Last Night’s Television: An Interesting Body of Work ; Anatomy for Beginners C4 Not My Fault I’M Fat BBC1

“I NEED ze chisel,” said Dr Gunther von Hagens, cadaver enthusiast and TV anatomist, as he prepared to pry off the back half of his volunteer’s head. “I need ze oxygen,” I thought, as the skull made a faint sucking noise, much like you would get if you tried to lever a paving slab off badly drained ground. Dr Gunther got out a toffee hammer and tapped away at the bone and then – in one of its few concessions to viewer squeamishness – Anatomy for Beginners cut away from the cutting away to show you a member of the audience turning green. When they returned, the cranium had gone, leaving behind a bag of pinkish jelly which looked positively eager to slither between von Hagens’s fingers and do a splattering act on the studio floor. Mercifully, Von Hagens enlisted a cerebral body double – a bowl of blancmange – to perform the stunt instead and left it to our imaginations to connect the two.

Channel 4′s series – running on four successive nights this week – is a bolder version of the televised autopsy with which it stirred up a certain amount of fuss a few years ago. Where that programme masked most of the knifework, simply displaying a series of dissected organs to the camera, this one shows the disassembly in close-up and it opened with an anatomist’s coup de theatre: von Hagen peeling away the skin of his anonymous volunteer in one piece and draping it over an adjacent stand. “It is very important zat ze specimen looks nice,” he said, fussing with the empty gloves of the hands like someone working on a flower arrangement.

What was left behind was a meat puppet dangling from an anatomist’s hook. And since this first episode concentrated on muscular articulation, von Hagens actually did a bit of string- pulling, slicing away the quadriceps and heaving on it to show how the tendons pulley over the kneecap to hoist a foot in the air. It required a surprising amount of effort, which – for all the carnival aspect of the sequence – was actually instructive about the imperceptible vigour of our living bodies. Do you find your skin heavy? You would if you could hold it in your arms like a fat- soaked duvet. Von Hagens was accompanied throughout by an alibi in a white coat, a qualified doctor who darted in now and then to hymn the “complexity” and “beauty” of our bodily systems and point a stick at the fabulously toned male nude who provided a living contrast to the star of the show. I briefly pondered the question of whether it was a shameless bit of taboo-twisting or a dignified exercise in biological instruction, but then became so engrossed that I forgot to worry.

Not My Fault I’m Fat showed how distressing the results can be when the meat machine malfunctions. Chris, Craig and Leona all had a software problem: their brains insisted that they were hungry all the time. The result was that they were simultaneously starving and eating themselves to death. Craig, who was just 13, was 17 stone and rising when filming began. Chris was 30 stone. Their compulsion, the result of a genetic disorder called Prader-Willi syndrome, turned them into classic addicts, often lying and stealing to get what they craved. They weren’t fussy eaters, either. “She was an extreme case… the one that ate the goldfish,” recalled a nurse in a Pittsburgh clinic, as she shared war stories with a colleague.

The good news was that if you could afford to outsource your willpower – through clinics or specialised boarding schools – you could lose weight quickly: Craig and Leona had both shed more than 30 pounds by the time the credits rolled. The bad news was that you had to find someone to guard the cookie jar for the rest of your life. Chris, who had decided that he could probably go it alone, was still gaining weight.