Infertility

There's a lot about American TV that Marchant - the man behind the searing, polemical and very British dramas Holding On and Goodbye Cruel World - does not like.

Such as Lost.

"Glossy, meretricious crap," is his damning verdict.

"It's pricktease TV.

It only exists to pull you in for the first five minutes and the last five minutes.

In between, nothing happens.

The creative impulses aren't honourable, they're all about: 'Let's get a 26-week season, then another.'" Marchant, 45, was a boxer in his youth and he's pulling no punches in the rarefied confines of Bafta's Piccadilly offices today.

Why, asks this recipient of the academy's awards, is a great dramatist like Peter Flannery not on our screens any more?

And whatever happened to Scotland's undisputed heavyweight champion practitioner of pulverising drama, Peter McDougall, who was at the peak of his powers when Marchant was making his debut?

Banished to the goggle-box wilderness, it seems, while the likes of Hustle and Hotel Babylon take centre-stage.

Both ape America, both are "glossy crap".

If you're going to copy America, Ma...

A few who suffered the worst injuries were taken abroad for treatment.

But many others less severely injured say they continue to suffer from the effects of the attack and that there are few resources to help them.

Parwin Mohammed, 56, coughed as she told her story.

"I have suffered from this for the last 18 years," she said.

"I cannot sleep at night because I am suffocating.

I can't walk for long periods of time.

Physicians say it cannot be cured and it is the effect of the chemical bombing." Parwin Mohammed's husband died of cancer seven years after the attack, and the family believes his illness was related to the bombardment.

Parwin's four children also suffer from respiratory diseases.

"I was 12 years old when I was hit by the chemicals.

All of my body was burned and I went blind," recounted Jwan Mohammed, Parwin Mohammed's 30-year-old daughter.

She spent three months in the United States receiving medical treatment before her sight was finally restored.

Last year, Narmin Osman, a Kurd and the country's environment minister, called for the creation of a medical center here to care for the survivors.

She also said the town's soil needs to be tested to see if it still contains toxic substances caused by the attack.

But nothing has been done, and many of Halabja's residents are beginn...

Critics generally have been kinder to her weightier efforts, but that's not why she writes them.

In fact, Steel says, she doesn't read her reviews.

Ever.

"My early reviews were so bad that I decided I didn't want to read them again," she says.

"Either the world likes them or it doesn't, and fortunately enough people seem to." New York Times The House will be released by Random House Australia on April 4.

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