Witness (Channel 4, Monday)
Big Bad World (ITV, Sunday)
Panorama (BBC 1, Monday) True Lives (RTE 1, Tuesday)
Ringside (Sky Sports 1, Wednesday)
Filmed by their parents at a dance class, the two eight-year-old girls sparkled with vitality. Blonde Melissa raised her arms to begin her routine; dark-haired Julie smiled directly to camera. Such home videos of children can, of course, be exasperating. After all, parental love, pride and self-satisfaction, though universal, are essentially private emotions. This particular video, however, was not exasperating - it was excruciating because we knew the end of the story: just months later Melissa Russo and Julie Lejeune starved to death in an underground cage built by a paedophile.
Witness: The Lost Children was almost unbearable to watch. The facts, at least in outline, are known to most people. The feelings can scarcely be imagined. How did these little girls feel as they were kidnapped, imprisoned, raped and finally abandoned to waste away? Think about it. How did their parents avoid becoming permanently demented as hours became days, weeks, months? Think about that. And there was more horror in Belgium: the paedophile, Marc Dutroux, also kidnapped two 17-year-old girls, An and Eefje, and passed them on to another monster. After months of sexual abuse, they too were murdered.
Sabine (15) and Laetitia (14) were luckier than Melissa, Julie, An or Eefje. They survived kidnapping and abuse by Dutroux. Laetitia Delhez described how the sicko, released from jail, dragged her into his van, stuffed drugs in her mouth and gave her a can of Fanta. "But I spat it into the drink and it started to fizz up," she said, giggling incongruously. Sicko saw what happened, doubled the dosage and Laetitia woke up more than 100 miles away, caged with Sabine, who had already been missing for two and a half months. What made all the horror so doubly sick was that most, perhaps even all of it, could have been prevented.
"You watch too much Miami Vice," police told Ann's mother, when she first reported her daughter missing. Well, by definition, anybody who watches any Miami Vice watches too much Miami Vice, but the casual contempt of the police mirrored the cavalier condescension which marked the Belgian institutions dealing with these cases. By their behaviour, politicians and police drove the concept of justice in the Low Countries to a previously unimagined low. They seemed, in officious, bureaucratic Belgium, not to give a toss about the suffering of the girls and their parents. They displayed "passive complicity", said one parent, adding that Belgium was "strong on petty crime, weak on serious ones".
We saw the notorious cage. It was about 80 inches long, 64 high, 32 wide - roughly the size of two standard fridge-freezers. Dutroux, a convicted paedophile, released after serving six years of a 13-year sentence, had boasted to his neighbour, Claude Thirault, who was a police informer, that he had converted two old basement water tanks. "He said it was a good place to hide children," said Thirault. When the parents of the missing girls went on television to broadcast appeals, Thirault told police that he was going to tell them about Dutroux. The police warned him against doing so.
It got worse. Searching one of Dutroux's seven houses, police heard children's voices but left without finding Melissa and Julie. When Dutroux was arrested for car theft, he paid an accomplice to feed the children while he was in jail. However, Sicko's pal reneged on the deal and the girls starved. As a catalogue of depravity, misery and incompetence, this story showed us that Silence of the Lambs is sheer codology.
Belgium's then justice minister - a title with even less credibility than say, Chad's nuclear czar - Stefaan de Clerck, was interviewed. He seemed obscenely concerned about the risk posed by the scandal to the government and his job.
Anyway, most people know the rest. Clearly there was - perhaps is - something rotten in the state of Belgium. Every country has its psychopathic paedophiles and sure, politicians and police can enable them through ineptness and more sinister traits. But this horror was scarcely believable, outstripping even States of Fear in its accounts of vileness.
Duty made it practically unmissable; content made it practically unwatchable. In a week in which media accounts of the torture chambers of Kosovo chilled us all, Witness suburbanised a microcosm of comparable horror. Three years on, the utterly verminous Marc Dutroux has still not come to trial. For Belgium, this shows the silence of the shams.
The title of Ardal O'Hanlon's new six-part comedy drama, Big Bad World, would make perfect sense to the victims of Dutroux. It's yet another thirtysomething opera - a subgenre which has been around since thirtysomething itself and more recently displayed in Cold Feet and Wonderful You.
The milieu is maniacally middle-class - the cosy principals work in law and the media; get most of their grub at dinner parties; live in deliriously tasteful, Sunday supplement houses. The plot has O'Hanlon as Eamon, a hack for a trendy magazine, desperate for love, sex and companionship.
Eamon's married friends (Steve Nicolson and Emma Fielding) are equally desperate for Eamon to score - principally to stop him hanging around their designer gaff and designer lives. And then there's Beth Goddard as Kath, a single feminist. She's writing a PhD thesis on "Shakespeare's Women - Towards an Understanding of Elizabethan Gender Politics". You've got to hope that she takes into account the fact that she defines the age she's writing about in terms of a woman's name. Anyway, Kath detests Eamon, which suggests that sooner or later - later, probably - they'll bed down together.
