Shane Hegarty reviews Tonight with Trevor McDonald: The Blame Game (ITV, Sunday), Jackass (Network 2, Monday) and I Saw You (ITV, Tuesday)
Trevor McDonald introduced Tonight with Trevor McDonald last Sunday night, as you would expect. Trevor is the Colonel Sanders of ITV current affairs, the face on the box that reassures you that this deep-fried gristle really is the tastiest, most nutritious current affairs on the block. He doesn't just read the news. Anne Doyle reads the news. Those BBC newsreaders you can't put a name on, they read the news. Trevor is a news salesman. He knocks his tuning fork against the story to see how to pitch it. He has sincerity down to a fine art. He is just the right blend of bland. He is the snake oil that keeps the wheels of ITV current affairs moving.
ITV needs Trevor to sell the news, because he is the closest thing they have to a BBC newsreader, and it was the BBC who invented television news. Tonight is a tabloid news programme, built from the same mud and straw as American current affairs shows such as 60 Minutes. It is the kind of show in which you get as many shots of the interviewer nodding in concern as you do of the interviewee. They have their heads tilted at such an angle that it's a wonder their make-up doesn't landslide to one side of their faces.
Tonight is home to Martin Bashir, who famously interviewed Princess Diana a few years back and has since been kept in a glass box to be brought out only in emergencies. Whenever a controversial figure wants to break their silence, they break it over him.
Tonight looks for the emotion in a story and then sucks it bone-dry. It is not interested in complexity. It likes stories about children with rare diseases. It is big into health scares. It can't get enough of consumer rip-offs. It is the showpiece of ITV current affairs, but hides its glass jaw behind the trusty charms of Trevor McDonald and punchy graphics that go on forever. If Newsnight was to give it so much as a sideways look, it would wet itself.
Last Sunday's show, The Blame Game, took four Catholics and four Protestants from Northern Ireland and threw them into a house filled with cameras for five days. The house was at an adventure centre on the Isle of Man. Do you get the thinking behind that? The Isle of Man is halfway between Ireland and Britain. This is what they call S.P.E.L.L.I.N.G. I.T. O.U.T. They spell it out a lot on Tonight. The adventure centre was one of those places where corporate managers go to learn about teamwork, where the two sides had to co-operate, build rafts, that sort of thing - even though, of course, they hated each other. "It's all high spirits on the high seas, but will it last?" Trevor pondered. Don't be an idiot. Pull up a chair.
Trevor introduced the show, with a little speech about how, as a journalist covering Northern Ireland, things were terrible. But, you know, if they could only, like, get the two sides to talk to each other. If it was up to ordinary people and not politicians, then, wow, maybe . . . It was enough to bring tears to your eyes, if you rubbed enough snake oil into them.
He announced that it was about getting people to talk, but of course it was about getting them to row. It made no attempt to understand the deeper motives of what makes people hate each other this deeply, but instead prodded and cajoled them until they turned against each other for the viewer's entertainment. Each night, the eight were shown videos of pivotal moments from the Troubles - the Shankill Road bombing and the Greysteel shooting on the first evening, for instance - and then asked to debate the issues. Cue screaming matches. It turned out that one subject, Oliver, had carried victims from the Shankill, and that another had lost a relative in the bombing. These were not ordinary people at all, but hand-picked casualties, primed for a row.
The manipulation was repugnant. Jackie was a Protestant who had regularly joined in the protests at Holy Cross, while Margo was the mother of one of the pupils. When this bit of information was on the point of being revealed during a row on the first night, the psychologist charged with controlling the arguments stepped in to change the course of the discussion. This piece of withheld information was, after all, to be the programme's trump card, and when it was revealed, all hell would break loose. Better to keep it simmering away than let it come out too soon.
