High drama in court

TV REVIEW: WimbledonBBC1, Monday; Criminal JusticeBBC1, Monday to Friday; The Beauty Season: Britain's Missing Top ModelBBC3, Tuesday This Is MeRTÉ1, Monday Imagine . . . Werner Herzog: Beyond ReasonBBC1, Tuesday

'If she had a tail, she'd be wagging it!" It was Andy Murray versus Richard Gasquet, and the Frenchman was getting hot under his visor as the eager crowd willed the sleepy London sun to keep shining for just a few more minutes. The sheer force of their collective excitement, along with dogged Scottish resilience and a kind of rattling athleticism, had seen Murray come from two sets down to win the third-set tie-break. The pert, round-eyed lady in the white straw bowler wiggled happily on her seat like a pink and steaming toddler at the nursery tea-table, her obvious delight spawning John Inverdale's oddly apt but vaguely salacious comment as the decidedly un-Henman-esque Murray ranged around the court, howled at the tentative summer moon, pinched his pecs and eventually beat the chaussettes off the bewildered Frenchman. Forget Scottish independence, forget Gordon Brown's lowland drumbeat of disappointment - Wimbledon had a new British hope (briefly, as usual), and a couple of hundred years of serfdom and impossible-to-match tartans weren't going to dampen the spectators' enthusiasm.

I had turned on BBC to watch Peter Moffat's much-vaunted new drama, Criminal Justice, but it was delayed by the cucumber gladiatorials and I found myself instead watching the tennis. I like Wimbledon: it's nostalgic, a reminder of the old days when we had seasons, when, blinded by the summer light, you'd stumble indoors to watch Bjorn Borg's shampoo'n'set wilt in the harsh Centre Court sun and Boris Becker's big square arms freckle as he smashed his hundredth ace four-square into the dumpy, long-suffering lineswoman.

IF WIMBLEDON WAS as palatable as a bowl of strawberries and cream, the fantastic, demanding and terrifying Criminal Justice, which immediately followed, soon pulled the rug from under any lingering Barley-watered sensibilities, with a sickeningly tense, nightmarish tale of a young man's life being rent asunder after his arrest for a murder that he was pretty sure he didn't commit. Dramatised over five consecutive nights, former barrister Moffat's claustrophobic script was even more emotionally draining than being trampled into the asphalt by a hungry Williams sister.

Ben Whishaw, who played Ben Coulter, the young man accused of murder after a chance drunken meeting with an inscrutable beauty, Melanie (the luminous Ruth Negga), is one of those blearily lovely young British boy actors with floppy hair, bony knees and well-toned sensitivity. He is the kind of actor who inevitably turns up in remakes of Brideshead Revisited (which is exactly where he happens to be heading), and it was the brilliantly relentless exploitation of Whishaw's vulnerability and intelligence that gave this drama such force.

This could be my son, you thought, as the character stumbled like a lamb to the slaughter into an unforgiving recreation hall where the other prisoners pulsed with contempt. Criminal Justice has been described as neither a prison drama, nor a legal drama, nor a whodunnit, but as a hybrid of all three, a vehicle to explore a labyrinthine justice system which ultimately seems to fail all the players.

"They take the lunatics and turn them into animals," ruminated the fantastic Pete Postlethwaite, who played Hooch, Ben's old-timer cellmate, referring to the 80 per cent of Britain's prison population who are mentally ill. Justice, this drama told us, is simply a sport, one that relies on the participants surviving a wearying mental endurance test of a much more dangerous kind than the imaginary chess games Ben and Hooch played to whittle away the long nights.

"Please don't speak," said Coulter's over-priced lawyer. "I only want to hear from you the things I want to hear." A sickening Mad Hatter's tea party, this was riveting viewing.

OVER ON BBC3, meanwhile, the murky fashion and modelling industry volunteered to be exposed to a harsh spotlight in The Beauty Season: Britain's Missing Top Model, an odd pageant pitting eight disabled young women against each other in competition.

The aim of The Beauty Season, apparently, is to question conventional notions of beauty and to challenge public perceptions of attractiveness. On paper and website, and in discussion around someone's aesthetically pleasing desk, this is probably a fine idea; the reality, however, comes across as a little less high-minded.

