Cures for sleep deprivation

TV Review: Proof began with the arrival of a freight container at Dublin port. It is loaded from a cargo ship onto a truck. Customs staff stop and search it. The officer steps inside, recoils and vomits. Inside are 23 corpses, one survivor and the stink of a hackneyed script.

Maureen Boland (Orla Brady) is the Garda press officer. She is the beauty in the midst of horror, the sort whose only reason for having a daughter is so that she can hug her tight at the end of a terrible day and wish away the badness of the world.

She wears her collars erect and her hem-line tight. She looks quite unlike anything you would have found on Crimeline. She didn't say the word "vehicle", but you know she wouldn't rhyme it with tentacle.

Terry Corcoran (Finbar Lynch) is a journalist. He looks, wouldn't you guess it, like he sleeps in a dumpster. When we first meet him he has cost his newspaper millions in damages and is being berated by his soon to be ex-boss for the "trail of shite" he always leaves behind him. Let us be the judge of that.

His conscience nags at him from the backseat of his investigative brain. He gets a job with the Northside Chronicle, a paper with geographical limits but a staff to rival the Daily Planet. At a press conference after the cargo deaths, he silences the scribbling of pencils with a cutting question, which he begins asking from the back and continues as he walks forwards through the throng. It is unerringly loyal to how other scriptwriters always incorrectly imagine press conferences to be.

Meanwhile, Myles Carrick (Bryan Murray) is the not-all-that-he-seems politician on the verge of becoming taoiseach. His party's slogan is "A Caring Ireland in a Caring Europe". You wouldn't win a hamper with that slogan. Maureen was good enough to sum up his politics for us without the need for a flip-chart: "I think he's the breath of fresh air this country needs to blow away the Civil War politics of the other parties."

Thank you, Maureen, you may return to your plot.

Among these characters wanders Nina, an Albanian looking for her refugee sister, and an evil goateed European who is being blackmailed by a businessman who procured his laptop through his joyrider lover.

"Oh believe me," the goatee tells the businessman, "you'll be paid."

"Paid in bullets!" he really should have cackled.

When the joyrider is assassinated in broad daylight in the city, only our hero, Terry, bothers to follow up the story. He is also the only one willing to help the Albanian find her sister and the only one who senses that there might be more to the refugee deaths. Happily, all of these strands will soon segue into one story, allowing Terry some quality yelling time with his editor and the opportunity to screw up his home life.

Proof continued with shocking violence, daylight blanched of primary colour, night-time taxi rides through the neon city and a montage in which Terry and Nina asked hookers if they'd seen this girl. It is all told through a music-video style that is more pleased with itself than it should be. In fairness to the actors, they push on steadily through the crush of cliché.

Tony Philpott's script may be trying to say something about modern Ireland and its capital, but will struggle unless it can relate to a Dublin different from this superficial contrivance. Proof filches every convention of the urban thriller, but forgets that these apply to the bigger, more complex cities of Britain and the US, so that when they are all flung into a smaller pot they just won't fit. The hope is that by throwing so much clutter at the opening episode there will be little left and the plot will get some space to breathe. Otherwise, Proof is a pudding.

In Shattered, the contestants have been challenged to stay awake for an entire week. You can play along at home. For this, Channel 4 has cross-bred the Big Brother and Survivor-type formats, undeterred by how knackered both have become in recent times.

Contestants are placed in a house, their every move tracked by cameras. They receive little in the way of stimuli, which should be the first thing to alert the viewer to the programme's impotence as entertainment.

Every so often they are given a menial task to do, because the eyes finds it tough to stay open when the mind is bored. It is shown 24 hours a day on digital channel E4.

Its contestants are the usual sort of young attention-seeker. For example, Craig (20) is a tanning consultant. All of western civilisation, it occurs to me, has brought us to the point were one can opt for a career in tanning.

Any novelty in the central idea is ruined by the reality of its execution. Marvel at their somnolence! Be amazed by their listlessness! It is not so cruel as it pretends. Contestants can quit at any time, and while a stopwatch counts the hours they have been awake, they are allowed a little sleep every now and again by the show's psychologists, who don't want them to freak out just as much as the viewer really does. On Monday night, for example, they were given 90 minutes shut-eye. Parents of new-born babies across the country must have scoffed at that luxury.

It is watchable only during the novel challenges it sets the contestants. On Tuesday, one was strapped to a giant teddy bear (Mr Cuddles) for an hour. On Wednesday, another had to lie in a bed while a grandmother read him a bedtime story. He cracked, and dozed to the gentle rocking of the granny's voice.

Shattered ends tonight. According to host Dermot O'Leary, "the experts say that the best cure for sleep deprivation is sleep". Thank goodness for the experts. By the way, as this was being broadcast on Tuesday night, ITV showed the movie, While You Were Sleeping.

The more considered experiment and always diverting Child of Our Time returned this week, continuing its annual check-up on the progress of several children born in 2000. Each first appeared on television as a jerky image on an ultrasound, so it is no surprise to find that each is developing into a screen natural. Return to them in 20 years and see how many have opted for a career presenting quiz-shows.

This programme, as it has gradually transpired, could as easily have been called "Parents of Our Time". You can imagine how the children's mothers and fathers might have agreed to feature on the assumption that it would make for a unique record of their offspring's development. They will have done so wholly unaware that it would likewise be an interesting document of how they are screwing up those children.

We met little Helena as she went to her first day of school.

"She wants to make friends," explained Prof Robert Winston from somewhere deep within his moustache, "but she is burdened by the legacy of her parents."

Yikes. Let's meet James instead. He is aggressive, always scrapping with his sister. "His mother hasn't got the skills to help them resolve their differences." Uh-oh.

Moving on to young William instead. "He is burdened by a double dose of shyness from his parents."

OK, enough now. They're trying their best.

Parents are not the only danger. Child of Our Time took a moment to illustrate how a child suckled on television can easily be poisoned. Shown a video of a man hugging a doll, the children, when presented with the same doll, mimicked him by kissing it tentatively. Show them a video of that same man punching and kicking the doll and the three-year-olds will set about the toy like the droogs of A Clockwork Orange.

Child of Our Time is not merely observational and cannot resist the temptation to tinker. It experiments with the children, sometimes deliberately redirecting the flow of their lives. For instance, James, the aggressive kid, was given a supply of the fish oil, omega three. The cameras returned three months later to find that it had calmed him down considerably and made him academically focused and socially expert.

This suggests the potential for a unique conundrum. What happens if this fiddling has an adverse effect? In 20 years, will there be a group of children visiting their therapists, unloading the psychological hang-ups they inherited from the BBC?

They f**k you up, your producer and director.