the name of the dog. Woof.