Inside Story (BBC 1, Tuesday)
The American Dream (BBC 2, Sunday)
Voyage (RTE 1, Tuesday)
Secret History (Channel 4, Monday)
QED (BBC 1, Wednesday)
Ally McBeal (Channel 4, Wednesday)
Used-car salesman Jim Godfrey loitered outside his east London premises looking like an ageing lizard in a cardigan. "If a husband and wife team come along, if they're English, got a sense of humour, I say `I'll take the missus as a deposit. Are 'er big ends OK? Does she need a rebore?' I say it with a smile on my face, of course. Breaks the ice." Well, yes Jim, very friendly and witty, suave too . . . although nowadays that sort of Carry On, seaside-postcard innuendo could get your face broken long before your ice.
Still, for all his dodgy, "big end" and "rebore" jokes, Jim is not boring. Inside Story: Confessions of a Car Salesman flitted between Jim's Guaranteed "Lucky" Motors and a BMW showroom in west London. When we first cut from Jim to the BMW smarm-fest, Antoni Craig and Laura Greene, a very 1990s couple, had just hooked themselves on a silver convertible. A third strand to this sharp, knowing documentary showed us aspiring car salespersons taking a course given by an outfit called The Training Corporation.
Jim has not been tutored by The Training Corporation. His most expensive car appears to cost £474. Mind you, it too is a BMW, a little less shiny and gleaming than the motor Antoni and Laura are chasing, but it's top-of-the-range at Jim's. In his own way, Jim is utterly honest. "Look, I'm not fixing it, I'm bodging it," he tells the camera. "Don't hit it too hard, guv'nor, the filler will fall out," he tells one prospective buyer, adding that the filler is probably stronger than the car. At 70, Jim is finding it very hard to make even modest ends meet.
Meanwhile, Antoni and Laura are getting no Cockney patter about big ends or filler. They are being subjected to BMWspeak, a velvety form of pseudo-casual sales guff which considers itself sophisticated. An over-dressed lizard, thirty-something, insists that, with BMWspeak, there must be "no big push - these cars sell themselves". It was explained to Antoni and Laura, for instance, how a BMW bonnet works: "Pull it down gently and press." Said in the wrong tone, or without the kind of smug smile used to suggest inclusion in an exclusive club, it could be construed as so patronising that the salesman might need face-filler after saying it.
But Antoni and Laura just beamed at the Beamer's bonnet. They might have been gazing at their newborn child. "Pull it down gently and press." Wow! Isn't German technology really something. Imagine a bonnet that you can close by just pulling down gently and pressing. Truly, this is Vorsprung Durch Technik with knobs on. Antoni and Laura just couldn't wait to fork out more than £30,000 for the car with the magic bonnet. As they drove away in it, they punched the air in triumph. Clearly, they felt like successful strikers but you knew that the lizard had scored too.
At the training course, aspiring lizards are being taught to "keep their eyes wide open" (literally); that "customers tell lies" (about getting a better price elsewhere); that they should "never do what the customer asks or answer their questions"; that, during haggling, they "should never commit to a price". They are further told to "make friends" with customers; "to show interest in him and his car" and to remember that "it's all about seduction because the longer we stay with people, the easier it is for them to trust us".
Really? Because the longer we stay with the cameras watching The Training Corporation, the harder it is to trust anyone. We become paranoid. Jackie Quinn, a woman, completes the course and gets posted to a salesroom, selling new-ish cars a mile up the Romford Road from "Lucky" Jim's motors. Jackie's sales manager is Stewart, a deadly, razortoothed lizard who "knows all the steps". Stewart, all businesslike and mock-confidential, manages to make a couple feel that they are getting a very special deal indeed. No doubt they are.
Perhaps the most awful reality about car sales across the spectrum from Jim through Jackie and on to the BMW brigade is that cars don't really have prices - at least not in the proper sense. It's just salespeople making deals and because they are trained in the lizardry involved, they can skin most punters. Jim Godfrey's days are numbered. "My missus says that one day they'll find me over a bonnet with a wash-leather in me hand and, no doubt, this is it," he says. The likeable thing about Jim is that he doesn't pretend not to be dodgy. His is a relatively honest dishonesty.
From the super-plush, Ferrari end of documentary-making comes The American Dream, a five-programme, oral-history series which looks at 10 families over three generations, spanning this century. The mix of interviews and archive footage gives it a standard form for this type of series. But the quality of the editing and the choice of emblematic old footage supply a context of epic grandeur to the more mundane individual lives spoken about in the interviews.
The yearnings, struggles, hopes, fears, successes and failures of a normal life can be made seem heroic if the context adds the necessary gravitas without squashing the necessary humanity. So, we are shown white, black, Mediterranean and Russian Jewish families and we hear them tell their own stories about life in America. At mention of the Roaring 20s or the Depression or the second World War, Charleston dancers or soup-kitchen lines or GIs in Europe immediately fill the screen, seamlessly linking the words and lives of the speakers to big-picture symbolism of the century's history.
