Suburban Shootout (five); Drug Trials - The Dark Side: This World (BBC2): THE women of Little Stempington are experts in domestic chores. Camilla proudly boasts that friend Lillian "can blow the door off a Smeg fridge without destroying so much as an organic vine tomato".
These aren't so much ladies who lunch as ladies who launch missiles at anyone who crosses them.
Newcomer Amelia gets an idea of their attitude the day she's taken on a tour of the village by Camilla and her gang. She's expecting an idyllic life of fresh air, birdwatching and jam-making and gets a lesson in explosives.
Parked outside the Wicker Barn shop, she's told to press the little red button on the box that's been passed to her. She's more than a little alarmed when the door is blown off the shop.
"Next time you miss a payment, ladies," Camilla tells the shocked shopowner, "we'll bring you out in matching wicker coffins."
Surburban Shootout is a very silly and sometimes very funny new sit-com that takes Desperate Housewives one step further, arming them with Uzis, grenades and barrack room language.
Little Stempington is a place where guns are kept in Tupperware boxes and you're sometimes forced to use your favourite tea-tray - the one with the pictures of little kittens on - to protect yourself from machine gun fire.
If it's not violence, it's sex. "I bet things can get quite rough when you two play hunt the hairy hound dog," suggests Camilla on viewing Amelia's husband and remarking on his "nice buns".
Amelia has stumbled into the middle of a turf war with rival female gangs vying for supremacy and the front of the queue in the supermarket.
Their tough policy is to keep low life, law-breaking scum off the streets of Little Stempington. And they have no intention of getting caught and being "sent to clit clink".
Recent events in drug trials in this country made This World's investigation into the exploitation by pharmaceutical companies of people in India very topical indeed.
With one sixth of mankind living in India, drug companies are tapping into one of the largest pools of patients available. Because many can't afford health care, they're more than willing to get what they think is treatment for nothing.
Often they don't understand that they're being used as human guinea pigs. They think they're being treated, not part of a clinical trial.
Drug companies pay the hospital per patient recruited, although the patient receives nothing. But in a poor country, they are like a "blank canvas for drug companies".
The programme showed these aren't isolated incidents but widespread throughout the country. In one case, a cancer patient didn't have the tumour removed as would have been normal medical practice, but was given drugs that hadn't been tested on animals. One doctor compared this type of action with Nazi medical experiments in concentration camps.
The figures are both astounding and alarming - in five years time, it's estimated that one million Indians could be on clinical trials.
Published: 28/04/2006
