The last time I counted, there were eight TV channels in the UK and many more in the United States, where the only output a viewer could watch is about crimes - real ones.

And not just any crime - ones which will chill you to the bone.

Stories of wives killing husbands, husbands killing wives (much more common), love turning to loathing as passions get out of control.

The means of murder can make a viewer think twice about what they do. I'm still fidgety every time I open the freezer at home if I come across a frozen curry. Lakhvir Singh stole into the home of her lover in West London to leave a meal for him in a tupperware container - but not before she had laced it with poisonous aconite, brought back from India especially for the purpose of killing him and/or his fiancé.

Lakhvinder 'Lucky' Cheema died - his partner surviving only after a battle fought by doctors who had feared the worst. The story, told in our series ‘The Lady Killers’ on Discovery Quest in the UK and The Justice Channel in the US, rated highly. People tuned in and watched until the end of the programme.

Why? It was a deeply tragic story told mostly by 'Lucky's' nephew Gurinder.  Gurinder had answered his uncle's agonised telephone call asking for help, raced around to his home and helped the couple into a car before speeding off to hospital with both Lucky and Gurjeet Choongh, his new fiancé. This was the stuff of nightmares - but nightmares we choose to watch.

When we carry out research into why and who watches True Crime programming, we find that it’s mostly women, but not exclusively, and they tend to be younger - aged between 28 and 44. Both they and the men who watch, who tend to be older, consistently tell us that they find it comforting when a killer is caught and successfully convicted. The process itself reassures viewers.

And watching the lives of others actually serves to comfort us - My wife or my husband is not like that. My girlfriend would never get so jealous that she would kill.

Odd though it may sound, watching True Crime documentaries provides a comfort blanket, and no more so than when the tale being told is about love which has turned to loathing. We all understand love, we 'get' passion, we can relate to rejection. It's the stuff of life that we recognise and know that, occasionally, things don’t work out. Who of us has not been dumped? Many discover the love of their life has run off with someone else - it happens. And when it does, we cope - we know how deeply we were hurt and still we got on with life. Almost all of the time, we know whatever has happened was probably for the best.

Seeing how things work out for those who don't 'move on' again comforts us and confirms to us that we are normal  - we become relieved we are not them.

We’ve just started making a series called ‘Meet, Marry, Murder’ looking at these kinds of stories. You can take a look here. As we do our research, we see lives becoming embroiled in emotional turmoil and those involved failing to cope. Love turns to obsession, creates deep insecurity, and drives people to murder.

But here's the good news - most of us aren’t like that, and those that are, get caught. That's the reason people keep coming back to the true crime genre.

Autumn 2020 sees FirstLookTV host one of the first true crime conferences in Europe. Former detectives like Peter Bleksley of Channel 4’s ‘Hunted’, former police officers turned authors like Clare Mackintosh, criminal profilers and criminologists will gather to reveal the cases which have left them reeling.... Find out more and book here: True Crime Live.