Television Review

IN APPOINTMENT with Dr Death (C4), Dawn Henslee described the suicide of her mother, Linda, assisted by Dr Jack Kevorkian. She and her sister drove Linda, who was suffering from multiple sclerosis, to a house where Kevorkian had prepared his "suicide machine". As Kevorkian helped them to carry Linda into the house in a blanket, they dropped Linda on the sidewalk. When she pressed the button on the suicide machine, which was supposed to release an anaesthetic followed by a lethal drug, it turned out that the machine was not plugged in. When it did finally function, it took eight minutes to kill her, in which time she remained conscious, instead of the advertised 30 painless seconds. Dawn cried as she described the undignified mess of her mother's passing, but remained impressively objective about Kevorkian, summing him up as "an interesting little guy".

Dawn's obvious distress, and her certainty that she had done the best thing for her mother, were not only the most affecting parts of Joanna Head's film, but also the place where it came closest to acknowledging the complexity of the moral issues raised. Kevorkian himself, who has reportedly assisted in more than 100 suicides, is subservient to a shallow, chilly logic that blinds him to fine distinctions, so that even those sympathetic to the notion of euthanasia may find it hard to warm to Kevorkian's arguments. His early history gave notice of this: in the 1960s, he experimented with transfusions of blood taken from corpses, and later he advocated the harvesting of organs for transplant from prisoners on Death Row.

One of his patients, Rebecca Badger, asked to die because she did not want to suffer the pain of MS. It emerged after her death that she did not have the disease at all, that she had suffered from alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs, and that she had previously attempted suicide. Kevorkian admitted that her medical condition might have been controversial, but insisted that her suffering was real: so where was the problem?

He has now been undone by the same blindness. Last year, he gave Thomas Youk a lethal injection himself, rather than assisting his suicide, and sent a video of the event to the US television programme 60 Minutes, evidently hoping to provoke some sort of judicial martyrdom. In the event, the court refused to listen to ethical arguments, insisting that what was at stake was a simple and flagrant case of law-breaking. In March, after a two-day hearing, he was found guilty of second-degree murder and possessing illegal drugs, and sentenced to 10 to 25 years in jail. Hubris brought about his downfall; but it's hard to feel that his case was tragic.

Reputations (BBC2) looked at the life of Mata Hari, an exotic dancer who was actually a plump Dutch woman, a master-spy who failed to sell any secrets whatsoever. Her feet sounded very interesting. A British customs official who had examined her said: "My wife often remarked that for a tall woman she had the neatest feet she had ever seen." Attempting to seduce the German military attache in Madrid, Mata Hari recalled: "I played with my feet and did everything a woman does when she wants to win a man." I will look at chiropodists with new respect.