MacKichan also correctly pointed out that statistically the people most at risk of being murdered in the UK are young, white men in their 20s and children under the age of one. While you can understand TV execs' reluctance to commission thrillers about baby murder, it's harder to see why dead adult bodies on screen tend to be female, not male – especially as men make up 79 per cent of murder victims worldwide.

It seems that crime dramas simultaneously erase male victimhood and sensationalise women’s. Is this sexism, or something else entirely? The answer gives us a clue to the reason why the baddies always seem to be men.

"Dead women are good box office," a close friend, who writes about thrillers and is a budding crime screenwriter, tells me. He says canny scriptwriters tap into humanity’s inbuilt desire to defend and nurture those “precious” individuals we’re programmed to protect in order for us to survive – women and children. We care more about their fates, so we stick with a drama to see justice meted out.

Conversely, we've also been nurtured to see men as expendable. Brilliant thinkers such as US men’s activist Warren Farrell argue that on both a micro and macro level, we need men to die – in wars and territorial disputes. So script writers face an uphill struggle when it comes to making their audience care about a dead man onscreen. What's one more dead bloke in a history of dead blokes?