Knell Mortuary

No, wait: it makes me feel uncomfortable. The ratio of female-to-male stiffs has always been weirdly skewed, which means that there must be a cross-demographic favouring of dead women. And now - what with #MeToo, Take The Lead, Women in Film, the Screen Actors Guild of Safe and Seemly On Screen Nudity (not a thing, but it will be) and the general litigation threat that the industry is trying to function in the shadow of -it's hard to sit back and watch those naked mortuary slab scenes without thinking of the PC paroxysms that shooting them will have prompted.Toni Collette in Wanderlust.Such scenes are now increasingly "gratuitous", as Lynda La Plante, High Priestess of crime dramas, said in a recent interview, contemplating that PC-ness becomes all the more jarring.Speaking out about the ITV production of Prime Suspect 1973 - a prequel to her acclaimed series starring Helen Mirren - the Bafta award-winning screenwriter said she was shocked to discover that nude shots had been inserted without her permission, when the series was broadcast last year. She was particularly disturbed, she said, by a scene "where a body of a girl is discovered - this was filmed outside, under a rain machine. The second, a naked girl on a trolley, before and during an autopsy. The way they were filmed annoyed and upset me. I felt for the women, the actors."In spite of the lurid end results we see on our screens, the creative process couldn't be less titillating, actor friends tell me. There are now multiple consent clauses necessitated for any degree of televised touching, increasingly elaborate and realistic latex body stockings that protect their modesty - there to allay the rising fear of that hand or kiss landing an inch further to the left or right than stipulated in "clause 254, section A". It doesn't stop there: sets now require "intimacy directors" - at least at HBO, the American network that has now decreed that these showbusiness chaperones be present for every "intimate" scene (that...