Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the funniest old lady of them all?

TV REVIEW:FEAR DOES a lot of low-down dirty things. Fear throws a punch in a dark room; it turns a fair-minded person mean just by reflex. It's the growbag where all the insecurities and doubts of otherwise-together folk take root and sprout. Success doesn't beat fear back, no matter how much of it there is. In fact, success only guarantees more fear. Fear that it's all going to go away, fear that success will find someone else to like for a while. Fear that . . .

Sorry, sorry, sorry. It’s just that when you’ve spent an hour and a half watching

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

(RTÉ2, Tuesday,), it’s really difficult not to find yourself conversing solely in little slips of fortune cookie wisdom. It must be the price she pays for writing jokes her whole life, always refining, always paring back, always finding a way to get to the punchline before the audience loses interest. She’s 75 years old and seems incapable of having a conversation without every sentence sounding like something she wants to leave for posterity. She does it so well that it becomes catching.

“In this business, you’re unloved your whole life,” she said. “People ask me why I’m a comedian – they’d be better off asking a nun why she’s a nun,” she said. “My apartment looks like how Marie Antoinette would have lived if she’d had any money,” she said. Okay, that last one was a gag.

The film was engrossing at times when it laid bare the ferocity of Rivers’s drive for ever more work and ever more lucre. She’s wealthier than she’ll ever need to be – joking aside, her apartment is ludicrously opulent – and yet she can’t shake a maniacal desire to get onstage.

“I’ll show you what fear is,” she said at one point, opening her booking diary to a blank page some months down the road. “That’s fear. That means nobody wants me and everything I’ve done in my life didn’t work. I’ve been totally forgotten if my book looks like that.”

Coming from one of the greatest comedians of the past 50 years, this should be a startling assertion. The very idea that Joan Rivers could be forgotten is pure poppycock. This is the woman who went on Johnny Carson's Tonight Showin the 1970s and replied to his notion that men are mostly attracted to intelligence by going: "Oh please, no man in history has ever put his hand up a woman's dress looking for a library card." As long as they keep making those Greatest Ever Stand-Ups programmes, there's just no way she could be forgotten.

But, more than anything, that's what A Piece Of Workwas about. The fear, the insecurity, the total absence of logic that drives someone to keep running a race they've long since won. A hysterical lady, whichever way you look at it.

THERE'S A REASONABLE argument to be made that the Joan Rivers film wouldn't exist without Richard Leacock, who died earlier this year. Or at least that it wouldn't exist in the same form or be nearly as good without Bob Drew and Jean Rouch and Michel Brault. Joan Rivers wouldn't know who these men were if they booked her to play their living rooms, and it's a fair bet that you and I wouldn't either without The Camera That Changed The World(BBC4, Tuesday).

If you can get past the grandiose title – even Drew says at one point that it didn’t change the world, it only changed storytelling – this was the sort of cracking documentary you stumble upon while flicking around and end up delighting in. It was about the invention of the hand-held film camera, which the not-technically-minded among us just assumed came about very soon after the invention of the camera itself. Not so. Not by about 70 years, in fact.

Up until 1960, cameras stood on tripods. They weighed around the same as the average five-year-old. The subject came to the camera and spoke to it instead of the camera following the subject, resulting in documentaries as stilted as the equipment itself. Without being able to move around, to react to real life, to follow people and watch events unfold, what you had was newsreel footage. What you didn’t have were documentaries, at least not as we recognise them today.

“A theatre without actors,” was what Drew said he was after in an interview in early 1960. “A play without playwrights. It would be reporting without summary or opinion. It would be the ability to look in on people’s lives at crucial moments from which you can deduce certain things and see a kind of proof that can only be got from seeing certain things.” As a manifesto for documentary-making in general, it stands tall even now. The independent efforts of two small groups of men on both sides of the Atlantic back then started everything off. It gained traction far more quickly in France than in the US, but eventually the whole world got on board, and now you own a hand-held camera that you also make phonecalls with and even read The Irish Times on. It’s not often you see a documentary about a genuine Year Zero. This was well worth the hour.

BUT THE REAL questions were left unasked. When Drew and Leacock and Rouch and Brault were beavering away trying to create this technology, did they imagine that one day, in a kitchen far, far away (the further the better, says you), a Cowardly Lion-maned X Factorrunner-up named Wagner would have hand-held cameras following him around a cookery competition? Filming him producing such pearls as, "One of my skills that needs a lot of improving is cooking." Truly, it can be said that if the hand-held camera changed the world, it didn't always do it for the better.

Celebrity Head Chef(TV3, all week) was oddly lacking in the fun and messing that these shows need. Nobody's tuning in for recipes or cooking tips, nobody particularly cares who wins the competition, and there's only so much back-biting and bitching you'll take before you decide that life's too short and you'd be better off watching a shoulder of lamb slow-cook for five hours through the oven door.

To be honest, they might even have got away with it over the course of the week if the one over-arching constant in the show had been a more watchable presence. But while Conrad Gallagher is many things, he’s not a TV chef. He’s too intense, too impatient, too wedded to the mystique of cheffing as a vocation only one step down the ladder from a lifetime’s Lough Derg.

Nothing wrong with that in everyday life, of course. It makes him a great chef, just not a great TV chef. There’s a reason people don’t watch Gordon Ramsay as much as they used to. That hectoring, shouty, kitchen-as-Wall Street persona is kind of wearying now. Life’s tough in a professional kitchen; we get it.

But a week-long celeb-driven show for charity is supposed to be dumb and silly and even, y’know, entertaining. Celebrity Head Chef was just hard work at times, and there are plenty of other shows to flick to if you’re in search of hard work. Shows that don’t have Wagner in them.

tvreview@irishtimes.com

Bernice Harrison is on leave

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