Trevor was loving it. "Will Jackie and Margo's fragile friendship survive? Find out after the break." The Blame Game found conflict in everyday human pettiness, and revelled in the superficialities of the genuine problems. When the eight played a game of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, a Catholic storming off in a bit of a huff was treated as damning empirical evidence. "So much for it being all a game," intoned Trevor, who has obviously never watched the rows that can develop over a game of Monopoly on Christmas Day. It was much more interested in playing Big Brother than in bothering with subtleties. The relationships between the two groups were there only to be reduced to easily labelled bigotry.
The Blame Game claimed to be an experiment in conflict resolution, but was a cock-fight masquerading as a study of poultry dynamics. It was the worst example of the Irish problem being packaged in a way the British public would want to see it, and possibly the most irresponsible hour of "current affairs" ITV has ever broadcast. This is the station that used to make World in Action. Now it makes Tonight with Trevor McDonald. No smiling face on the box can disguise the sour taste within.
This was supposed to be the week in which we would watch Irish people trapped in houses, making spectacles of themselves. TV3 was to show Haunted House, a series in which eight people were locked in a building in Spiddal and then subjected to the realisation of their worst fears. Haunted House, though, proved to be a bit of a chimera itself, turning up in the schedules but mysteriously disappearing on the nights it was supposed to be shown. It turns out that TV3 and the people who make the programme have tapped into their own most primal fear and become involved in a row about money. If it goes to court, they should film it.
ANYWAY, there's lots of this stuff on the television these days. It's not so long ago that we used to tune in to mock the Japanese and those dumb gameshows in which contestants lay down in beds of scorpions or put their hands into pits of snakes. The Japanese, it turned out, where visionaries.
If you were to lie down in a bed of scorpions now, it would be seen as too highbrow for most audiences. Sky One runs a programme called Fear Factor in which the agoraphobic get dropped into deserts, the vertiginous get thrown out of planes, that kind of thing. You've seen one episode, you've seen the series. If you've seen 20 seconds of Jackass, though, you've seen about 10 seconds more than necessary. Here, people hurt themselves for entertainment, theirs and ours. It is the frat boy humour of young men who have smoked a little too much. In this world, Beavis and Butthead are gods.
People wrestle in manure. They test stun-guns on each other. This week, one guy, Steve, thinks he's broken his back in a stupid stunt. His mates are shown the X-ray by a doctor. That they can see his penis makes them guffaw wildly.
Mates: "Where's the tail bone?" Doctor: "Right here underneath all this faeces." There are few words in Jackass, and the script usually consists of people screaming "enough!" or saying "shii-iit!" in that disbelieving American way in which the word gets stretched out to about a dozen syllables. This week, Steve - a very hairy man indeed - had all thehair on his body removed, most of it through waxing. Waxing a man should be banned by the Geneva Convention. It would seem that the best way to remove an eyebrow is by going against the grain. One pull on the strip results in a sound like grass being pulled and the kind of scream you would associate with a man having his eyebrows torn from their roots.
Jackass is half an hour of those little mpeg movies that you get sent to your e-mail; of bullfighters getting gored, of cars driving into rivers, of people's hair catching fire. It's how comedy is at the moment. The pratfall is king. One moment of clumsiness can make you world-famous. If a man falls off his chair, but there is no-one there to record it, is it still funny?
That sort of clumsiness would be a positive aphrodisiac in I Saw You. This is comedy as patented by Four Weddings and a Funeral, a farce played out among people who don't speak so much as mumble and fluster in a sweet fashion. Everyone is only ever half a second away from running their fingers through their hair in an awkward manner. They are all unnaturally quick-witted.
It is, though, very funny - or, at least, Fay Ripley is. Ripley, the first of the Cold Feet cast to jump ship, plays Grace, a single mother who, in a pilot episode two years ago, fell in love with Ben (Paul Rhys). They have broken up within minutes of the start of this new series, which does make you question the depth of their feelings for one another. She is pursued by a ludicrously rich and gentlemanly Alexander Armstrong, while Ben falls for his dentist. Ripley's excellence and the script's non-stop one-liners successfully divert from the flimsy plot. Ben's dentist friend has gone a little heavy on the anaesthetic.
"Where is it numb?"
"It's just my whole head."
Television can be like that sometimes.
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