TELEVISION Cruelty and horror increasingly fill the small screen. It is as if the refusal to show the effects of conflict in the news seeks compensation in a higher court of fiction.
Waking the Dead (BBC1 Sunday and Monday) began its eighth series two weeks ago with a middle-aged woman running naked through a forest, having been raped by three Turkish mafiosi; later, the team headed by Detective Superintendent Peter Boyd (Trevor Eve) discovers a tortured body hanging naked and upside down from a ceiling, his face half-eaten by maggots. In the following two-parter this past week, a young woman has been raped by two men, her 10-year-old thrown to his death over a bridge, she following – though not to her death; she lives to revenge.
