TV Review: Would you volunteer to wake up next to Paul Daniels? Would you, honestly?
Reminiscent of the puffy membrane on the inside of a stale egg, his particular brand of magic makes my teeth water. The blonde with the big opinions, Vanessa Feltz - the Diana Dors of talk radio, chat-show hostess and journalist - did just that, slipping under Mr Magic's duvet, tightly robed and gritting her dentistry in Celebrity Wife Swap, which returned to our screens this week.
Feltz, a kind of lascivious Oprah with a penchant for grizzly party dresses, left her gothic London pile - stained-glass windows and many creamy couches (one of them containing her new boyfriend, Ben Ofoedu, watching MTV with his sunglasses on) - and moved in with a largely silent Daniels to take over the lovely Debbie McGee's housewifely duties. McGee and Daniels live in a spookily clean architectural refrigerator beside a river, and keep company with ducks. Not fun for Feltz, who burns the celebrity candle at both ends - mainly, it would seem, to ignite her boyfriend's music career (number two hit in 1999, currently appearing in a Watford nightclub).
After two days of buttering Daniels's toast and buffing up his en suite, Daniels's enigmatic silences (which were more akin to an empty cistern than a deep river) drove the messy Feltz over the edge and, having charged down the lawn to embrace the gardener like a peroxide bullock on steroids ("I don't care who you are, I want to talk to someone"), dragged Daniels down to his local, where he did card tricks for an embarrassed-looking man at a corner table while Feltz unfurled her opinions and tossed her mammaries around for the rest of the bemused natives.
Meanwhile, a sporty McGee, ever the magician's assistant, endured Ofoedu's "celebrity evenings", which involved sitting around Feltz's kitchen with Shane Lynch, formerly of Boyzone, while the boys snaffled Feltz's Bolly and measured their column inches. McGee, having spent her career grinning inside a plastic box while her husband plunged trick swords into her, seemed impervious to distress, so much so that later she even bopped around a dank Watford nightclub wearing a truly awful knee-length skirt that branded her prim and docile backside with diamonds and clubs.
I have no idea who benefits from this invasion of domestic privacy, but I suspect that Feltz, who, on an operatic level, seems like a doomed old blonde forever chasing the holy grail of youth and beauty, partook of the series in order to shed some fame on her young and ambitious lover - possibly not the wisest of moves.
"On my own I didn't have all this attention, the cars, the phones," Ofoedu told the doe-eyed and censorious McGee. "But, it doesn't last forever; nothing does."
'DO YOU WANTto tell me how this feels? Can you take me there?" Roll over, Dr Anthony Clare. Dr Pamela Connolly has hung up her comedy tights and, complete with a stern parting, a laboriously unflinching gaze and the kind of questions that would once have furnished her comedy sketches, returned to the screen in Shrink Rap, a psychological journey around a celebrity subject that has about as much levity as a tombstone.
Curled into the corner of a studio couch, clutching a Kleenex, bare- footed and wide-eyed, but with all the vulnerability of a sleeping tarantula, Dr Connolly's first client was the unpredictable Sharon Osbourne. Having barely hacked through her subject's expensive foundation or wrung the tears from her waterproof mascara, the good doctor soon struck a seam of therapy gold when mining her scatological impulses. Osbourne confided that, when affronted by journalists, she or her children have been known to defecate in little boxes which they then put in the post to the offending hacks. In light of this fascinating revelation, I present a selection of unadulterated and hugely entertaining reminiscences from the wonderful, charming, staggeringly gorgeous Shar, as culled by Dr Connolly: Sharon on past acrimony with Ozzy: "I ripped up his passport, smashed his gold and platinum discs, then I called him stupid. That's the worst thing you do, call Ozzy stupid - he just sat there on the tour bus, crying."
Sharon on business rivals: "Punched them, kicked them, threw ashtrays at them."
And Sharon excusing Ozzy's copious infidelities: "There's always 20 women waiting at the end of the show to suck your dick. You don't even have to buy them a drink." (I have just thought of something more alarming than a tryst with Paul Daniels in bri-nylon pyjamas.) Sharon's defecation days apparently started when she redecorated a garden statue intended for the mistress of her megalomaniacal and violent father, Don Arden ("ruthless music mogul", as he was described). All her rage, seemingly, boiled down to daddy, a discovery that made Connolly twitch with pleasure.
"This is old pain, this is really old pain, this makes perfect sense to me," she intoned. If I hadn't spent the entire programme expecting Connolly to lighten things up a bit by shaking out her poker-straight hair, fellating her pencil or offering Osbourne a whoopee cushion, the whole exercise might have made some sense to me too. Funnily enough, though, watching Connolly as a psychoanalyst made it far easier to take her seriously as a comedian.
But Sharon, you were incomparable, amazing, and definitely through to the next round.
'THEY'RE NOT CALLEDrugger buggers for nothing." Queering the Pitchbegan with this pronouncement from the elegant tranny Miss Panti, tongue firmly in her well-powdered cheek as she conducted a fundraising "slave auction" in The George (Dublin's iconic gay bar) in order to help the Emerald Warriors, Ireland's first gay rugby team, get to New York to participate in the Bingham Cup, an amateur world rugby tournament that seeks to promote inclusive, non-discriminatory involvement in this testosterone-fuelled sport.
Rugby club dressing rooms, we were told, are (as well as sending one into olfactory meltdown) among the most homophobic environments on earth and, let's face it, the sport is generally seen, certainly in this country, to be the preserve of well-fed, well-off blokes with minuscule girlfriends and lousy taste in polo shirts. Heartening, then, to see the Emerald Warriors share facilities and compete with a west Dublin-based rugby team and to hear the Tallaght captain say: "Gay side or straight side, it makes no difference, we'll put in a performance." The largely joyful documentary (but one that was occasionally unable to resist lingering on the men nestling into a scrum) followed the team's progress in the US, from a euphoric early victory over the terrifying-looking Portland Avalanche to eventual elimination with a couple of shattered hips and deflated ambitions. But one courageous player's crisp description of his pleasure at beating the bruising competition on the scuzzy grass of a New York pitch would have struck a chord with many. This, he said, is for all those "bastards at school who never picked me for the team".
In the same week that saw Louis Theroux, in The Most Hated Family in America, shatter another redneck American target, the Westboro Baptist Church, whose members picket the funerals of American servicemen with placards reading "God Hates Fags" (their deeply unhinged belief being that the US deserves God's wrath for allowing gays to serve in the military), Queering the Pitchwas a reason for taking pride in our national conduct.
The good news for the defeated Emeralds is that Ireland has beaten off the competition to host the 2008 gay rugby world cup in Dublin. The IRFU is supplying the match officials and has complimented the team for adding a "much-needed vibrancy to the game". Who'd have thought it, eh?
BY THE WAY, it's highly possible that the chocolate bunny you're planning on demolishing has a deeper understanding of satire than Ben Elton. Let me give you some dietary advice: unless you enjoy the peptic sensation of embarrassment and distaste, avoid Get a Grip, Elton's stomach-churning new "cross-generational" comedy effort, in which old motormouth spends 28 minutes behind a desk reading a self-penned monologue from an idiot board on the state of modern Britain. The cutting-edge commentary - on subjects as diverse and painfully unfunny as Princess Di's car smash and, oddly enough, a pig-shagging competition in Utah - is occasionally interrupted by a pretty young thang called Alexa, who has to say "duh" and "dude" a lot, as well as being forced to swallow Elton's painful avuncularity.
"Duhh . . . I thought you were a sad old leftie," said Alexa as Elton stoutly defended the Royal Family in yet another churningly unfunny riff.
