But for a young woman, ideally red hot and blonde, who's been raped, tortured and murdered, there's little crime drama likes more than a dead child. A kid's corpse immediately raises the emotional stakes of even the most humdrum drama, imbuing it with a certain compelling nature it might otherwise lack. For example, Criminal Minds, which is perfectly adequate but still quite rubbish, recently featured a little girl abducted from a mall. As far as I recall, it transpired that her auntie did it, having discovered her husband was abusing the girl. Tonight's Silent Witness begins with the death of a schoolboy whose post-mortem reveals evidence of abuse. This initiates a race-against-time hunt for another missing child and the wheeling out of that other crime drama staple inextricably linked to dead children - killer paedophiles.
What is it about paedophiles and their activities that we find so, well, entertaining? Sinister child sex offenders feature frequently in everything from CSI through Prime Suspect to The Bill. And Special Victims' Unit is, of course, all about sex offences, many of them perpetrated against youngsters. (Doink doink!)
But what is the fascination with paedophilia? Is it that these "especially heinous" crimes are so beyond our ken that we watch to gain insight? Is it, as is the case with most detective dramas, that there's comfort in watching a disruption to the social order - particularly a disruption so appalling as the rape/murder/torture of a child - being rectified by the forces of good? Do we find solace in fictional restorations because neat closure is impossible in real life?
Or is it something darker that appeals about these dramas? As I might have mentioned, I watch a lot of Special Victims' Unit but I wonder what it is I especially like about it as opposed to, say, Criminal Intent or the original Law & Order. Is it a tabloid prurience that makes me want to watch stories of abuse and murder? Do we derive a thrill, not from the restoration of order - which sometimes isn't forthcoming in these dramas - but from its initial disruption? Do we watch to see the perps brought to justice or just to watch the perps?
