TV REVIEW/Shane Hegarty: On Monday night's Coronation Street, Richard did what his eyes have been promising he would do for many months now: he claimed another murder victim. He had planned for it to be Emily, but discovered too late how decades of a weekly set-and-blow-dry had formed a natural protection against the force of a crowbar.
Coronation Street
TV3 & ITV, Monday
Taken
N2 & BBC2, Saturday
Wife Swap
Channel 4, Tuesday
The Life of Mammals
BBC1, Wednesday
Instead, his victim was Maxine as played by Tracy Shaw. We knew it would be Maxine as played by Tracy Shaw because she has been busy telling her story to the tabloids with all the verve of a soap actress who reaches page 23 of the script and finds that as of page 24 there will be no further call for her services. That's the thing about the soaps these days. We all know the plots so far in advance that some day a character will dodge her fate thanks to having stumbled across it in the Sun four weeks before.
Fred, Doreen and Norris reacted to the grisly scene by shuffling about the room like an amateur troupe waiting for the next page of the script to be written. It was Maxine's husband Ashley, however, who was first to arrive.
Ashley's voice gives the impression that he swallowed a dog toy as a child, but on this occasion his squeak failed him.
Finding him speechless, covered in blood and grasping his wife's body, the police did the most sympathetic thing they could under the circumstances. They handcuffed him and hauled him to a police car in full view of the entire Street.
"It's only routine procedure," insisted PC Emma, who is a Street resident and, it often appears, the only copper in Manchester.
"This is ridiculous," blared Fred Elliot, in a rare moment of self-awareness.
Richard, you can rest assured, will die a fiery death. Quite when is yet to be revealed. In the meantime, he has spent his week as he has spent all his time on the Street, skulking the cobbles, eyes so narrowed you couldn't slip a cigarette paper between the lids. Perhaps he is reading the small print of his contract.
For a man who was once noted for being able to kickstart zeitgeist, with Taken Steven Spielberg finds himself arriving in at the tail-end. It has not an ounce of originality but is a medley of scenes you have seen before.
Bright lights, crashed saucers, evil generals, government cover-ups. The grey aliens come at night, as the shadows of the trees dance in the bedroom and the breeze summons up one last blast of foreboding. Lights go out. Car engines splutter to a halt. Static takes over the radio. It includes regular scenes in which humans struggle and scream on a lab table while an alien probe reaches for a nostril. They're an advanced species, the Greys, and one of these days they're going to invent an effective sedative.
The backdrop is once again the backdrop of Rockwell-esque diners and Cadillacs that suggest the aliens inhabit deepest Americana rather than deepest space. Taken's closest relative is not the X-Files but the short-lived series Dark Skies. Like Taken it took Roswell as its opening chapter and involved wholesome folks battling immoral government spooks over five decades. It had planned to run for five years before it got too close to the truth - the truth being that no-one out there was watching it. If by 1996 it already seemed to be a series hitching a ride on a wave that had already peaked, then Taken has arrived only to find the tide has long gone out.
Spielberg's nod to Dark Skies comes in casting its lead actor, Eric Close, as the kindly alien who wanders into the life of a lonely woman and makes interstellar whoopee. With what must have been relief all round, the resulting hybrid child, Jacob, has avoided potentially awkward social moments by being born human on the outside and keeping the alien stuff tucked away on the inside. Jacob has a talent for knowing what will happen next. You will find yourself developing an uncannily similar ability without needing an alien dad to go with it.
If you have also been watching Wife Swap then you might well have wondered if all of us on this earth quite belong to the same species. Meet Barry: "My job is relaxation and enjoying myself. The gym, dog tracks, the horse racing. That is a job. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I'm a success or anything " What Barry might really be saying here is that on his terms he is most definitely a success. And when he says "the horse racing" he doesn't mean afternoons spent wandering the paddock, throwing his flat cap in the air as his horse sweeps past the post. He means hours in front of the Teletext betting pages with pen and paper in hand. His face is thin and his eyes large, as if they have evolved for the purpose. Barry is the distillation of a certain male characteristic that glossy magazines promised men we had dropped a few steps back along our evolutionary path.
Meanwhile, his wife Michelle works 60 hours a week in the local betting shop, and spends whatever time is left cooking, cleaning, vacuuming and running Barry's bath. "He hasn't made me a cup of tea in 15 years," she sniffed.
As the title of the programme so eloquently explains, Barry got a new wife for a week. She was Carol, a middle-class drama teacher with the wardrobe of a teenager and a husband who would rather she relaxed and put her feet up while he vacuumed under them. She began her week picking dog shit off the carpet, and continued it by washing his smelly gym gear, rising at 6 each morning to make him breakfast and run his bath. She endured his demands relayed across the house from the sofa. Barry's constant calling had the power to turn Carol's name into aural water torture, halted only when she would turn him off by giving him a cup of tea.
Finally, she ended the week being belittled by Michelle for not having been servile enough. "She was talkin' to you?" Michelle asked Barry with astonishment. "She'd rather talk than do housework. She's fuckin' lazy." Michelle, by the way, had spent the week living with Carol's husband Peter and their two lovely daughters. In that house Peter does all the housework, no-one raises their voice and they order a take-away five nights a week. She hated it.
Wife Swap is brilliantly simple television. You will learn nothing from it, only that it will have diverted you from getting anything useful done with that hour of your life, and that you will feel uncomfortable for having watched it. The makers of Wife Swap simply look at these people, ask how they can get the worst out of them and then strip-mine them of their dignity.
That's entertainment.
An hour with David Attenborough, on the other hand, remains an hour to cherish. The Life of Mammals is yet another beautiful, fascinating, thought-provoking series. You should always clear some space in your brain in advance of the barrage of information.
The 100ft long Blue Whale is the largest creature in Earth's history. It has a heart the size of a small family car, and which beats only six times a minute. It has two tiny hip and hind leg bones that are the last remnants of its origins on the land, when they were deer-like animals. It can communicate with another whale hundreds of miles away.
The Right Whale, meanwhile, has testes that weigh a ton. His penis is 12ft long. No-one can quite be sure what whale song means, but they may be bragging.
This week, Attenborough was looking at the mammals that live in the sea, popping up all over this planet he has helped us to so appreciate. He stalked river dolphins in India, dug the ice for seal pups in the Arctic, snuggled against manatees in Florida. ("I suppose a little halitosis is what you would expect but, whew, that's strong.")
"The more we study these magnificent creatures, the closer our relationship will become." Of course, we've got Barry in our species, so they may not be keen on a relationship with us.