A FEW DAYS AGO–the night of January 1, as it happens–British television’s Channel 4 aired a program about art in China that featured photographs of performance artist Zhu Yu eating the corpse of a stillborn baby.

Other Chinese artists shown in the program painted dead Siamese twins with their blood and drank wine that had been used to preserve an amputated human penis. This caused, as you might expect, a certain amount of upset in the former home of the now, at last, completely deceased Queen Victoria. “Perverts and Narcissists: Channel 4’s Cashing in on a Chinese Artist Eating a Dead Baby Is a Greater Outrage Than the Cannibalism,” opined a headline in the Guardian. Speaking a more traditional British idiom, the Liverpool Post gave over the front page to “It’s Sick: Bereaved Mum Hits out at TV Baby Shocker.”