Bottom of the bowl

TV REVIEW: Podge and Rodge's Stickit InnRTÉ2, Tuesday; Horizon: The Secret YouBBC2, Tuesday; Age Eight and Wanting A Sex ChangeChannel 4, Monday; MidweekTV3, Wednesday

IN THE ALTERED reality of RTÉ, Donnybrook, Dublin 4, two papier-mâché puppets persuaded some bloke with a blazer and a budget to give them money for a new comedy series: Shure it’ll be a laugh, shure haven’t we been takin’ the mickey outta celebrity culture for years and shure aren’t they lapping it up.

But listen, let’s change the format a bit, let’s break out of Ballydung Manor. A bar – that’s the ticket! And let’s get an actress, one with enormous breasts, and let’s squeeze them and her into a really tight blouse and . . . and let’s get her to lick the foam from the frothing pints . . . ah shure, to hell with it, let’s get her to stick her tongue out every time the camera is pointing at her. And shure, we’ll have a quiz, get a handful of curdling television personalities to be the contestants.

Even better, let’s get solicitor-to-the-stars Gerard Kean, and his mot, the blondey one. And on the other team, let’s get literary giant Amanda Brunker . . . we’ll stuff her into a pair of intellectually stretching thigh-high legwarmers, and we’ll have Daithi O’Shea, the bilingual weatherman . . . Shure, wouldn’t Daithi warm any old stool. And let’s call the quiz “Touch It, Feel It, Lick It, Suck It”, get them to identify curious objects with their teeth: an arse-wiper, an oral sex snorkel.

Oh, and let’s get them to draw pictures of great big mickeys and let’s have a “wank you for the music” round. And let’s talk about holes and shit and shit and holes, and shure bejaney won’t we have a bit of a karaoke round, we’ll sing about that auld one, Susan Boyle, about mowing the hairs off her face. And we’ll have a swipe at Heather Mills, ’cause we’re sharp as nails, cutting edge, and the audience will be gagging for more.

Oh, aren't we the cute hoors all the same, the pair of us, made of sand and glue, the bored, mouldering old pair of us, with nothing original left to say, bereft now of satire, dried of wit, with ne'er a bite of originality? Sure aren't we the cute, cute hoors all the same that we can still squeeze a few bob out of the RTÉ budget? What will we call it? Hah? I said what will we call it, the whole fandango, the great big scatological stain? Podge and Rodge's Stickit Inn? Shure jaysus, you're a genius. The James Joyce of the puppets you are. A cultural icon . . . hah?

APPARENTLY, THERE ARE 100 billion nerve cells in the brain. Mathematician Marcus du Sautoy keeps his under a neatly shorn scalp, below which two inquisitive peepers hint at the rapidly firing neuron activity happening behind his affable, intelligent-looking visage. The jumpily friendly du Sautoy was at the helm of Horizon: The Secret You, an investigation into the age-old question, "how do we know that we are who we are?" (well no, I didn't actually know it was an age-old question either, tending, as I do, to confine my existential inquiries to "where did the bath plug go?").

Du Sautoy’s frenetic investigations on our behalf were conveyed by much spookily surreal camerawork, as he boarded a series of planes, trains and automobiles in search of answers. His journeying included a trip to Stockholm, where the philosopher Descartes was originally interred, and it was there that the key questions of the self-proclaimed atheist du Sautoy’s exploration of consciousness were posed. Are we dual in nature, do we have a separate body and soul (or body and mind, if you like), or are we merely a great mass of neurological activity that eventually burns out with the brain cells? In other words, is we is or is we ain’t simply a whole heap of biology?

The programme pointed out that while humans are "part of an elite group" with the gift of self-awareness (along with chimpanzees and orang utans), for us "the price of self-awareness is death-awareness" – so we get depressed, go to the mall, strip another banana tree, pick a couple of nits off the offspring, and eventually create a whole range of religious belief systems and rituals to make ourselves feel better, in the process separating "I" from "me". Du Sautoy, having undergone multifarious tests inside MRI scanners and electrical skullcaps, and having survived several erudite conversations with Teutonic neurologists in the Californian hills (in the process discovering that some people possess a neuron that only ignites when shown pictures of Jennifer Aniston), appeared to make a pretty good case for our brain activity beingour consciousness. As he (more or less) put it, the constant dialogue inside our heads (between the different parts of our brains as they endlessly process data) could well be what gives us our subjective sense of being who we are.

