TV Review: A couple of months ago Sally Webster woke up one morning in Coronation Street to find that she had gone from mousy loser to Showbusiness Mother from Hell. Sally has decided that her daughter Rosie shall be a superstar of stage and screen and that there will be no argument about it.
This week Rosie arrived home with a love bite the size of Belgium on her neck and Sally was fearful that it might derail her daughter's route to stardom. Sally has become quite demented about the whole thing. Lest there be any doubt, on Monday she was to found washing dishes to a soundtrack of There's No Business Like Showbusiness.
Sally wishes to send Rosie to the Northern Stage School, but needs sponsorship; so she has impressed upon local hack Ken Barlow the urgency of writing an article for the Weatherfield Gazette just like the one it featured about a seriously ill boy going for treatment in Venezuela.
"I think it's dreadful," sighed Sally, "that sick children and those with talent have to scrape around for money."
Not all of them. In Charlotte Church: Spreading Her Wings we met the singer as she approached her 18th birthday, at which point she will gain access to a bank balance that would refloat several national economies.
We also met her mother Maria, a woman with great ambitions for her daughter but who has certain expectations of how the rest of the world should behave around her. She is fed up with PR people telling her how to run her daughter's life and is convinced that Charlotte's friends will betray her to the tabloids. Most of all, though, she is angry at constant invasion by the press of her daughter's private life. Charlotte's career began when Maria called ITV's This Morning and told her kid to warble down the phone. She is now like a person who waves a piece of meat at a pack of lions and is aggrieved when they bite.
That Maria was whining about the invasion of their privacy while appearing in a fly-on-the-wall documentary displayed chutzpah of impressive magnitude. The BBC, though, was happy to conspire in this wilful blindness. It followed the singer on her 18th birthday night out.
"And not a press man in sight," said the narrator. If you ignored the documentary camera crew tracking her every move.
Her mother's supremely patronising tone does hit the right notes every now and again. Not least in her matronly dislike of Charlotte's boyfriend, Stephen.
"If, for any reason, the relationship does fall apart, all I can do is be there for Charlotte," said Maria. Meaning that if, for any reason, it didn't fall apart, she'd be there to chip away at the foundations.
Charlotte, of course, was heavily in love with Stephen and he with her. Until they broke up. As mother had predicted, he sold his story to the press and the Churches moved to a safe house because they reckoned he might come after "the voice of an angel" with a strongbow and a full quiver. It was a dramatic over-reaction to events for which Sally Webster would give her second-born to experience.
As an angel, meanwhile, Charlotte has had the good grace to fall. Quite literally, as it happened, while leaving the nightclub on her 18th birthday. "CHARLOTTE LURCH", read the headline above the picture of her crumbling on the pavement.
Charlotte likes a drink and a fag, and it was obvious that if she keeps this rebellious streak going for much longer her voice will be going from honeydew to Ronnie Drew.
There was a warning from the continuity announcer before Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares: "As you might expect there is a lot of strong language from the start."
This is a little like warning Antarctic explorers that they are likely to encounter some snow.
In this series, the famed chef attempts to rescue failing restaurants. This week it was to a place called Bonaparte's.
"A man's palate can, in time, become accustomed to anything," the emperor once remarked. His empire never made it as far as Bonaparte's of Silsden.
Head chef Tim had worked his way up from dishwasher to chef in four years and was about to tumble back down again. He devastated croutons and razed chicken kievs. His lemon meringue pie repeatedly collapsed in disgust. He kept outdated food as if conducting some sort of experiment. As a main course, a Bonaparte's customer could order mouldy mussels with fetid lentils in a festering tomato jus; followed by a dessert of furry strawberries with last week's cream.
Tim cooked his signature dish for his TV guest, but unwittingly used rotting scallops. Ramsay had to sprint to the backyard, so that he could vomit in a place where it wouldn't later be mistaken for an omelette.
Ramsay was aghast, reduced to wobbling back and forth like a polar bear at the zoo. Then he set to work in the kitchen. He shredded Tim's ego. He puréed his confidence. He fricasseed his self-esteem. Everything Ramsay did was sprinkled with a generous portion of precision vulgarity. Tim was "the biggest twat in Britain". The restaurant owner Sue was "up to her eyeballs in shit". Ramsay was "shitting himself".
The food was in danger of being served where it shouldn't be: "If you toss that spinach one more time I'm going to shove it up your arse!" He threatened to pickle Tim's nuts. Would you like chips or wedges with that?
Ramsay is a desperately obnoxious man, but he makes for entertaining television. He dragged Bonaparte's from disaster to triumph in only a week, meaning that its Valentine's night customers went home from the restaurant without having to stop off at the hospital on the way. But when he returned a few weeks later, it was to find that all had reverted to its pre-Ramsay state. Food crawled from the fridge. Cockroaches demurred at conditions. The owner closed the restaurant for a day so that she could clean up and sack Tim. He found a job with the competition across the road. After this programme, that restaurant may suddenly have realised why all his burgers look like they could serve themselves.
As part of Network 2's interesting Frame 2 series, Land of the Morning Star was a bracing documentary about Papua, formerly Irian Jaya, formerly West Irian, formerly West Papua, formerly Netherlands New Guinea. Countries do not change their names simply to stave off boredom.
This beautiful place has been a plaything of empires. The Dutch had it first, and there is footage from 1926 showing their scientists measuring the head size of tribesmen in order to judge just how primitive they might be. The Japanese overran it during the second World War before the Allies arrived as welcomed liberators. Tribes that had never seen outsiders watched as men dropped from the sky. A witness recalled: "Wow! You couldn't see the sky . . . Americans."
The Dutch came back and were preparing to hand over independence, even though Indonesia - transforming itself from colony to empire - coveted the land. However, JFK saw newsreel footage of Khrushchev nestling into the chest of the Indonesian president like a newborn searching for a breast. Wanting influence, he persuaded the Dutch to hand Papua to Indonesia. It remains there, kicking and screaming under its boot.
A few years ago, under a new regime, political exiles were invited back. A national congress was allowed. Spectacularly adorned tribesmen, sporting penis gourds that reached to the forehead, walked from the highlands to the coastal capital to have their say. The congress voted for independence and anointed Chief Theys Eluay as leader: "Our Martin Luther King. Our Gandhi, Our Aung San Suu Ki."
But he has since been assassinated. Seven soldiers were found guilty and sentenced only to between two and three and a half years in prison.
Film-maker Mark Worth died earlier this year, shortly after making this documentary. The family says it was pneumonia that got him, although there are some who insist that it was the Indonesians. Whatever the truth, Land of the Morning Star was a powerful reminder of how a struggle between people on the second-largest island on the planet and the government of its fifth most populous country can go almost unnoticed on this side of the world.
As an aside, Network 2 is currently running a trailer for the imported comedy sketch show, Little Britain, at the end of which the continuity announcer sighs: "Is it any wonder they lost their empire?" Such Schadenfreude is most unbecoming. But funny.