The eight young women competing to be Britain's missing top model come from a range of backgrounds: at least three have lost limbs or mobility through car accidents, some have seriously debilitating genetic conditions, and two are deaf. All these glamorous women have struggled against other people's tight views of normality, achieving a confidence that enables them to hang around TV cameras in their underwear. And how many of us would be willing to do that? The problem with the programme seems to lie in an inability to decide on its brief: is it to find a model (who happens to be disabled) who can make it in a notoriously competitive industry, or is it to identify a disabled model capable of shifting some perceptions? Four panellists - Marie O'Riordan, editor of Marie Claire (whose magazine is offering the winner a photo-spread), Red or Dead co-founder Wayne Hemingway, disabled actor and TV presenter Lara Masters, and casting director Mark Summers - judge the participants on looks, personality and tenacity. However, bunching the women together like some disparate herd and arguing about whether deafness is visual enough to represent disability, or whether a girl who lost an arm out of a bus window is more disabled than a paraplegic, is unfortunately dragging these women back into the pit of gawping misperception that they're trying to crawl out from.

There were some quite uplifting moments, though, in Piccadilly Circus, where huge photographs of the women were displayed on a moving billboard above the bustling streets, causing passers-by to stop and stare for entirely straightforward reasons.

Sophie, a strikingly independent and lovely blonde, in a wheelchair since a car accident five years ago, looked up at her illuminated face and, with tears in her eyes, said: "This is why it happened to me, so I could feel this." This series may struggle to maintain its tenuous balance, but it will be interesting to see if it can make an impact that carries it beyond a digital slot.

EXCEPTIONAL LIVES were further explored on RTÉ's new series, This Is Me, a documentary strand part-funded by the Rehab group and the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, which invites viewers to spend half an hour in the company of a family or individual living with some form of disability or coping with illness.

The eight-part series kicked off with the story of Gary and Liz Scanlon, whose daughter Claudia has the genetic skin condition Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB). Claudia is a sweet little girl, about to start school, whose skin is so fragile that she is almost entirely bandaged, dressings that have to be changed every 48 hours, causing pain and discomfort. Liz and Gary fight a magnificent fight to keep the illness at bay, constantly pushing to "protect but not suffocate" their daughter. And Claudia, though fragile, is a determined character, shrugging off the "bad days", and clipping her butterfly wings on to her jacket to lark around in the park. Despite the family's positive attitude and determination to deal with the illness, however, they have to face the fact that the prognosis for EB sufferers is ultimately bleak.

If this gentle strand brings support or encourages understanding in place of indifference, there is surely value in opening out the private lives of people such as the Scanlons for public perusal.

THE COMEDY THIS WEEK (and let's face it, in this damn weather you need a laugh) came from an entirely unexpected source. Imagine . . . Werner Herzog: Beyond Reason saw the cautiously grave Alan Yentob conduct a hysterically funny interview with the enlivening and eccentric Bavarian film director. Herzog's career of fantastically illuminating and original madness is inextricably linked to that of the late German actor, the wild Klaus Kinski, a man who featured heavily in the gloriously wry conversation of Yentob and Herzog.

"I vould not shoot him vithout giving him a chance," Herzog said, explaining how death threats were sometimes useful when it came to directing Kinski, a profoundly wrathful man given to great swathes of rage, outbursts which Herzog would encourage in order to exhaust the actor and thereby produce a more suitably muted performance when the camera was rolling. My favourite rage tale was of a teenage Kinski spending 48 hours locked in the Herzog family's bathroom, which, over two days of maniacal fury, he reduced to rubble. "You could sieve it through a tennis racket," said a professionally deadpan Herzog, talking about the shattered porcelain that had once constituted a bath and toilet. Fantastic.

HOLD ON, HOLD ON, hold on, I can't go without making an apology. In last week's column I mistakenly wrote that Barry Murphy of Après Match was responsible for a fantastic impersonation of RTÉ sports presenter Pat Spillane, when in fact Risteárd Cooper was the actor under the silver wig. As long as Cooper doesn't start wearing Murphy's rubber toupee, I promise not to make the same mistake again. Apologies to all concerned.

Mind you, we could all do with wearing a rubber toupee in this damn weather.