When the Government of the United States of America decided to kill Angel Diaz three years ago, it did not do a particularly good job.
Despite the lethal injection procedure being intended as a humane way of ending the life of the convicted murderer, Diaz winced, his body shuddered and he remained alive for 34 minutes, gasping for air and apparently in pain, according to reports, for 11 of those minutes.
Other incidents in the annals of execution botch-ups include syringes being plunged right through the wall of the vein, through the other side, with the drugs forced into the soft tissue of the condemned man.
One woman, who was given one of the paralysing drugs used when she was in hospital for a routine eye operation, awoke to find herself with the sensation jet fuel had been injected into her body, and lay trapped in a dead body with excruciating pain she likened to being on fire.
Investigate: How to Kill a Human Being (Documentary Channel, January 26, 8.30pm), follows former British conservative MP Michael Portillo as he sets out to find a solution which is fundamentally humane.
He discovers why convicts can catch on fire in the electric chair, learns how easy it is to botch a hanging, and inhales a noxious gas to experience first hand the terror of the gas chamber.
He travels to the most logical place to discover how to kill, the Unites States.
If you suffer from the misconception those who want to give the state the power of life and death might consider a humane death is a reasonable thing to strive for, think again.
The inventor of the lethal injection, Dr Jay Chapman, was concerned his procedure was being implemented by poorly trained technicians he described as idiots, who did not, for instance, know which direction to push the fatal needle into the arm.
In one of the executions, this is exactly what happened.
But asked if a successfully completed procedure would cause pain, Dr Chapman cheerfully declared: My basic attitude is if they suffer a little pain, who cares?
And yes, Dr Chapman is a doctor.
How to Kill a Human Being struggles with such issues as whether executions should, in fact, be painless, and whether the state should behave in a similar way to murderers, something, unbelievably, there is debate about at all.
It is darkly disturbingly, fascinating, and the opposite, whatever that may be, of life-affirming.
And that, my television-viewing friends, almost brings to a close my view of the viewing year 2009, a year that, televisually, lurched from comedy to despair and back again.
A little like life.
Happily, it begins again very soon.
Enjoy.
