TV Review: The heavy storm of Euro 2004 football lifted briefly at the beginning of the week, and through the gaps seeped the dense fog of Wimbledon.
Among this year's highlights has been Russian Maria Sharapova, who has brought some relief to the commentators by having a forehand just as impressive as her legs. Some day they might be able to talk about her without feeling it necessary to also mention Anna Kournikova. But not yet. "She can't escape her beauty," insisted Vijay Amritraj, in a refreshingly old-fashioned interview on BBC Breakfast on Tuesday morning. Certainly, the camera didn't so much focus on Sharapova as gawp longingly at her.
On Wednesday, Tim Henman took to Centre Court once the staff had scraped Jennifer Capriati from its surface. She had, minutes before, been swatted out of the competition by Serena Williams in the time it takes the rest of us to pick up a racquet. Among the BBC's tricks is a very-slow-motion camera, and when it replays Williams through this it reveals her to have the merciless grace of a puma leaping at a deer.
The BBC also used that slow-motion camera during Tim Henman's game against Mario Ancic. It was nice of them to do so, that being the only way in which Henman would see the ball. After three sets, he almost needed to be carried out on a stretcher having been so thoroughly beaten up by his opponent: a Croatian 20-year-old with a catapult where his right arm should be. The crowd, previously a little giddy from the fumes of the union jack face paint, were quite stunned. Their cheering quickly turning to a drizzle of applause that sounded something like rain falling on a parade.
The commentators kept the faith. "There's the first fist-pump," said John McEnroe of Henman's trademark gesture. But Ancic fist-pumped harder, giving a double fist clench of impressive ferocity. Ultimately, crowd and commentators united to give Ancic the praise and applause he deserved. "Ancic didn't even blink with one eye," suggested Boris Becker, whose commentary remains far less precise than his hair. "He just had 20 more horse powers in every department of the game." Meanwhile, out on Henman Hill a disappointed Brit waved an inflatable donkey at the camera. Which showed no subtlety at all.
Being the summer, there is a dwindling supply of new programmes, so the sports coverage is always allowed run a little wild until the autumn schedules come along to trim it back again. RTÉ is almost at that time of year when, apart from the sport, reheated and repackaged programmes fill the airtime while everybody goes on their holidays. The repeats are fast moving in, although we have not yet reached the point at which the only evidence of there ever having been people in Montrose is a half-eaten meal in the canteen and the occasional rumble of trucks delivering Pat Kenny's wages.
There are occasional bright spots, such as the Townlands series of short documentaries. This week's Communion Kids was a thoroughly enchanting film from the always pitch-perfect director Adrian McCarthy and Wildfire Films. It was a child-level view of that singular ceremony; that burst pipe of money and bad taste. We met Adam and Lorna, residents of Fatima Mansions, a couple of eight-year-olds in Dublin 8, as they prepared for the big day. The result was sometimes a live-action Give Up Yer Aul Sins. Important theological questions were raised. Did the crown of thorns give Jesus brain damage? Does unblessed Communion wafer taste nasty? The film didn't exactly have to scrape around for the outrageous, but neither did it sneer at it. There were wonderful scenes at the beauty parlour as the girls lined up to get their hair done in a juvenile parody of their mothers. In the church, the girls came traditionally dressed as white taffeta clouds. The boys wore suits wider than they were long; except for one young lad who wore a replica sailor's suit, complete with cap, gold rope and shoulder straps that suggested his rank to be that of lieutenant. He stood there, hands in his pockets, cap tipped back, boasting of the €30 already earned. It was a crystallised moment of innocence; proud as punch and completely oblivious to the great amusement his appearance in this film will present to his girlfriends in the decades to come.
Are there professional Holy Communion organisers yet? People who test the bounciness of the castle; who know trade secrets on how to keep a cow's lick down. In Britain they would get a series out of that sort of thing.
You Are What You Eat is part of a trend that has been labelled "lifestyle television", but is more accurately the television of admonishment. Condescending, know-it-all women berate people for their lack of fashion, hygiene, health, manners, self-esteem and general class. Television has even started to have a pop at itself. Another new programme, Honey I Ruined The House, arrived this week with the promise that it would rescue houses from owners who reckoned that because decorating looks so easy on the makeover shows then they should do it themselves. In order to get under your skin, then, television has begun to engage in a bit of self-flagellation. Don't believe the television, your television was saying. It'll make you believe you have taste as well as talent. Get away from that wall before someone gets hurt. Put the nail gun down.
In You Are What You Eat, Dr Gillian McKeith insists that she can change the lifestyles of fat people in eight weeks, by using a cunning regiment of diet and humiliation. We were introduced to her first subject, 17-stone Yvonne, via an apocalyptic chorus and an extreme close up of her half-naked body. The lens ran through canyons of cellulite, glided over floes of flab.
Then Dr McKeith went at her like a sergeant major of sense. She piled up her week's meals on a table, forming a brightly coloured tip of microwave meals and crisps. She told Yvonne that these were making her smelly and depressed, shredding her concentration and deflating her libido. "You're full of crap!" she declared, before sending Yvonne for a session of colonic irrigation to find out exactly which type. Whole chunks of undigested food scampered through the tube. "This is a thin, runty little excuse for a poo!" decided Dr McKeith. If you're at the stage when your excrement's being insulted on national television, then you've probably gone as low as you can go.
Anyway, Yvonne was put on a diet of pulses and beans ("Sadists."), but it was the weight of Dr McKeith's condescension that really did the trick. Over a couple of months, Yvonne lost two stone and three dress sizes. She was happy with her new body, and you have to admire the healthy message being sent out by the programme. But that still doesn't stop you from wanting to strap Dr Gillian McKeith to a sofa and force-feed her Wagon Wheels until biscuit oozes from her ears.
Wife Swap returned this week. This is a programme that doesn't bother to intervene, but simply lets two wives go at each other like domestic gladiators. It is now, though, somewhat smothered in predictability, and is beginning to pant a little under the forced intensity. This week's clash was yet another of slob versus snob. Two women swapped families. A working-class man learned to appreciate his woman; a middle-class family got to loosen up a little. It all ended in a big row. Wife Swap is class war by other means. It is rare that the two families are not from either side of the divide, and their coming together is always sufficiently fractious. What did you get out of it, the middle-class Pat was asked of her stay in the slobbish Compton household. "I got lice." Which was true.
In this attention-deficient age such harsh concept ideas tend to have a shelf life of about three years. The first series builds a momentum. By the second, those who heard all about it at the water-cooler join those who loved the first series. By the third, everybody's seen it all before and the original idea has been ripped-off by other programmes. Sometimes these programmes drag themselves on, self-deludedand long out of fashion. Someday, someone will come up with a programme in which condescending, know-it-all women arrive to admonish sloppy television producers. At which moment your TV set will implode with a loud burp.
