Kill It, Cook It, Eat It
BBC4, 10.30pm
Cold Blood II
ITV1, 9pm

THERE are few current TV shows I'm unable to watch beyond their first 15 minutes. On the grounds of the following programmes's turgidity, witlessness and/or moral deviance, I cannot linger long with Desperate Housewives, Lost, Dragons' Den, Ugly Betty, Al Murray's Happy Hour and Celebrity Come Dancing.

On much the same grounds - plus the added charge of the following performers being smug-faced onanists - I can't tarry with progs featuring Robert Kilroy-Silk, Nicky Campbell, Nick Knowles, Dawn French, Kirsty Young, or Gillian McKeith.

Sadly, there's a different reason for my inability to watch much of Kill It, Cook It, Eat It: I only managed the show's first 10 minutes because I'm a self-deluding milksop.

Because Kill It, Cook It, Eat It aims to show purblind carnivores like me the full story of the industrial meat production process. Beef was on last night's menu, not only for us viewers, but for a room full of diners with a ring-side seat at the slaughterhouse as their fresh, tasty beef repast was led in en route to their plates.

A cute brown cow trotted into the slaughterhouse's stunning pen, where an awfully nice chap called Steve - who I'm sure is very skilled at his job - lightly dabbed a captive-bolt pistol to the cow's forehead.

This caused instant brain damage sufficient to make the cow fall to the ground. It then collapsed and was rolled - its legs twitching involuntarily - into another room where it was hung upside down by one leg as its throat was sliced open.

Blood gushed out. The cow's heart stopped. Some more twitching went on. The cow's head was deftly cut off before being skinned, baring its teeth in a hideous grin, and its tongue peeled back.

This whole surgical procedure took about 30 seconds, and was conducted with great care... nay, with great tenderness. But it was still utterly ghastly, and I had to stop watching it, and call me a lily-livered twit, but for the foreseeable future, I will mostly be eating nuts, berries, leaves and anything else that doesn't have a face. Tonight, it's lambs that'll be copping it, by the way, and, tomorrow, pigs. Shudder.

After the gory real-life death of Kill It, Cook It, Eat It, Cold Blood II was a bit on the tame side. Some jailbird having a Biro jammed up his nose all the way into his brain and then being hung from the bars of his cell with a coiled bedsheet? Puh, not as scary as watching a cow being reduced to steaks.

However, in the role of cerebral and self-absorbed psycho serial killer Brian Wicklow, Matthew Kelly oozed sinister creepiness most deliciously, just as he did in the first Cold Blood. It's Matthew's face and manner that do it, a goosebump-inducing blend of debauched cherub, back-bench Tory MP and defrocked priest. Most alarming. Ditto Jemma Redgrave as Detective Sergeant Eve Granger. Her northern accent's deeply bogus. She only ever succeeds in looking stunned. And she was rotten as Charlotte Church's mum in the worst British film of the century to date, Craig Ferguson's I'll Be There.

Wur ain John Hannah is better as helpful reformed murderer Jake Osborne, a man who spends his time atoning for his crime by a) seeing things that aren't there and b) mending merry-go-round wooden horses.

But would the police turn so readily for assistance to a helpful reformed murderer? Especially one who sees things that aren't there and mends merry-go-round wooden horses?

Cold Blood II: its dramatic logic is only a little less off-putting than Kill It, Cook It, Eat It's honest gruesomeness.