Unlimited vengeance does no one any favours

Media matter
Nick Thomas
4 c HANNEL 4, is it?" Thus Robbie Coltrane, delivering the only funny line in that dreary little film Mona Lisa, when he
enters to find Bob Hoskins watching hardcore porn on his TV As soon as the station started broadcasting this became a standing joke; the scheduling of "art" the other networks wouldn't touch, along with a rag-bag of more or less tedious minority programmes. Soon though, it settled down into a sort of commercial BBC2, cornering the market in serious and intelligent television with a heavy list towards the arts, and here its image has remained. So why does it show Vengeance Unlimited?
I imagine most of my readers will be unfamiliar with this American series, occupying as it does an insomniac slot on what is technically Friday moming.The premise is a simple one. Michael Madsen plays a man with great sorrow, a personal tragedy in his past which resulted from the triumph of evil power over the little guy. So he goes through life dispensing rough justice to baddies with big money and smart lawyers, on behalf of their victims. He seems to have limitless resources, and an infinity of conveniently placed individuals who owe him favours. He never raises his voice, and he always wins. That's it.
Madsen works hard to squeeze something approaching characterisation out of his role, shuffling chunkily around with his hands in his pockets, so ruff he's cool, so cool he can be camp and still be macho. And he is blessed with a good line in laconic wit: Thug: What do you want?
Madsen: What I want is to travel back in tine and stop John meeting Yoko. What I need is your help.
Or this, from the same episode: Rescued damsel: Who are you?
Madsen: Jehovah's Witness. We're everywhere.
So the show can be watched and enjoyed with irony,
and might even have been made in the sane spirit, for it is difficult to believe that a team capable of making something with such high values on the technic al side could be daft enough to believe that it is anything more than escapist rubbish. But therein lies the problem. Have a laugh, make something for fun, and you drop your guard against the emergence of a harmful subtext.
Resentment against a legal structure which fails to protect or compensate the honest citizen or punish the guilty is endemic on both sides of the Atlantic, and this series exploits our desire to see the evil-doers suffer for their sins. The world of Vengeance Unlimited resides back in the Old West of black hats and white hats, with the same comfortable certainties. Our hero Its Right on his side, so we applaud his contemptuous disregard for due process, and revel in the sadism with which he treats his targets. Even the similarly nonsensical The Equalizer occasionally dabbled in moral ambiguity, but here there are no doubts, no qualms and no ruis. Madsen can bully and terrorise his way through the onderworld with impunity, because the guilty have it coning. Lucky. really, that he has no social prejudices or polihcal views; he just does the right thing because the stanhas not.
But the cry "democracy has failed" is a dangerous one, for in real life there is no such thing as benign fascism, and no champion righteous enough to maintain his integrity while venting the spleen of the rnobGalling as it often is, the duties of the citizen and the Chistian coincide in the obligation to bear injustice with fatitude, and seek its reversal only within the rules. "lo confuse vengeance with justice is to invite an anarcly far more perilous for the innocent.
Taken as silly, action-thriller fantasy Vengerice might be harmless. But as a hymn to the ethic d the vigilante, it is definitely something we could do without. And, either way, it is not drama, and shouldnot be on Channel 4.