Flaying them in the aisles: Gunther von Hagens (left).
Hold on to your lunches - the Plastination Professor is back. Gunther von Hagens, who you may remember from such TV programmes as Anatomy for Beginners and Autopsy: Life and Death, was the first person to perform a public autopsy in the UK for 170 years.
His new show, Gunther's ER (can you imagine the Channel 4 meeting for that pitch?) will see him collaborating with an A&E consultant and a member of the British Red Cross who will demonstrate first-aid techniques. Will this latest attempt to legitimise the ensuing gore succeed?
To describe his autopsy as "controversial" is an act of gargantuan understatement. Von Hagens received a letter from Her Majesty's Inspector of Anatomy before the event, warning that the performance would be illegal. The police loomed over proceedings, but did not intervene. Broadcast on Channel 4 in 2002, the station received 130 complaints.
He is also legendary for his Body Worlds exhibition, the grand finale of which was a bisected cadaver of an eight-months pregnant woman with her womb opened to reveal the foetus.
Each of his endeavours has had some form of associated legitimacy, whether educational, as in the case of the TV programmes, or artistic, in the case of the exhibitions.
This new show explores the impact accidents and assaults have on the human body. It's being made under the auspices of aiming to demonstrate how to save lives (according to Channel 4), but seems designed to detail stabbings, maimings and other injuries.
Underlying von Hagens's every move has been the obvious showcasing of his patented plastination technique, which he has a vested financial interest in promoting, and his tangible obsession with cutting up things that used to be alive.
Von Hagens is never seen performing his grisly tasks without his trademark black fedora. He even has a macabre back-story: a haemophiliac, he cut his head as a child, which resulted in a six-month stay in hospital. This stimulated an interest in medicine, a field in which he holds a doctorate.
After the first two television programmes, various court cases came to light, disputing the origin of the cadavers he uses. There were accusations that he illegally received and plastinated several hundred corpses from prisons, psychiatric institutions and hospitals across the world.
Von Hagens's only response has been to deny that he was aware of the origin, then go on to burn some of the bodies under dispute.
Will audiences buy this new show's slightly more tenuous link to the legit? And just where will he get the corpses? Well, it remains (sorry) to be seen.
