On TV

Trafalgar Battle Surgeon (C4)

Killer Asteroid (five)

DIGGING up Dirty Den's corpse in the Vic cellar in EastEnders turned out to be the least horrendous happening as TV schedulers decided to make Bank Holiday Monday a real gory, glum day.

"Christ, here we go again," said a detective as a crucifix was pulled from inside the stomach of a victim. How right he was. Messiah 4 found all the expected ingredients in place - horrifically ingenious killings, gruesome post mortems, more red herrings than a North Sea trawler and Ken Stott looking morose as DCI Red Metcalfe.

"An ordinary person, an extraordinary death," he muttered after finding a woman in a van full of thousands of bees and maggots. Her hands were taped to the steering wheel, the words SAVE ME written in her blood on the windscreen and, to ensure maximum shiver factor, there was a close-up of a bee emerging from her nose.

The sadistic pleasure is not in discovering whodunit but how they're going to do it. Imagine the shock when the second victim passed away in her sleep, after a morphine overdose. This provided a brief respite from the gore as the body count mounted faster than a rider using a trampoline to get on his horse.

"I've never seen anything like this," said the pathologist. If someone who spends most days rummaging around in people's insides says that, you can be certain something very nasty is going on.

The blood and guts flowed too in Trafalgar Battle Surgeon, based on the log of William Beatty, ship's surgeon on HMS Victory during the Battle of Trafalgar. He was one of three medics for 827 men and operating without anaesthetic.

The battle wounded were dealt with on a first come, first served basis. "Even if your bollock is hanging by a whisker, you wait your turn," he insisted.

The rule was broken when Admiral Nelson was brought below decks after being shot by a sniper. "He might as well paint a bullseye on his chest, strutting around the quarter-deck dressed up like the Emperor of China," someone said unsympathetically.

I wondered why The Who's Roger Daltrey had been cast as a loblolly boy, an old sailor turned hospital porter until they amputated young Mr Rivers' leg - Daltrey led a singsong while Beatty sawed away at the limb to take the wide-awake patient's mind off the operation. Some may have found his singing worst than the pain.

Killer Asteroid lacked blood and guts, although the message was clear -mankind could be wiped out by a large lump of rock hurtling to Earth from outer space.

We're four times as likely to be hit by an asteroid as be struck by lightning. Killer rocks, planet smashers and celestial terrorists were among names given these asteroids. No matter what you call them, the effect if one hits our planet will spell disaster.

"There are millions of rocks out there and one could be heading for us," warned the narrator.

Fear not, Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweikart has a plan to protect us. He suggests taking a spacecraft, docking on to the asteroid and gently pushing it to change its orbit. The bad news is that it will take 15 to 20 years to develop the technology.