ACOUPLE of months ago I had the misfortune to tune into a predictably cheesy made-for-television movie on NBC. I can't remember what it was called, or why I sat in the armchair until it was over, but the plot did stick in my mind.
Sean Young played a pushy television executive who had the idea of carrying an execution live on pay-per-view. She impressed her boss by explaining such an event could be couched beneath a fake motive of bringing the capital punishment issue to public attention, while it would, more importantly, make a fortune.
The plot thickens like bad gravy when - you guessed it - Young gets to know the condemned man and begins to doubt whether he committed the murder at all. In the climactic scene - in TV parlance, the one before the last lot of commercials - she rushes intothe stadium in a race against time to stop the guy frying.
The script must have been either the work of a biting satirist, a psychic, or someone with a mate on the staff of the Phil Donahue talk show. Because a couple of weeks ago, I read something that made me realise American truth was indeed stranger than American fiction: Donahue, a big-rating daytime programme with a weekly audience of 20 million, was engaged in a legal battle for the rights to carry the first televised execution.
The show went to the North Carolina court after killjoy prison authorities denied its request to videotape the June 15 execution by gas of killer David Lawson. Lawson is all for it, claiming it will show the nation's couch potatoes the horror of what he is about to go through.
This all sounds too tasteless to be true. But in a sense, the idea of the death penalty as spectator sport has been slowly becoming a reality in the United States for some time now.
Thirty-eight people were executed in the US last year, the most since the Supreme Court reinstated the punishment in 1976. But in no way has it become commonplace. The most famous cases, notably the grisly serial killers or the death row inmates who go to the electric chair protesting their innocence, still achieve a great deal of national publicity.