Insofar as many of my neurons managed to respond to the information being breathlessly imparted, it seems that the Oxford-educated professor doesn’t really go for the notion of “soul” (that elusive bit of ourselves with inkblots on it, which, the nuns told us, lurks somewhere underneath our breastbones and is our passport to heaven).

I don’t know, though; I think du Sautoy’s gravitas was somewhat diminished by his choice of socks. Every time he offered himself up (shoeless) to the MRI scanner, he was sporting yet another jaunty pair, the kind (stars, stripes, spots) that try to say, “never mind what goes on in my cranium, I’m really just a soxy, fun-loving guy”.

'I WENT INTO the bathroom – she had her penis in one hand, her nail clippers in the other." Oh dear, this "gloriously subjective" world of ours, as Prof du Sautoy calls it, just spun a little off its axis. Channel 4, never an organisation to opt for subtlety in its programme titles, this week offered a surprisingly moving documentary called Age Eight and Wanting A Sex Change, filmed in the US among a group of children (two biological boys and two biological girls) aged between seven and 16, all of whom were adamant that they had been born in the wrong body.

Du Sautoy’s scientific nous would doubtless have illuminated this sometimes disturbing programme, but the viewer was left stranded between sympathy and scepticism at the practice of giving testosterone and oestrogen to adolescents, along with other medical treatments intended to “extend the physicality of pre-puberty so they can mature in their decision” to undergo a sex change. The children, all of whom were now living as their preferred gender, had experienced bullying from their peers when they displayed behaviour characteristic of the opposite sex, and their distressed and protective parents were, for the most part, just doing their best to ease the fears and anxieties of their sons and daughters.

“It’s wrong to have a penis if you’re a girl,” said one sweet little eight-year-old, blonde hair drawn back in a bobbin, skirt pleating around bony knees, who was now called Josie but had been born Joseph.

“Most children with gender dysphoria grow out of it, but, increasingly, families are coming forward – this is becoming part of the public discourse,” said one of the consultants treating this extraordinarily difficult condition.

Hormone treatment under the age of 16 is illegal in the UK, and, while feeling nothing but sympathy for these children who are so uneasy in their own skin, it is difficult not to wonder whether the psychological landscapes of their lives should have been more closely examined. And, as with so many documentaries which feature children, there have to be ethical questions around filming seven-year-olds in the throes of gender confusion, a process which could exacerbate their sense of isolation or difference, and possibly even pressurise them into making premature decisions about themselves.

By all means make this issue part of “the public discourse” – talk to the parents, talk to the clinicians – but really, shouldn’t we leave these desperately young children out of the frame?

tvreview@irishtimes.com

This one's for Stephen: A philosophical post-mortem with Louis Walsh

Presenter Colette Fitzpatrick, the calm, competent and decorous hostess of TV3's Midweek, had the pleasure of Louis Walsh's company on her couch this week in the aftermath of his colleague Stephen Gately's funeral.

Walsh and Fitzpatrick effortlessly spread asinine balminess over the dark, wet evening in a languorous chat about how “we all have our ups and downs” and how “we never know what’s around the corner”.

Walsh, son of Kiltimagh, diligently mopped up any strands of controversy that had spilled over from some photographs of the funeral, of Walsh looking deeply uncomforable while embracing Gately’s partner, Andrew Cowles. Sure you wouldn’t want to believe everything you read in the papers, Colette.

I almost dozed off, until Walsh told us that X Factorjudge Simon Cowell had images of his own face embossed on the wallpaper of his manor house for his 50th birthday celebrations.

Now there’s a recession-busting idea for the interior decoration industry.