Memories of the dustbowl years and some extraordinary, accompanying footage could make you almost feel how, as Jim Wolford of Arkansas said, "the sand in a strong wind cut like sandpaper". Endicott Peabody (where do American WASPs get those names?), a member of "an east coast establishment family", spoke about the three most WASP-ish forces in the US of his youth: the Episcopalian Church, Wall Street and government. (Not "the government", mind - just "government", indicating the sense of permanent access assumed by a class unquestioning of its own born-to-rule mentality). Dave Moore, a black man born in South Carolina and Joe Mifsud, born in Malta, became Ford workers in Detroit. They recalled the "hell on Earth" and "enormous risks" of working beside the furnaces. But Dave also remembered that having a job in Ford, with the Ford badge on his overalls, "made a black guy a celebrity in the neighbourhood". In 1990s speak, he could be considered "cool in the hood". Whatever about the spectacular progress made in many areas by the American Century, spoken language has taken a severe thrashing.
Still, this is a fine series. Its strengths are its American production values; its weaknesses its American insistence on self-congratulation. There have been great American successes this century and great American failures too. The problem with The American Dream is that it can't quite resist treating history as a morality story in which the US will inevitably triumph. Reared on feelgood endings and notions of making audiences feel good about themselves, US documentary is invariably too conscious about ratings and showbiz. Good stuff, but typically American, there's too much sugar coating the pill.
Back on RTE, Dick Warner is again making waves. His new series, Voyage, a six-parter about sailing around Ireland in a 42foot, 19-ton ketch, Rinn Voyager, will do well to repeat the success of Waterways, his journey along Ireland's rivers and canals. Still, on the evidence of this week's opening episode, Warner should have another winner. A splendid aerial shot of the ketch passing through Dublin's East Link bridge provided an auspicious christening for the series.
Turning south, Warner, skipper Gerry Moran and the crew of Eric Goodbody and Donal O'Kelly headed past Dun Laoghaire and Dalkey - "Dublin's Riviera", apparently. First landing was at Wicklow town. Off Wexford, where coastal erosion is alarming, an underwater camera showed us an anchor dropping to the sea-bed. It was a telling touch, not quite Jacques Cousteau perhaps, but in using aerial and underwater shots, the visual aspect of Voyage is enhanced.
On the Great Saltee Island, we got close-ups of gannets and a little anecdotal local history in the Warner way. Keeping the script pared has been one of Warner's wisest choices in the past and he has remembered the lesson. Done properly, the pictures should tell the central story in a documentary such as this. Superfluous words have sunk so many similar efforts. With "show don't tell" as the correct premise, plants such as orchids, pansies and sea-holly just require a camera, a pause and some simple verbal identification. Voyage could well hit choppy waters yet. But, so far, it's been smooth - and enjoyable - sailing.
Other documentaries this week included Secret History and QED. The former, in an episode titled D-Day Disaster, told how more Americans were killed in training for D-Day than during the Utah beach operation itself. Prisoners of the Forgotten Plague, meanwhile, was the title of QED's investigation of sleeping sickness (encephalitis lethargica), which swept the world in the 1920s killing, it is estimated, more than one million people at the time.
The disastrous training exercises off the coast of Devon, which, in their most spectacular cock-up, cost the lives of 749 men, were put in perspective by the fact that Utah beach in Normandy was taken weeks later with the loss of 197 lives. Sometimes, Secret History is not really about anything very secret but about popular misconceptions (usually created by sustained propaganda). This week's, however, was a revelation. The operations supervisor, Admiral Don Moon, committed suicide not long after the mess. He hadn't been alone in creating the disaster.
QED included footage of a 1990s case of encephalitis lethargica. It was horrific. In September 1993, the then 23-year-old Rebecca Howells contracted the virus and was saved only by a massive dose of steroids reducing swelling in her brain. We saw her looking at hospital video of herself and saying that she could not recognise her own face. Still, 1990s medicine found an answer for Rebecca. Philip Leather, a gifted child, has had the disease now for 64 years. Scientists are awaiting his death so that they can dissect his brain in the search for information about a killer disease which is only sleeping itself. It hasn't gone away, you know.
Finally and briefly, Ally McBeal. This week's kitten-soft, fluffy-puffy, cuddly-wuddly dose concerned sexual harassment, Julie Andrews and dirty jokes. Forget the sexual harassment bit (one woman sues others because, she claims, they are "hostile" to her good looks). It's the Julie Andrews stuff which was thoroughly frightening. Ally's flatmate suggests that Ally is too much like Julie Andrews to tell a dirty joke. Ally rejects this and points out (sorry) that Ms Andrews once showed her breasts on screen. She had, says Ally, "optimistic nipples". Surely Jim Godfrey's guff is less offensive than that. Optimistic nipples? I need a rest from TV. Click!