From strength to strength

HARRY’S fling with Hungarian human rights lawyer Anna Sandor takes a dramatic and tragic twist in Silent Witness after she asks him to fly out to Budapest to perform a second postmortem examination on drowned pregnant prostitute, Sofi Mustafova.

It’s a typically fraught storyline for the show that, despite losing original star Amanda Burton a few years ago, continues to go from strength to strength with Emilia Fox as pathologist Dr Nikki Alexander.

“I hope the programme is a success because it keeps evolving and moving forward, retaining that good mixture of stories within each series,” she says.

“Some of them look at very current issues that you will recognise from the news, focussing on a murder. Then there are your classic ‘whodunits’, and then there are the thrillers.

“Also, now that our characters are more familiar with the audience, I hope it’s because people care about Harry, Nikki and Leo as well, and what’s happening between them and how the cases affect them.”

Nikki isn’t involved too much in the opening episode of the team’s latest case.

Instead, it’s Harry who is the centre of attention, although his efforts to help Anna look likely to come to nothing when they’re told by the local pathologist that Sofi’s body has already been cremated.

However, Sofi’s pimp had, oddly Tonight’sTV By Steve Pratt email: steve.pratt@nne.co.uk enough, also ordered a comprehensive medical report. What could he have been hoping to find? Before Harry can find out, he’s delivered a body blow – Anna is stabbed to death, and he becomes the chief suspect.

Before going on the run, he gets a message to Leo, who arrives in Budapest to help his friend prove his innocence. But will Leo get there in time to save Harry’s neck?

It’s not giving away too much to reveal that in tomorrow’s concluding episode, Nikki hotfoots it to Budapest too.

Fox must be used to the customary body cutting-up scene in which Silent Witness specialises. She admits the models they use on set are alarmingly lifelike.

“The bodies just get better and better each year,” she says.

“There is just so much care taken over them. All the weight is completely worked out and accurate, so what you are playing with seems immensely real.

“The models and prosthetics can definitely make you feel squeamish, but actually it was the little girl who I worked with in the first episode of this series when I had to remind myself that she was going to be able to wash all the injuries off afterwards.”

THINK of baking and what immediately springs to mind? Perhaps grandmothers covered in flour making Victoria sponges and other oldschool favourites. But in Baking Made Easy, Lorraine Pascale sets out to prove that baking can also be fashionable by giving a modern twist to some decadesold favourites.

For example, we’ve all tasted Swiss roll in the past, but Lorraine believes it’s now looking a little tired. So she decides to jazz it up a bit by adding fresh strawberries and mascarpone.

She then takes a trip down memory lane to visit the supermarket where she worked as a teenager, before making a version of macaroni cheese that she reckons will make it “unlikely you’ll ever look at this dish the same away again”.

IT’S not unheard of for a young adult to be banned from a pub, but every single pub in Britain? Now that’s some going.

It almost beggars belief, but for Laura Hall, it’s now her reality, after she began drinking alcohol and displaying shocking behaviour to such an extreme that the first nationwide “booze Asbo” was slapped on her.

She was expelled from school at 15 with no qualifications and has endured six years of binge drinking as a consequence.

The documentary Laura Hall: My Battle With Booze follows her journey, after more than 40 arrests, as she regularly consumes 150 units of alcohol a week, but chronicles her determination to change as she enters rehab.

The cameras followed Hall for six months, witnessing the highs and lows in her attempts to get her life back on track.