Rich man, poor man

TV REVIEW: MoneyBBC1, Sunday and Wednesday

Gok's Fashion FixChannel 4, Tuesday

When The Au Pair Came to StayRTÉ1, Friday

Prime Time Investigates: Forgotten LivesRTÉ1, Monday

Dispatches: The Lost Girls of South AfricaChannel 4, Sunday

MARTIN AMIS SAID this week that he thinks the BBC adaptation of his cult novel Moneyis "great television". With respect – which of course is what people say when they don't mean it at all – it's not. It was terrible, not just as an adaptation of the book but particularly as a TV drama. After enduring part one on Sunday it took some effort to bother watching part two on Wednesday: the surest sign of a turkey, and it wasn't for lack of wanting it to be good.

It's difficult to explain just how huge Moneywas when it was published, in 1984. All about greed and excess, it was above all hilarious, with a biting satire that chomped down hard on the delusions of the early part of that decade. Its central character, John Self, is a money-chasing London adman brought to New York by slimy producer Fielding Goodney (Vincent Kartheiser) to direct his first movie. As Self, Nick Frost was all wrong. He got the fat slob, porn-addicted, mostly semi-drunk aspects of the cult character right – but, let's face it, that's not too hard. Where he fell down was not adding more than two dimensions to the role: he was like a panto baddie, with his peculiar hairstyle and droopy moustache.

And where was the humour? The novel was hilarious, full of witty one-liners and silly names for products – Self's car is a Fiasco, he snacks on Blastfurters and his sweaty obsession with his hair involves endless meditations on a "rug rethink" – but they didn't transfer to the screen. And side-splitting set pieces from the novel, including the one where fat mess Self plays tennis with ace player Goodney, were only mildly amusing in a Carry Onsort of way. It's a voice novel, with Self's interior monologue crucial to the satire and integral to the plot; but, on TV, lengthy voiceovers kill drama and pace. The large number of choppy, short scenes in part two – as if the director was racing to get to the finish – didn't help either. And what was Kartheiser up to? The Mad Menstar was another reason to watch, but, with his peculiar strawberry-blond dye job, he looked too much like the lost member of Duran Duran to take seriously.

Moneyis part of the BBC's 1980s series, and it was a bit of a laugh seeing things that seem from the Dark Ages, such as passengers smoking on aeroplanes, but that was about it.

FROM THE EVIDENCEof his flaccid new series it can't be long until Gok Wan goes the way of Trinny and Susannah and their obsession with big knickers. Remember when they were all over the place, telling women in their sneery posh way what to wear? Then Gok became the queen of fashion-makeover TV, elbowing the gruesome twosome into obscurity, and it was mostly because he was funny, hyperactive in an unirritating way (always an achievement) and – gasp – he actually seemed to like women. Okay, he kept going on about bangers, which is Gokspeak for breasts, but he seemed to be having as much fun as the wide-eyed women who took his advice and gave up their old trackie pants.

But his new series, Gok's Fashion Fix,is as flat as his new quiff-free hairstyle. The central idea is still the same: Gok takes a plain Jane (in Tuesday's programme it was dowdy accountant mother-of-two Mandy, from West Brom) on a "makeover journey". By the end of it she's all glam in high heels and a good haircut, amazing her husband and open-mouthed friends with her new fabulousness. It always makes me wonder what they thought of the pre-madeover person before. As well as this there's some ghastly woman called Brix, who is probably huge in the fashion world but seems like a big blousy Yank straight from central casting. She hunts out stratospherically priced designer clothes to see how they compare with high-street versions, and there's a "fashion face-off" at the end between both versions. We see a group of supermarket workers testing jeans by acting as mechanics and dancing in a diner, like a works production of Grease, and we go on a lengthy trip to a brogue-making factory – there was more padding in the programme than a Wonderbra. And Gok didn't use his trademark bangers once, asking instead to cop a feel of some woman's "boobs". He referred to himself as Aunty Gok throughout – which isn't camp; it's creepy – and the whole lot seemed as unappealing as his choice of "ruched animal-print skirt". Hideous.

WHAT WOULD POSSESSa family to let a camera crew into their home to document their experience of having an au pair? There's an above-average chance that the kids are going to come across as unruly brats and the mammy of the house as either a bit hysterical or an exploitative wagon. It was probably different back in the day when au pairs were really just another pair of hands, giving the stay-at-home mother a bit of a help with the kids in a relaxed atmosphere of multicultural curiosity.

These days, of course, au pairs are cheap childcare with housework thrown in, and When the Au Pair Came to Stayat least doesn't pretend any different. Last week we had Heidi from Germany, horrified by the dirt she found in her Galway host family's house, not to mention the horrible food. Actually, she did mention it, several times.

But this week was a real humdinger. It was never going to work. We first met Marion playing the piano in the tranquil and spacious living room in her family’s penthouse apartment on the outskirts of Paris. Next the 19-year-old was dragging a mop around the floor in a dark semi-D in the back end of Rathfarnham that’s home to three small kids, two parents and a granny. The host family came to Ireland some years ago from Cameroon, and both parents work full time. They couldn’t work, they said, unless they had an au pair.

Marion had dreams of hanging out in Dublin city centre, enjoying the nightlife, not traipsing around the suburbs skivvying for hours on end for €85 a week. She didn’t last a fortnight, and you couldn’t blame her.

Fending for themselves Two generations, two continents, a singular lack of care

The must-see programmes this week were also the most spirit sapping. We’re a great little nation for getting all blood boiled and

civil warish about "the right to life" when, as Monday's Prime Time Investigates: Forgotten Livesvividly showed, as a society we don't actually care too much about the living – such as those with Alzheimer's disease. Of course, individual families care, desperately and to the point of desperation.

The Prime Timeinvestigative team is on a roll this season, with every report producing high ratings (who knew last week's tyre-recycling exposé would be such an audience magnet?), and for this one

Barry O’Kelly followed several families caring for loved ones with Alzheimer’s. Their devotion was nothing short of heroic. The trust they showed in him as a reporter and the access they gave to their everyday lives made the

programme particularly powerful. And when you see a grown man, worn down by years of looking after his mother, crying out of frustration because his attempts to get the right incontinence pads for her have been fruitless, then you have to wonder. Just think how much these carers are saving the State, but, as O’Kelly showed, they have to fight for every hour of respite care as if it were some outrageous luxury.

One of the bravest contributors was Kate Arthurs, a young woman who was so frustrated by the lack of a care plan for Rose, her 56-year-old mother, that she called an ambulance and deposited her at A&E, where she remained, costing a fortune, until the HSE was forced to come up with a plan for her. Forget about the caring aspect: the inefficiency is breathtaking.

"The cry for help is there, but it takes so long for help to come." That could have been a quote from Prime Time,but it was spoken by a South African social worker in Dispatches: The Lost Girls of South Africa. The emotive feature-length documentary showed, through the tragic stories of five little girls (including Fuzeka, right), the record level of child abuse in South Africa, where a child is raped every three minutes.

While the cameras are trained on the World Cup, a few kilometres away in the impoverished areas of the country, a girl has a one-in-three chance of completing secondary school but a one-in-two chance of being raped. Not a level playing field.