KEY POINTS:
The human survival instinct is strong, and has the perfect match in the equally resilient human instinct to be on TV.
We like champion survivors so much it's spawned a whole industry in mocking up survival-of-the-fittest contests, filming them in documentary-style and calling it reality TV. Now we
have a show called I Shouldn't Be Alive (Mondays, 9.35pm, TV One) which takes real survivor stories and films them in highly fake re-enactments.
I Shouldn't Be Alive is an impressive survival story in itself. Perhaps it should be called I Shouldn't Really Be Masquerading As A New Series On TV One When I've Already Been On Pay TV.
Never mind, on this so far gritty, grisly show, it's not the rights and wrongs but the unshakeable will to survive that counts.
There were no heroics, or heart-warming tales of the triumph of the human spirit in adversity in Monday's debut episode, a horrifying tale of five people adrift in a tiny inflatable dinghy after their yacht sank in a storm.
This was an ill-fated voyage from the start it seemed, the two survivor's stories implying a startling lack of competence and lack of co-operation among some members of the crew. Of course, not everyone survived to tell their side of the story, but let's not dwell on that.
The show is chiefly notable for the opportunity it affords actors who are extraordinarily bad at playing ordinary scenes, such as setting out and sailing innocently towards disaster, but extremely talented at looking scabrous, lying round dying of thirst and going mad from drinking seawater.
Special mention must be made of the sharks who played themselves, although in what were obviously entirely unrelated pieces of footage. Full marks for toothy menace.
Also well reproduced was the water swirling with blood when one of the unfortunate seawater drinkers hurled himself over the side treating the sharks to a free dinner.
The show also featured the real survivors as talking heads, which came as a relief from all those scenes of suffering on a painted ocean. The rescue, when it came, was something of an anti-climax with strangely little detail about how the survivors got to shore. But that would have detracted from the chief aim of wallowing in the gory details.
A far more intriguing monster called serial killer Brian Wicklow put in an appearance on TV One, Sunday night. with the welcome return of British crime drama Cold Blood. It's a little recognised but reliable rule that Brit dramas with the word cold in the title usually have something going for them.
The Brits are highly accomplished at exploring all aspects of the cooler emotions. Here it is Jemma Redgrave who is compelling as DS Eve Granger, object of Wicklow's obsession. Those hotter-blooded American women cops, such as Kyra Sedgwick's The Closer and Holly Hunter's Grace, with all their overplayed flaws and foibles, could take an object lesson from Eve in how to be both ordinary and intriguing.
Passions run higher in TV One's new Brit drama Talk To Me, which appears to be a sexier, shallower update of Cold Feet. It's an entertaining if rather pointless wallow in modern relationships and appears to be mainly a vehicle for the fetching Rose Byrne, who is about to star in the much more high-profile Damages.
Also on TV One, Andrew Davies' adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst's excellent novel Line of Beauty, however, suffers the ignominious fate of screening after midnight, the slot reserved it seems for anything which treats being gay with a level of frankness. There was a time when a Davies' adaptation would be in pride of place in Sunday Theatre, but apart from the gay sex, this drama is also handicapped by having serious, political themes. This is gay love in the exciting but chilling climate of Thatcher's Britain. The cold, Tory sharks in this show are far too subtle to make it anywhere near prime time.