The immensely overhyped first public autopsy in Britain for more than 170 years was everything you could have predicted.

It was sleazy, pretentious and presided over by a ringmeister with the kind of German accent English actors aspired to in all those post-war prison camp films. And it was watched by an audience of voyeurs and thrill seekers accompanied by Channel 4 TV cameras recording their every queasy squirm.

Public autopsies first became a depraved form of popular entertainment in the 16th Century.

When they were finally stopped in London in 1830, it was not because of jaded tastes but because of a growing fear the decaying corpses were spreading disease.

Now the wheel has come full circle. Wednesday's dissection in unlicensed premises in east London, performed by the unlicensed German pathologist turned showman Professor Gunther von Hagens, showed how little the public taste for the obscene has changed down the centuries.

And where there is a demand for something, however dreadful, there will always be a provider.

Professor von Hagens has already become a millionaire through his technique of preserving skinned human bodies with a plastic solution and displaying them in a variety of poses as "art".

But whatever his spurious air of being an educationalist, the truth is different. He is nothing more than a hypocritical opportunist who is exploiting today's public lust for extreme entertainment.

In this respect he was aided and abetted by Channel 4, which showed extracts from the autopsy and attempted to give it respectability by claiming to be "confronting the ultimate taboo" of death.

You could use the same argument for confronting the ultimate taboos of torture, rape or murder. Is it only a matter of time for Channel 4?

What the TV channel presented was pornography of violence and degradation of the human body. Do not be fooled by arguments it was really about exposing the secrets of pathology laboratories in hospitals, or even about informing and educating.

As Professor Harold Ellis, professor of surgery at the University of London, put it so tellingly on the programme, he could have given precisely the same information and education with a few slides and a brief talk for those who really wanted to know.

Watching Professor von Hagens cut up the six-month-old, pickled cadaver of a 72-year-old man who, we were told, had given his permission for his remains to be used in this obscene way, was rather like being in a busy butcher's shop. But because of the pickling of the body, there was no blood.

Wearing a bright blue overall and his trademark black fedora, which he refused to remove, the ringmeister sliced open the brain and heart and liver for his sickly customers to examine.

In spite of the presence of two police observers and government warnings the degrading spectacle was illegal, no attempt was made to stop it.

Why not?