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punctuates his speech with so many ridiculous hand gestures he’ll have his own eye out if he’s not careful. He also has a plastic head, hair like a futuristic combat helmet and was probably spawned in a microwaveable Petri dish by the Justice League of America.
    The title sequence forms perhaps the most jaw-dropping introduction to any programme ever. To the toe-snappin’ sound of howling power rock, Jaaaaarrhn bellows that we’re about to see case histories involving ‘fugitives without compassion’ over reconstructed footage of a wild-eyed madman blowing up a car. Then we see a flicker-book cascade of real-life mugshots. And then …
    And then, suddenly, a photographic montage of a young, smiling boy fills the screen. Jaaaarrrhn explains there’s a personal link.
    ‘In 1981 my six-year-old son Adam was abducted and murdered,’ he booms, and your brain does a backflip before you realise that, yes, you really are watching the host of a ruthlessly downmarket crime-tertainment oglefest reduce the death of his own son to a schlocky title sequence interlude. Whoever told him that this was a good idea deserves to be sealed inside a packing crate full of jackals and razor wire and rolled down a hill.
    Next we cut to Jaaaaarrhn striding through a darkened alley billowing with dry ice. ‘I was shattered,’ he yells, almost cracking the lens with a hand flourish. ‘I was mad at the whole world. I was bitter, angry. I didn’t want justice, I wanted revenge.’ And he got it by reinventing himself as a histrionic TV arsehole.
    The show itself opens with Jaaaaaaaaaahrn hollering that ‘drugsare the poison of American society, and its highways are the veins through which that poison is spread’ – a clumsy metaphor that sets the scene for a reconstruction so offensively one-sided it’s like watching a crime take place in the imagination of a particularly idiotic fascist.
    Two painfully young Mexicans caught smuggling marijuana get pulled by a rookie highway patrolman and find themselves facing a needlessly harsh 25-year sentence. Understandably aggrieved by this, and egged on by a minor felon sharing their police-station cell, they make a desperate bid for freedom using a bit of glass as a makeshift knife. Any sane viewer will be rooting for them.
    The story of their ill-fated escape is told with soullessly slick camerawork, wailing rock guitar and numerable close-ups of them sweatily rolling their eyes around in the manner of a schizophrenic mime artist glaring at a boxful of snakes. One of the escapees evaded capture for months until his case was featured on America’s Most Wanted – at which point he foolishly turned himself in, receiving 48 years in prison for his trouble.

Sexual Swearwords     [30 September]
     
    You and I did nothing. The police, the government, the army and the navy all failed to intervene. No one lifted a finger, so now that Simon Bates is back we have no one else to blame.
    Yes, frogchops himself is fronting a TV incarnation of his legendary radio sob-story-and-song spot Our Tune (Sky One). It is, of course, entirely hypnotic.
    Confronted with Bates addressing the camera directly, it’s hard to shake the memory of his legendary video-certification announcements, which used to appear at the start of rented movies and generally proved far more disturbing than anything in the film itself, thanks to the palpable crackle of excitement as he mentioned ‘sexual swearwords’.
    Our Tune doesn’t last much longer than those videotaped cautions: it’s a few minutes long, and is sprinkled throughout the Sky One daytime schedule like tragic croutons in a bowl of poo soup,bobbing to the surface on the hour throughout much of the day.
    The format is identical to the radio strand: Bates relates a real-life tale of misfortune sent in by a member of the public with all the sympathetic compassion of an automated voicemail assistant, then plays a tear-jerking request; invariably a gooey ballad rather