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Grim TV

No, astonishingly, at this point I'm not going to write about the Christmas Day episodes of various soaps, as I don't give any of them enough attention to warrant it - though Eastenders was on in our house and sounded every bit as grim as you'd expect.

No, this is about something I caught one night last week while wrapping presents. In a quest to put something suitably wallpaper-ish on, I turned to one of the inevitable episodes of Friends that you can guarantee to find on E4 every evening. So they burbled away while I folded and taped and disentangled the cat from everything I was doing, eventually to be replaced bu the programme that followed it, an end-of-season double-bill of a programme called Hollyoaks In The City.

Now, again, I've never really watched Hollyoaks, but David used to be quite into a Sunday morning blast of Popworld and the Hollyoaks omnibus, so some vague sense of it had sunk into my head. I gather that In The City shows what happens when some of those old faces move to the city and grow up a bit. At least physically.

I confess that after a while I had to stop wrapping and start giving it my attention, because I literally had a hard time believing what I was seeing. Really and truly, it made the average episode of Eastenders look light and frothy. In the course of the double bill, all of the following happened (and I'm assuming no one is worried about spoilers at this point):

• Someone called Lisa gave up her job as an escort working in one bar to go and do the same job in a gambling den/club.
• Her (former?) boyfriend wasn't happy about this and got a job in the same place.
• The owner of the place then set out to seduce him and set her up to provide undefined services to some 'special clients' (more on this later).
• A woman arrived at the home of two orphaned sisters to reveal that they weren't sisters, and one of them wasn't orphaned, because she was her mother, which led to the revelation that the older sister had faked records and essentially abducted the younger one, telling her that her mother was dead, apparently so that she'd avoid the sexual abuse that the older one had suffered (more on these two later).
• A would-be actor discovered that his younger brother had found a gay porn movie he'd been persuaded to make on the internet, and was disowned by his family.
• A male teacher was accused of having sex with a sixteen year old gay male pupil. It subsequently transpired that they had in fact kissed while drunk, but the kid was making up the rest as revenge for the teacher not being honest about his sexuality and not returning his love.

(All the above, bad as it was, was basically set up in the first episode of the two - the second is what pushed the whole thing into 'had to be seen to be believed' territory):

• Lisa's 'special services' involved being abducted to a warehouse in order to be raped for the benefit of the watching (and filming) special clients.
• Having been seduced by the club owner, her former boyfriend discovers that something is going on, and persuades their former boss to explain all. He races to Lisa's rescue, awaiting directions to her exact location from said former boss, but:
• Former boss is the person who got the would-be actor to make the gay porn movie, so the actor throws him through a window and beats him to unconsciousness before he can communicate the location of the abductors.
• Would-be actor then has a row with his girlfriend and breaks up with her.
• After a blazing row in which the younger 'sister' leaves, the older of the two supposed sisters decides to have a pills and booze overdose.
• Teacher man tells his wife of three days that he thinks he's gay, that he was caught in a compromising position in a public toilet the day he proposed to her, and first had sex with another man the day before their wedding. He then leaves for a snog with the pupil before going with him to a gay club, where he dances topless, takes some undefined drugs and starts snogging with a stranger, thereby breaking the pupil's heart further. Pupil leaves in tears.
• Boyfriend finally arrives to rescue Lisa from the hairy-arsed (seriously) rapist and friends just as she manages to make a break for it, grabbing a gun in the process. Startled by boyfriend's unexpected arrival, she shoots him.
• Cue closing montage of weeping teen, unconscious suicide, off-his-face teacher, three abandoned partners and shot boyfriend.

I mean, really, this is somehow seen by the people who make it as entertainment??????