Southcliffe: Is there too much violence on TV? There's also the unpleasantly high torture quotient in programmes such as Utopia, a thoroughly dystopian sci-fi drama that Channel 4 showed in the spring, and the same channel's more recent, more realistic Run. One had a scene where a man has his eyeballs gouged out, the other had a man getting his cheeks cut open with a pocket knife. Top of the Lake, currently on BBC Two, has a man pulled along by a speedboat until he drowns and a dog shot in the head, both in the first episode. The curious thing about these dramas is that in many ways they are high quality, they have intelligent scripts written by the likes of hard-hitting heavyweights Tony Grisoni (Southcliffe, and also Red Riding) and Alan Cubitt (The Fall, and also the second Prime Suspect) and star actors as excellent as Ruth Wilson (Luther) and Olivia Colman (Run). The peeing scene in Southcliffe described above, as performed by a war-shocked soldier, is clearly, when you think about it, a carefully considered reference to Abu Graib. In fact it seems fair to say that there is a concentration of TV talent focused on some pretty nasty subject matter at the moment. How has this come about? One reason may be that the cinemas are saturated with American blockbusters aimed at teenagers, that may feature several robots smashing each other up but don't tackle crime and violence with any gravity, leaving a vacuum for TV to perform that service. But I think the longer term explanation is a gradual adoption of the erroneous notion that something has to be savage per se in order for people to take it seriously. A series of excellent American dramas from the past couple of decades, among them The Sopranos and The Wire, were set in crime-rife worlds where violence was always just around the corner, although actually we saw very little of it on screen. The success of these programmes established the notion that human beings are at their most interesting when they are living in constant peril of physical mutilation or death. This idea has now become so pervasive that the level of violence in most of the dramas currently on our small screens is vastly at odds with the experiences of 99 per cent of the people watching them. It troubles, shocks and shakes us up, but we have no real gauge of its authenticity, meaning these programmes don't have relevance to our lives. Also, a bit like actors shouting their lines in the theatre, too much violence drowns out expressive nuance. We just have the big, obvious emotions - panic, terror, hatred - left. The richer, more complex states - different kinds of love, sorrow, jealousy - don't get a great deal of a look in, or, if they do, they fall into the shadow of the more attention-grabbing bashing and cutting. Channel 4"s Run is a case in point: it had some deeply sensitive scenes tackling a mother's love for her wayward children, but the torture scene in the next episode quite blotted it out of my mind. The answer is not merely to make comforting dramas set in drawing rooms: a parade of Downton Abbeys. But some respite from the onslaught of strangulations, summary executions and rape on screen would not diminish our sense that television's writers and directors have interesting points to make about contemporary life. It may even improve it.