Sky's Hannibal might have been more interesting with a bit more psychology and a bit less blood and guts

Hannibal (Sky Living)

The Apprentice (BBC1) | iPlayer

Life of Crime (ITV1) | ITVplayer

Murder on the Home Front (ITV1) | ITVplayer

Great Artists In Their Own Words (BBC4) | iPlayer

There are two ways of looking at the kind of psychologically rich and physiologically brutal fiction written by Thomas Harris, author of The Silence of the Lambs. The first is that it's a sort of cultural safety valve, a secure and harmless realm in which to explore the dark thoughts that haunt our nightmares. The second is that it's gruesome porn for sickos.

The more sophisticated understanding is obviously the former, but there's some queasy part of me that can't quite shake off the suspicion that the latter contains a kernel of truth. Given the popularity and critical acclaim these books have enjoyed, I realise that's to embrace the vulgar side of the argument. And I chastise myself accordingly: why can't I savour graphic details of torture and extreme sadism and gastronomic deviancy like a normal person? What's wrong with me?

This self-censure recurred during the new series Hannibal, based on the characters from Harris's Red Dragon. There was charming Hugh Dancy, with a wispy beard and an American accent, playing Will Graham, a criminal profiler employed by the FBI to track down a serial killer who liked to impale young women on deer horns. Fair enough, we've all got our foibles.

Graham suffers from "pure empathy", which means he understands where the guy who likes to impale young women on deer horns is coming from. Such are his powers of deductive perception, he makes Robbie Coltrane's Cracker look like Forrest Gump. He can see inside other people's heads, and so we got to see inside his. It's not a nice place – full of female corpses and crimson tides of blood.

We saw him imagining strangling a young woman and envisioning shooting another woman in the neck to paralyse her, the better to commit other unspeakable acts of torment. Then there was also the real killer slashing his wife's neck and doing the same to his daughter – cue further gallons of claret. But again, perhaps owing to some critical failure of empathy, I couldn't thrill to these scenes. They seemed just a tad unnecessary.

Not that it was all violence and slaughter. There was also a lot of cod behavioural psychology, as well as the fabulous Mads Mikkelsen as evil psychiatrist Dr Hannibal Lecter. Mikkelsen is one of those people who can make eating seem like an act of cold depravity, particularly when the dish is a young woman's lungs.

There were some juicy exchanges between Mikkelsen and Dancy, which made me wish this opener could have been a bit more cerebral and a little less carnal – but perhaps that's too much to hope for in a show about a cannibal, even if he's an intellectual cannibal.

Alan Sugar would make an excellent guest star in Hannibal. You could imagine him – or Dancy could imagine him – removing the spleen from some egomaniacal sales clone with an old pair of pliers, while fondly remembering his heroic early days as a young businessman. He could certainly do with a change of scene.

It's been several years since contestants on The Apprentice formed into one large homogeneous mass of sycophantic psychopaths. I could have sworn, for example, that Jason, this year's posh berk – "I think my effortless superiority will take me all the way" – had already appeared last year or the year before, and possibly on both occasions.

Meanwhile the women, with their straightened doll's hair, plastered makeup and killer-bitch expressions are all just depressing mirror images of one another. The only one that stood out as a little different was Jaz, who was destined to be offed at the first time of asking. She made the cardinal mistake of sighing "Oh, man" during the boardroom inquisition.

"No," growled the master, in one of his periodic fits of status anxiety, "I'm not 'man'. I'm Lord Sugar."

She might as well have shouted, "Sack me!" He did.

Sugar came by his honours for giving the world the Amstrad computer, shortly before the world gave it back, and for turning Spurs from a mid-table Premier League football club into a mid-table Premier League football club. But surely his most formidable and lasting achievement has been to keep this show going with almost no change whatsoever to the format for eight long years.

"I'm sick and tired of all that bloody rubbish," he complained last week to his familiar-looking apprentices. We know the feeling.

Being a TV dramatist these days trying to pitch an idea that doesn't feature the police or a murder must be rather like being a policeman who doesn't want to arrest criminals. The opportunities for career advancement are likely to be severely limited, to say the very least.

Two more new crime dramas rolled off the conveyer belt last week. Life of Crime starred Hayley Atwell, about whom I am incapable of objective assessment. I'd happily watch Casualty or Holby City if she featured, even in a minor role. For God's sake I watched two whole episodes of Falcón – and not many people can say that – just to feast on her captivating lushness. You see I tend to write about her in the same sick-making fashion the apprentices speak to Lord Sugar.

So it was almost a relief to see her decked out in the most unalluring outfit ever invented by man or machine – the 1980s Metropolitian police woman's uniform. She played a WPC who got too personally involved in a murder inquiry and ended up fixing the evidence to finger an apparently guilty man.

For period detail the producers relied on a pop soundtrack, a gauzy look to suggest that everyone was smoking all the time everywhere, and a shouty chief copper with casually sexist attitudes. It never quite formed into anything coherent or convincing, but there were some interesting haircuts, especially Richard Coyle's bird's nest, and an intriguing atmosphere. And Atwell, of course, was just extraordinarily wonderful.

Murder on the Home Front was silly hokum, a sort of Foyle's War-goes-CSI, except it shared a fascination with mutilated naked female bodies that would not have looked out of place in Hannibal. Set during the second world war, the story followed an ambitious pathologist (Patrick Kennedy) who appears to be about four decades ahead of his time in forensic science. It's hard to see why it was commissioned, but it will probably run for years.

Great Artists in Their Own Words was an enjoyable mishmash of a raid on television archives. Despite some impressive contributors, this episode on surrealism had little to say that was original, but some of the footage was excellent. There was a delightful clip in which Joan Bakewell, looking like a head girl in a miniskirt, interviewed Marcel Duchamp, who resembled nothing so much as a Mississippi river boat gambler.

And one solemn interlocutor asked Man Ray what, looking back on his life, satisfied him most. The great experimental photographer took his cigar out of his mouth, paused and then replied: "I think women."