There’s something red and swirling in the big tank in the bowels of the hospital. We know it’s going to be bad because this contemporary version of Frankenstein (ITV1) was written and directed by Jed Mercurio, who has the most fabulous name in television (just pretend you are him at a business meeting, “Hi, I’m Jed Mercuuuuurio”). Mercurio created the brilliant hospital drama Bodies, which revelled in gore and contraventions of the Hippocratic oath. Similarly Frankenstein wasn’t shy of showing flesh and gristle while interrogating issues around medical ethics.

It was set slightly in the future; a supervolcano was raining gloopy ash on the city. Helen McCrory played a female Dr Frankenstein, a scientist who was trying to build a bank of single organs. In her desperate attempt to save her son William, who would die from organ failure, she introduced his DNA to the cauldron of her experiment and created a monster. This roaring giant was a grotesque conglomerate of ET, Jaws, Chewbacca and The Elephant Man.

Mercurio shot everything in washed-out greys and fleshy reds with occasional splashes of what looked like blackcurrant smoothie. When he emerged – and Mercurio really made us wait for the money shot – the monster was the classic misunderstood beast, terrifying but terrified. He murdered a little girl in the most horrific scene by snapping her neck like a twig. A debate hummed along beneath the drama about genetic engineering, stem cell research and scientific advancement.

The drama went awry when the monster was caught. It turned out that James Purefoy, McCrory’s ex-partner and William’s father, seemingly without her knowledge, ran a top-secret medical laboratory where “the beast” was being kept shackled, bound and – intermittently – zapped by some kind of paralysing ray if he didn’t eat his greens. When McCrory revealed that she was partly the beast’s mother, Purefoy suddenly got nice and paternally protective. This was the Frankenstein story feminised for primetime – Oxo mum in a lab coat.

If the character reversals made no sense, nor did the last scenes on a beach where Purefoy got shot by some guards who wanted to take the beast back to the lab. But McCrory seemed to be in charge of that, too, and was last seen teaching her son/ monster to count the same abacus that she used with her human son. “When it develops understanding will it love its mother or hate her?” wondered Lindsay Duncan, playing a kind of über-professor/mafioso.

The currency of the script – genetic science is often having the “Frankenstein” label thrown in its direction – was undermined by a bizarre lack of dramatic charge. The monster’s rampages were brief, no one really knew what to do. Still, Julian Bleach, as the monster . . . phenomenal grunting, my friend. How many Strepsils did you get through?

Jane Beckwith’s For One Night Only was a tough nut of a ONE Life (BBC One): hard to crack and fascinating. Asta, disabled and confined to a wheelchair, wanted sex and intended to take some other disabled men – also frustrated that their disability meant women looked past them (if at all) – to a brothel in Spain. His point was that disabled people have sexual feelings that need to be fulfilled, or at least acknowledged and explored.

Asta advertised on the net and found Shah, who was paralysed from the waist down after a motorcycle accident, and Lee, who was blind. Their journey was touching. Asta had sex but it made him realise that what he wanted was love and companionship. Shah went to the brothel but didn’t stay long – he wanted to have sex with someone who loved or wanted him, he said. Lee, who was a virgin, had sex and loved it: “I needed the hour to do it properly.”

The documentary wasn’t about the women who were being paid for sex, but you wondered whether they treated disabled customers differently. It would have been good to ask the men about how they saw the women. But there was rich detail: the men’s chum-my blokiness; Shah standing up in the pool (holding the side) to his delight; the men looking at people walking on the sand, normality so near yet so far. Asta’s final realisation that “I need someone” confirmed that it had been an ultimately sad, rather than sexy, trip. But after appearing in this show, I bet all three won’t be single for long.

Out of the box

Kylie turned up in the final episode of the current season of Kath & Kim. Minogue was playing Kim’s daughter, Epponnee-Raelene Kathlene Darlene Charlene Craig, 20 years in the future on her wedding day. Ingeniously they dragged her up as her old Charlene persona in Neighbourson her wedding day to dear Scott. The poodle perm was perfect, or “noice, unusuaal”, although I don’t remember Charlene wearing thigh-high white PVC boots. Still, “Epps” had spookily inherited her grandmother Kath’s talent for imploring “Look at moiiii”. Shilpa Shetty claims to feel no bitterness about the Celebrity Big Brother race controversy. She told BBC Breakfastyesterday it had “made” her career. Whether there had been any rapprochement with Jade Goody went unasked.

tim.teeman@thetimes.co.uk

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