If television were a city, its real- crime programmes would make up the red-light district. Those who enter it are embarrassed about their enthusiasms but still determined to get what they came for — a glimpse into the sickest, bleakest recesses of the human soul. Ted Bundy: Natural Porn Killer (Channel 4) was there to feed that fascination, complete with the kind of trashy title that the channel favours nowadays. Tonight we have Bus Pass Boob Jobs and we’re bound to get a documentary about a ruthless, sex-crazed fashion designer entitled The Loin, the Bitch and the Wardrobe.
Ted Bundy, an FBI expert declared in the programme, “is the standard by which other serial killers are judged”. He was duly treated as the superstar of compulsive killers. Bundy had murdered his way across 1970s America, sadistically slaying at least 30 women. Yet he was handsome and articulate and ended up defending himself in court. Since being executed in Florida in 1989, he has left an image that is still hard to reconcile: a picture of a killer too gross to contemplate, yet wholesome to behold. The programme focused on his final interview, shortly before facing the electric chair, in which he claimed that hardcore pornography had pushed him over the edge.
Whether this was simply some 11th-hour hand wringing on Bundy’s part for the benefit of his interviewer, a psychologist and right-wing Christian evangelist called James Dobson, or there was something to Bundy’s claims, was the crux of the documentary. But it failed to offer any definite conclusions, especially as Bundy said that “I planned the crimes, I knew what I was doing”, then added that porn was “central to the development of the vile behaviour”. So the programme simply became another excuse to detail Bundy’s gruesome crimes (with fuzzy reconstructions of terrified victims) and to muse on the warped nature of celebrity as female fan mail flooded in during his ten years on death row.
In the end, the programme showed that television often doesn’t really care if you have been bad or good but obsessed. Last night you could also see a man called Fred who loved anything with a chimney, a woman called Sarah addicted to property values and a chef called Gordon who liked to roast people. And in The Trench Detectives (Five) we had archaeologists and military historians dedicated to unearthing the remains of First World War battlefields and identifying the dead.
Ever since Time Team tried to inject immediacy into the slow process of archaeology with a spurious time limit and Tony Robinson running around, television’s enthusiasm for all things corroded and mud-clogged has become more gimmicky, usually involving a helicopter. We ended up with such series as Two Men in a Trench, which was all buddy banter and Benny Hill speeded-up bits to sprinkle extra jauntiness over proceedings. And I can still remember, for all the wrong reasons, King Midas’ Feast, in which the sitcom star Ralf Little tried to re-create an ancient funeral banquet — against the clock.
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The Action Man urgency of archaeology on TV has never appealed, which is why the soberness of The Trench Detectives was welcome. Edited so we got the relevant finds and the results of conservation and forensics without fuss, this followed a dig at the 1915 battlefield of Loos in northern France. From little details the nationality of the fallen could be established; this was all far more convincing than the kind of extrapolation favoured by most trowel-based telly that sees a whole lost Iron Age settlement from a single post hole.
From fragments of a pay book and a postcard hidden in a soldier’s songbook, one of the dead was identified as German, an accomplished musician who had died while serving in the same Bavarian reserve regiment as a young Hitler. As the clues were pursued, the diggers’ respect for the dead was touching. Their indignant anger said it all when they arrived one morning to find that the site had been cleared of artefacts by thieves with metal detectors and so removed vital clues for identification. “It’s like killing someone all over again,” declared one historian, tears welling up in his eyes.
Nowadays so much on television is pimped up or padded out that watching it can seem like a species of archaeology itself — the viewer is left to reconstruct the small, neat programme that once existed from the traces left underneath the big, ugly construction that now stands in its place. The Trench Detectives was simple, effective and affecting and, unlike Ted Bundy, had subjects more worthy of remembrance.