GRIME SCENE QUEENS, BBC1, 10.40pm
This documentary follows an “all-girl bio-hazard team” as they travel Scotland tackling extreme cleaning jobs such as sewage spills, crime scenes and drug dens.
Marie Fagan inherited a struggling cleaning business from her father and sought ways to rejuvenate it. Inspiration came from an unlikely source: watching the grisly CSI programmes and wondering “who’s cleaning that blood?” So she abandoned the idea of being an ordinary cleaning company armed with mops and Mr Sheen and, instead, she and her two employees go to work in biohazard suits and protective gloves.
It’s not an easy job, Marie explains, especially when you have a young family. She explains the stress of running a small business and that she often can’t sleep in the week before payday in case she finds there is no money to pay her “girls”. Plus the job itself is hard; she talks to the camera about sewage and blood while combing her young daughter’s hair, although her older daughter doesn’t get such gentle treatment. She’s one of the employees and declares her messy job to be “just pure cruelty tae children!”
We see the team clean up crime scenes, and one had a dead body lying undiscovered for weeks. When Marie was called in to clean the flat she found something hairy sticking to the drawers and shows us a photo: “That’s basically the guy’s scalp. It should have went with the undertaker!”
HOW TO DIE: SIMON’S CHOICE, BBC2, 9pm
Simon Binner was diagnosed with an aggressive form of motor neurone disease and given two years to live. Faced with the prospect of a terrible physical decline and loss of dignity and independence he made the brave choice to end his life at a Swiss clinic. The film follows Simon and his family as they face this decision and deal with the ethical and legal issues it raises. Rising above the right-to-die debate it’s about one man’s bravery and independence.
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