The news bulletins should come with a violence warning

I was sitting half comatose in front of the television screen one evening last week – as you do on the Irish Summer evening when the ceaseless rain pours down reminding you that Winter is just around the corner.

Now, there’s one thing on which you will get agreement on almost any street corner in Galway . . . once The Races are over, the evenings seem to gather-in more quickly, and the clincher is that many parents are in the business of organising their kids’ schoolbooks, and the year moves on with new pace.

As I wrote recently, television programming has hit rock bottom – with promises in the background that RTE is really going to entertain us with its new schedules – but I was stopped in my tracks by one of those crime scene investigation episodes which made me wonder about how unpleasant some programmes have become.

I have little doubt that it was the advent of villains like Hannibal Lecter with his unique brand of violence towards his victims, and the treatment of Lecter as some sort of ‘half-hero, which spawned what they term this new ‘gritty realism’ when it comes to crime, to murder, and to murder investigation.

Nowadays they don’t just show you the body, or film a sequence as brilliantly as Hitchcock did the shower scene in Psycho. No, they give you the full gory details.

In this episode which stopped my channel-hopping in its tracks, a nutter had a woman held captive and, while the desperate hunt went on to track down the cellar in which she was being held, the serial killer had her partially undressed, tied to a chair and was approaching her with an open old-fashioned cut-throat razor.

I watched transfixed as he made an approach and took off a hunk of her blonde hair as she screamed. Then he put on a blindfold and told her he was going to complete cutting the hair!

In the nick of time, the cops broke in having tracked down her whereabouts by – I thought – a rather unlikely use of maps and global positioning which showed the moon position over a particular part of the United States. But it was the sheer terror of the scene, the unremitting portrayal of her fear, and the thought of such crime being portrayed in such detail, that left me breathless.

Maybe I’m one of those who is easily spooked . . . but, for me, what is called ‘gritty realism’ is Helen Mirren as Chief Superintendent Jane Tennison chasing down a serial killer, or a coven of child molesters, but with the realism coming from great acting, the sparseness and awfulness of the lives portrayed . . . not fellows with open razors approaching a partially-clothed terrified woman who is tied to a chair.

Maybe I am easily moved by scenes of violence. I recall being simply appalled when the ‘heroes’ in Goodfellas took offence at some idiot drunkenly talking out-of-turn in a pub, and simply beat and kicked him half-to-death, put him in the boot of their car and then gave him air in the boot by shooting into it!

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.