Newsnight Review discussed The Autopsy, Channel Four's broadcast of Professor Von Hagen's public autopsy at the Truman Brewery in London.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

MARK LAWSON:
One of the week's big talking points, The Autopsy on Channel 4 and in public. Autopsies are a standard part of crime fiction. Does it belong in public and on TV?

IAN RANKIN:
Only if they can make it more gory. It was too flat. If you are used to watching fictional autopsies, as in Silence of the Lambs, you know there's more body fluids around. This guy had been injected with rubberising solutions. You were never going to get a sense of the smell or the noises made when sloshing things out of bodies.

Parts of the autopsy were missing from the programme. It was public. They were talking about going back to the 17th century, but the 19th century, the so-called body snatcher, he was in there and they took his skin off and turned it into souvenirs.

MARK LAWSON:
All the talk beforehand of knocking down a wall on TV - I've never seen a wall knocked down so cautiously.

PAUL MORLEY:
That's TV. It was like Joseph Boyce and a bad episode of Holby City. If somebody asked me whether it was educational, entertainment or information, I would say it was TV. It followed an equally gruesome moment in the evening schedule when Anne Diamond met Goldie. There may be a movement in television that's going beyond Reality TV and this is the precedent.

I hope we never have anything like it again. It reminded me of a Throbbing Gristle concert in the '70s when there was strange obsession with the body. The most disturbing moment in The Autopsy was when he removed the inner organs and the crowd applauded. What were they applauding?

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
The medical outcry was ridiculous. It was as if we were bringing back public hanging. We see the same things on Holby City every day. It kept showing you people trying to look horrified.

It was too short, they pussy footed around and it irritated me that they stuck adverts in the middle - for Gordon's Gin! The build-up was the most amazing thing on TV. They should have had the guts to play it straight.

IAN RANKIN:
There's an education to be had if you go to a mortuary and see what happens. Death should be demystified. If you talk to pathologists they will tell you the body is a miraculous machine.