Television: Today's pick

Monday 13 April 1998 18:02 EDT
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Children of Crime (10.20pm BBC1) Eleven-year-old Mary Bell's favoured form of strangulation was to tell her victims that she would massage away their sore throats. She killed two young boys amid the ruins of the soon-to-be-cleared slums of 1960s Newcastle and was convicted by overwhelming evidence after parrying police interrogation with considerable sophistication. The comparisons with the Jamie Bulger case are notable by their absence. There was no cry for vengeance (even the Sun called for "a humane approach to the little killer girl") and Bell was released, a reformed character, in 1980. Denys Blakeway's film tells the perplexing story.

Tx (11.15pm BBC2) Rob Scholte was the most successful artist to come out of Holland in the 1980s. In 1994, he lost both legs in a car-bomb attack in Amsterdam. This opening film in the arts documentary strand is not so much a search for culprits as a look at the fall-out. One of Scholte's first acts was to put the ruined BMW into an art exhibition.

Timewatch: Grammar School Boys (9.30pm BBC2). Kenneth Clarke, Neil Kinnock, Colin Welland, David Puttnam and others relive the joys and cruelties of the Eleven-Plus and after.

THe film

Desperately Seeking Susan (10.15pm C4) Scratch its surface and you'll hurt your nails, but this fluffy piece of Eighties screwball comedy is still fun (even if you have seen it several times before). Rosanna Arquette is the bored suburban housewife who takes Madonna's free- wheeling tramp as a role model. Madonna (playing herself) has some fun with Arquette's dorky husband (Mark Blum). As a call to drop out, it was curiously timed - just as the Reaganite Yuppie dream was taking off.

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