Sweeney Todd (BBC1)

IF nothing else, this retelling of the gruesome story of the demon barber of Fleet Street was a 90-minute commercial for vegetarianism. I may never be able to look a steak and kidney pie in the face again.

Most of us know the bare bones of the tale of Sweeney Todd, who gave new meaning to the barber's phrase of "something for the weekend". He didn't offer protection but a close shave, slitting the throat of the customers in his barber's chair and serving them up in Mrs Lovett's meat pies.

This film attempted to put some flesh on the character, effectively played by an unusually subdued Ray Winstone. Not for nothing was he known as "the quietest barber in London". He was all the more effective by giving a still, unshowy performance rather than running around waving a bloody cut-throat razor yelling "Yer dinna's ready".

The production certainly didn't stint on the gore with full-front throat slittings, dismemberment, bullets removed without anaesthetic and a tongue being cut out.

The latter belonged to Sweeney's father, an unsavoury character - and as tough as old boots to eat, I bet. Sweeney was angry that he'd served 20 years in prison for something that his dad had done.

He also had issues with his dead mother which led him to come over all peculiar when Mrs Lovett showed her appreciation of him setting her up in a pie shop.

He made amends by regularly arriving on her doorstep bearing parcels neatly wrapped in brown paper. They contained the meaty bits of his victims that he'd sliced and diced. "Me bruvver, 'e's a butcher, 'e's going to be sending me meat every so often," he informed Mrs Lovett (who clearly did love it judging by the procession of men folk through her bedroom).

He was highly regarded about town as "a real Londoner", someone who gave jobs to workhouse boys and was always ready to do a spot of medical work, whether it was an abortion or removing a stone. His methods, though, made All-New Cosmetic Surgery look like the Teletubbies.

Why no-one cottoned on to what Sweeney Todd was doing is a mystery. Men would go into his shop for a shave and never be seen again. Investigator David Warner's Sir John didn't twig as he was having a bleeding good time. "There's nothing quite so restorative as being bled," he said, although even he would have taken a different line if he'd realised quite how many pints Sweeney was taking from his victims.

The film raised interesting moral questions, such as his decision to take someone's valuables as well as his life. "Is it worse to take a man's pearls than the flesh off his bones?," asked Mrs Lovett.

It was a question Sweeney Todd couldn't answer - and neither could his tongue-tied father.