The Week on the Telly – July 1st 2011 by Hannah

This week I watched…

Luther, BBC1

While exhibiting an interest in real life serial killers isn’t going to endear you to anyone, especially not your fellow passengers when you’re reading ‘The True Story of Sex Killer Ted Bundy’ out loud on the train, it’s perfectly OK to spend six hours watching back to back episodes of CSI while texting ‘Horatio found fingerprints in the vomit! LOL’ to all your friends. Everyone enjoys a fictional serial killer, and by just episode three, the new series of Luther is pushing the serial killer boundary to envelop men in Punch masks dissolving children in acid (Luther stops him!), and maniacs rolling dice to decide whether or not to hammer commuters in the head. This is already better than improbable Robson Green vehicle Wire in the Blood!

(CONFESSION- I have a massive crush on Luther. I like my men grizzled, croaky voiced, and, er, maverick. Or as Ripley, Luther’s side kick, put it, ‘There’s a difference between getting your hands dirty and being dirty.’)
As well as tracking down the hammer-wielding killer before he bludgeons anyone else, sprays acid in their eyes or defaces their motor vehicle, Luther must also protect the teenage prostitute he rescued from a life of necro-porn. He does this by playing at being a dirty cop for a gangland pornographer. As is usual with TV drug-addled hookers, she is fresh faced, pretty and expert at doing experimental hair and make up. She is also constantly in peril, opening the door to anyone who bangs angrily on it.

The writing in this series is incredibly slick, and at times it feels like I’m watching a US crime drama. British cop shows are always slightly ramshackle (yeah A Touch of Frost, I’m looking at you), and I’m sure I’m not the only one who struggles to stay awake during Lewis (Morse is dead, get over it!). If I fall asleep during Luther, I have nightmares that I’m being pursued around a convenience store by a baseball bat waving, blank-faced psycho. Then I wake up, sweaty and confused, and remember I left the flat door open…

I also watched…

The Sex Researchers, C4

‘I know the penis more than anyone out there in the world,’ says Dr Su, director of the Micro-Surgical Potency Reconstruction and Research Centre in Taiwan. That’s right guys; Dr Su is taking one for the team to solve YOUR impotency problems. The bad news is, it seems to involve inserting a pipe cleaner into the flaccid penis. Who said science was boring? Certainly not Marie Bonaparte, who carried out research into the location of the clitoris in order to enjoy better sex. She eventually underwent clitoral relocation surgery, twice. In 1924. Ouch. Also featured is Dr. Wilhelm Reich, who believed he had discovered a new unit of energy, the Orgone, released when a person has an orgasm. If only we could harness this power, it would be ‘goodbye, oil crisis.’ I feel a little self-conscious that, despite having a Science GCSE, I know nothing about any of this. Failed by the state school system yet again.

Mildred Pierce, Sky Atlantic

I watched this, despite it failing the most basic of my viewing criteria (does Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian like it? TURN OFF). Kate Winslet reprises her role from Revolutionary Road, and it was immediately apparent that this wasn’t going to be easy, or light-hearted, viewing. Mildred is abandoned early on by her useless husband, and spends the rest of the episode trying to find a job that doesn’t feel beneath her. This involves a lot of staring through windows at waitresses and having awkward sex with her husband’s friend. Finally, as I shouted at the TV in frustration, she succumbs, and is soon earning 25 cents an hour being OPPRESSED in a hash house. Just four more episodes to go…

Next week I’ll be watching…Undercover Boss, C4

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