When Louis Met Paul And Debbie BBC2, Tuesday RTE1, Sunday
Cannibal Channel 4, Tuesday
Sin E TG4, Monday
Metrosexuality Channel 4, Wednesday
The last time I saw Paul Daniels's house on the telly, he was floating around his garden with Richard Bacon from the Big Breakfast. He and his beautiful wife, Debbie McGee, had suffered badly during the floods, but he had an autobiography to plug, so chin up and make the best of it. It reminded me of the time Jimmy Saville did that documentary with Louis Theroux in which he broke his leg falling off a mountain. The first person Jimmy rang was a local newspaper photographer.
So, who should turn up in Daniels's house this week only Louis Theroux (When Louis Met Paul and Debbie). Theroux's interview technique runs something similar to that of characters in those 1990s movies in which a perfectly nice person would inveigle their way into a household, join the parents for dinner, laugh with their children and then go all batty and boil the pet rabbit if asked to leave. Theroux acts the gangly fool, following the subjects everywhere like a confused chick, desperately trying to ingratiate himself with them. They get in the car, he's there. They go to work, he's there. They open their sock drawer, he's in there matching up the pairs. He peppers his commentary with phrases such as: "I think Paul and I are beginning to bond", and "We are happy in each other's company". Every time he appears on the television you take the phone off the hook, because you don't want to miss a thing. Theroux followed the pair as they got set for the opening of McGee's dance company, Ballet Imaginaire. The Imaginaire bit had much to do with the fact that she did Swan Lake with a mechanical swan, and Theroux was desperate to see how it worked. "Don't show it. It's a secret technique. It's copyrighted," begged McGee. That it turned out to be a guy on his knees pulling the swan across stage with string proved that a magician's assistant should never reveal her tricks. Despite the mechanical swan, Ballet Imaginaire didn't do so well, and quickly ran up losses of £100,000. The sight of Daniels in the Stirling University bar trying to make an audience appear out of nothing by bullying confused students with pints in their hands into going to the ballet is a scene he will not want re-played at his funeral. The magician has not lost any of his distinct brand of self-satisfied charm and gave a masterful display of the celebrity strop when appearing on Ready Steady Cook. "Have you seen the show?" asked the friendly floor manager. "No." "After the introduction you grab an apron." "I can't reach that far." "Will you be doing some magic?" "No."
Despite some valiant attempts, Theroux never got into the bedroom. It was in Jimmy Saville's bedroom that he began to uncover the full, jaw-dropping extent of the DJ's mother-fixation, opening a wardrobe to find all her clothes freshly dry-cleaned and ironed, years after her death. Actually, Paul and Debbie turned out to be less creepy than you might have hoped, and were instead locked into some sort of teen love thing which was really kind of sweet, in small doses. "We didn't think we'd be your kind of people," McGee commented towards the end, still completely missing the point. The bit of humour was needed after the events of Sunday night's ER, in which we discovered that that nice Dr Green has a brain tumour. He didn't ask how long he had left to live, but I'm guessing till the end of the series. He was going to tell his girlfriend, that equally nice Dr Elizabeth Corday, only she got in first with her news that she's pregnant. They hugged, and he told her how happy he was, but left out the bit about the brain tumour so as not to ruin her moment and the credits rolled to much wailing and sobbing in my house. They do this every year in ER, and every year we fall for it. Last year it was Lucy getting stabbed. Before that it was George Clooney leaving the twins he didn't know he had. Our local Kleenex salesman can't get enough of it. I believe we're putting his kids through college. "If you take a fresh ham, a roast pork, the butt-end where it's a little burnt - that's what you taste like." So now you know. Channel 4's Cannibal was a bit of television with scientific pretensions and a lot of psycho-babble, but was really just a chance to get us going "Uuugh", as flesh-eating maniacs described their worst crimes, while we were given close-ups of them tucking into their dinner. Issei Sagawa was a sickly, small Japanese child who grew up with a sexual dysfunction and a love of tall, white women. So he went to university in Paris. "I wanted to know that taste of human flesh - just one bite of the hips. When you fall in love you want to kiss her. I was just the same. I wanted to taste her." His obsession became so overwhelming that, one evening, he invited 25-year-old Dutch student Renee Hartevelt to his flat, shot her and ate her. "She was a very good friend to me, so I thought I must eat her."
IN his childhood, Sagawa and his brother had played games in which his uncle dressed up as a man-eating beast and his dad as the knight sent to rescue them. In the game, though, the kids more often than not ended up in a pot. Cannibal was curiosity TV that would have been a lot easier to watch if it hadn't been spoiled by the documentary-maker Katherine English coming over all Clarice Starling on us. She walked through the streets of Tokyo with Sagawa as he explained the flip-side of his fetish. "I don't mind being eaten by the young, beautiful girl," he explained. "So you'd like me to eat you?" offered English. Don't flatter yourself. Later she visited self-proclaimed cannibal Arthur Shawcross in jail and worried, "I do not know what to expect - what is to stop him from reaching across the table and grabbing me." The two prison guards and her camera crew in the room with her obviously gave her no comfort. She was so visibly disappointed with Shawcross's reluctance to divulge the fine details of his murders that she pleaded with him: "It's just that we're making a documentary about cannibals, so I want you to be frank." Shawcross flashed a sharp glance that briefly hinted at fava beans and nice Chianti. But he let it go. In this week's Sin E, Blathnaid Ni Chofaigh met homeless Irish in London, men whose stories were punctuated with pauses so heavy with emotion they let a lifetime of regrets flood in. The tales were all similar. The freedom of leaving home turned into the shackles of alcoholism, the lost loves, the loneliness, the embarrassment. Each of them was anonymous, and you wondered about family, and what it is that makes the shame greater the shorter the trip home is. Some had managed a sort of late salvation through the drying-out programmes and community groups set up to help, but others still talked through a slur of drunkenness. One showed Ni Chofaigh the car without a steering wheel in which he lived, gave the run-down on the economics of alcoholism, held up his broken fingers. The programme could have done without Mel C's shallow pop take on homelessness as part of the soundtrack, but Sin E served as a useful reminder of those who left Ireland for England but ended up without a country at all. It's hardly noticed now, but there are still Irish going over there, and they are still ending up on the streets. These days they are usually running away from something more than the economic factors - drug abuse, fractured families - so are even less equipped to cope.
One tradition remains, though. A young lad, who left home in 1997, described getting ripped off by a fellow Irishman, echoing the stories told by those who arrived in the decades before him. "Never work for your own, isn't that what they say." Finally, a quick word for Metrosexuality, which is the kind of programme that only Channel 4 could make. Within 10 minutes it had two scenes of gay sex, about two dozen multi-racial characters, "satirical" targets at every turn, a lot of screaming, a drum 'n' bass soundtrack, skateboarding, layer after layer of flashy graphics, hundred-miles-an-hour camera work and dialogue so hip that it isn't even hip yet.
It's good to see that Channel 4 - which produces some of the best television around - still has it in it to come up with some of the worst.
