The body of Trevor Jordache lay beneath the patio for two years before it was discovered during the investigation into an underground leak on Channel 4’s Brookside in 1995. Audiences had infinitely more patience last century. Nowadays, reflects Jimmy Corkhill (played magnificently, then and through this new show, by Dean Sullivan), they couldn’t possibly wait that long. The corpse would have been dug up in two weeks.
Sullivan performs his monologue on television sets positioned at random intervals through Where the Bodies Are Buried, Lindsey Mendick’s colossal installation for the Weston Gallery at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The sound is as duff as any Brookie-era telly, but still you can hear his character’s meditations everywhere you go. Corkhill remembers his own childhood, watching frightening crime on TV with his father, exhausted after a long shift. And the memory of his father’s heartbeat seems to set off another soundtrack through the gallery; this time it is the pulsing heart that haunts the murderer in Edgar Allan Poe’s terrifying short story The Tell-Tale Heart.
