Blood on her hands

TV Review:The work of State Pathologist Dr Marie Cassidy is the subject of a rather jolly new series, Death Duties, which began on RTÉ this week and which is indirectly responsible for my adhering to the bleak January principle of healthy eating.

I was just about to sample some half-price toffee cake in an effort to boost my serotonin levels (having sludged through The Palace - but more of that anon) when my sexy TV screen filled up with maggots, and not just a passing glance, may I add, but a nice long visual treat: many maggots, moving maggots, maggots dancing in excited anticipation of feasting on another molten corpse. If I was a maggot, I'd be reading the crime statistics in this country with more than a tincture of amoebic pleasure.

Cassidy, who, like her predecessor, Dr John Harbison (a warm and convivial man of gruesome good humour with whom I occasionally had a pint in my dazzled youth), is a surprisingly eager raconteur, speaking entertainingly of maggots and their entomological significance in determining how long a corpse has been hanging around a dank basement or lonely riverside. In fact, Cassidy spoke with a kind of excited, steely glee about most aspects of her fascinating profession. She likened her craft to puzzle-solving, and her morgue did almost seem like a posthumous pathology playground where the game was identifying the cause and time of death of whatever corpse was currently occupying the slab (mind-bogglingly, Cassidy was said to have examined more than 10,000 dead bodies in the course of her career).

Featuring reconstructions of a couple of her livelier recent investigations (utilising chilly special extras who seemed to be bathed in a bluey food dye, and some blackened and burnt mannequins), this vigorous programme was infused with Cassidy's enthusiasm. However, given the high rate of suicide among members of her profession, surely there is a downside to donning the milk-white rubber bootees and scalping a stiff?

When pushed, Cassidy said that facing the anguish of the bereaved living, consoling a mother over a dead son, be he three or 33, was not her strong point. Her work begins when "no matter what has happened, it's over", and her healing resides in the accumulation of detail and in restoring, millimetre by millimetre, the dignity of a murdered man, woman or broken child by telling their final story. Visceral viewing.

'IT'S NO MORAL matter. It is what certain gentlemen do, it's as natural as breathing." Eviscerating entertainment of a cruder kind seeped on to the screens in the dank City of Vice, Channel 4's much-heralded new drama starring Ian McDiarmid and Iain Glen as 18th-century magistrates Henry Fielding (the novelist) and his brother, John. Seventy-five years before Robert Peel, in the seedy, disreputable metropolis of cesspit London - a city where the rural poor got shafted by the urban rich (so what's new, pussycat?) - the powdery, bewigged brothers, in response to increasing lawlessness and with the consent of the powers that were, conjured up the Bow Street Runners, a bunch of heavy Georgian bouncers who looked like they should be propping up the bar in Albert Square.

This historical drama, based on factual material, opened with the usual gothic cop-show sadism. In a grisly little scene played out within moments of the opening credits, and barely past the tick-tock taper of the watershed, a young Covent Garden prostitute was anally raped and slashed to ribbons in a steamy "bagnio". Doubtless the machismo and misogyny of the brothel-keeper, his clients and even the flustered law lords was as authentic as the inky maps of murky London that located the drama, but either the petticoat perversity and brutality was actually quite shocking or it was just way past my bedtime.

Altogether, despite buckets of rouge and pulsating bodices, City of Vice is a pretty bleak romp which, although delicately and convincingly acted, somehow feels a little educational, a kind of sleuthy Antiques Roadshow or pantalooned Morse.

"I am not making a dog's dinner of our first investigation," stomped Henry Fielding (McDiarmid, who, garlanded by his tresses, somehow looked terribly like a frilly Paul Daniels), and nor did he. With their first case under their suspenders, the bros will continue their diabolical detecting over the coming weeks, poking at their corpses with the tips of their very fine walking canes. Way to go.

'WRITING ABOUT SEX is almost as difficult as writing about happiness," said a gently humorous John Banville to Charlie McCarthy during Arts Lives: Being John Banville, a film whose visual sumptuousness echoed the rigorous delight the novelist Banville takes in words.

During a conversation filmed over a period of months in Dublin, London and Rome, an unexpectedly open and unequivocating Banville recollected his Wexford childhood and a mother who made him feel "like a god", a state of affairs that did not diminish the young man's determination to get away and broaden his horizons, an urge so potent that he neglected to learn the street names in his home town.

While dismissing the idea of art as self-expression, Banville did allow himself to speculate that "not being able to feel in time" may be part of the state of being an artist, acknowledging that the intensity of the "grief, memory, and love recollected" in his Booker Prize-winning novel, The Sea, may have had something to do with a long-delayed response to his parents' deaths when he was a busy man in his 30s, supporting a family, writing, and working nights as a newspaper sub-editor.

The film was also fascinating in its depiction of the nuts and bolts of a writer's existence. Like a visual eavesdropper, McCarthy's intimate camera took in the details of the Dublin room where Banville works, the Picasso drawings pulled from a book of illustrations and pinned to the wall, the photographs of his children, their drawings, the notebooks and computer screen filled with sentences written and rewritten again and again until he hears the "ping" that signifies completion.

McCarthy's portrait was a tender oasis in an otherwise frothy television week, further enhancing the reputation of this unerringly consistent strand.

I RATHER SUSPECT that Vincent Browne, a journalist I admire, is not feeling quite so composed. A couple of rounds into TV3's Nightly News with Vincent Browne and one wonders if this rather nervy jaunt is ever going to ring his bell. The show, which, to be fair, is in its absolute infancy, pales next to more established news analysis programmes such as BBC's Newsnight, constrained as it is not just by its scant, strangely scarlet set, but, up to now, by its rather flat handling of mainly domestic stories.

There is, however, talent on board, not just that of the vastly experienced and courageous Browne, but also of senior correspondent Karen Coleman and political correspondent Ursula Halligan. Maybe it is simply that TV3 is a little like a deflated hostess whose over-enthusiastic small talk has started to run out in the face of hostile guests. Browne's vessel has been launched with bells and whistles, much as Eamon Dunphy's was, but why does one sense that TV3 will struggle to land its catch? It may be fairer to revisit this show after the anchor has tested the ballast of his ship.

THE KING IS, like, dead; long live the king, okay yah? The Palace is, like, soooo amazing! A whimsical, farcical carton of takeaway tabloid tandoori greased by chick-lit sensibility, it is a new ITV drama about a fictitious royal family living in Buckingham Palace, along with the campest-looking footmen the casting director could dredge up from the pages of Spotlight. It's a kind of Upstairs Downstairs with ermine and curs.

Anyway, episode one, and before you can say "there's a Corgi in my Bolly", the king ups and dies, and his eldest chisel-jawed son, Richard (Rupert Evans), has to get his royal Y-fronts back on in a hurry, remove his tongue from the tequila bottle, lead the nation in mourning and take up the royal reins. Which he does, much to the chagrin of his ambitious older sister, Princess Eleanor (Sophie Winkleman), who hangs out in her royal apartment autographing her photograph and sprinkling bad fairy dust around the castle, much like a skinny Miss Piggy. Queen? Moi?

It's a bit of a laugh actually, and Lorcan Cranitch is in it (which is always a good thing), playing press secretary Jonty Roberts. Bonkingham Palace, as he so eloquently put it, is in for a "penis horribilis".