However, despite the ingredients for yet another thirtysomething smugfest, some of the jokes aren't bad. "Eamon, could you possibly squeeze another 1,200 words out of your genitals?" spits the Alexis Carringtonwannabe features editor of the lifestyle mag on which he is the sole male writer. Given Eamon's declared level of frustration, you might expect such an assignment to be a godsend. Not so, however. Such words won't come easy for Eamon and he suggests writing about female "football fakers" - ladettes with the right attitude but no understanding of the offside rule, even in football! As we know, drinking cappuccino doesn't necessarily mean you can fathom catenaccio.
Throughout, Nicholas Martin's writing punctuates the cliches with deft touches. In desperation, Eamon's married friends, keen to protect their hermetically sealed smugness arrange for him to visit an expensive prostitute, Natasha. Of course, Eamon and Natasha get the emotional hots for each other and the plot thickens - in every sense. Still, if the plot risks congealing, perceptive observations maintained the momentum of the opening episode. The snake-pit of magazine publishing; the convenient Catholicism of middle-class, atheist parents seeking a place for junior in a good school; Kath's mentally-ill mother thrown out of hospital - these cut the mustard.
For his part, O'Hanlon manages the transition from stand-up through sitcom to comedy drama well. The gormlessness of his more familiar personae is as toned down as the lighting in his smug friends' dining room. But most of the rest of the characters are middle-class mannequins suffering from humanity deficiencies. We learn that Eamon once defecated on the floor of a bank in a protest against apartheid in South Africa. We hear that Mr Smugly Married used to play in a band named Bollix "which once supported Sham 69". This drama doesn't quite need such punk excesses but it does need its smugness slashed.
The week's second investigation of a police force was conducted by Panorama, which looked at alleged RUC collusion in the murders of solicitors Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson. With Chris "Hong Kong" Patten's report on the force's future due out by September, this is a particularly sensitive time for such particularly sensitive issues. Reporter John Ware, complete with professorial spectacles, put his allegations to RUC chief constable Ronnie Flanagan. This resulted in Flanagan flatly contradicting Param Cumaraswamy, the UN rappporteur probing allegations of RUC harassment of lawyers.
Cumaraswamy insists that Flanagan told him the RUC had "more than a suspicion of some lawyers' relationships with paramilitary organisations". Flanagan, however, said he had "no recollection" of phoning Cumaraswarmy to ask for this remark to be deleted. Still, the UN man believes there was collusion in the Finucane murder. And there you have it. Common sense would suggest that members of the RUC, as in every other police force, range from the scrupulous to the villainous. Indeed, given the pre-ceasefire ruthlessness of the IRA and the 93 per cent Protestant make-up of the RUC, a perfect record within the force would be virtually impossible.
But involvement in the murders of nationalist lawyers is a pretty serious charge. Clearly, ideology splits people into the ancient, well-defined camps on this one and in an area like the North, people's urges to believe what they want to believe - or even feel they need to believe - are intense. Panorama certainly made it awkward for the RUC, as it has done in the past for the IRA. As ever though, you have to wonder why it is that British television tries to get to parts of the North's conflict that Irish television characteristically ignores. The list of similar probes by British TV is a litany at this stage. Ignoring is not collusion - but neither is it commendable.
Anyway, RTE did, at least, provide an engaging, if ultimately inconsequential, documentary in its True Lives series. The Million Dollar Deal focused on the world of big-time poker in Las Vegas. Narrated by John Hurt and intercut with obligatory scenes of the neon necromancy that is Vegas, the atmospherics were the equivalent of a full house. The tension, though, was more two-pair, perhaps Jacks high. The players, with some exceptions, should have packed after the ante. It was a pity that poker's Naseem Hamed, an insufferable braggart named Scotty Nguyen, won the big pot. Still, that was not the fault of Doubledown Productions, the independent Irish outfit which made the programme. Certainly, the garishness, the egomania and the psychology of this tough 'n' bluff card game were well captured. And, in fairness, there were genuine characters among the chancers. The year after this one was filmed, the Irish player Noel Furlong won the million dollar deal. If Doubledown's timing was a little unfortunate, they still did more than enough to be dealt another crack at the documentary game.
Finally, a little gem in a generally gloomy TV week. Previewing the upcoming heavyweight boxing bout between Herbie Hide and Vitali Klitschko, Ringside interviewed Klitschko through an interpreter. Listening carefully, Klitschko's man nodded in understanding before translating: "He will show his weapon in the ring and he will send Herbie Hide to the canvas with it," said the linguist.
Klitschko is six foot eight inches tall, so even if the promised spectacle falls short of a knockout, Herbie might have more to cope with in the ring than he's bargained for.