Geri's World Walkabout (BBC 1, Tuesday)
The Day Britain Died (BBC 2, Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday)
It's A Family Affair (RTE 1, Saturday)
Harbour Nights (RTE 1, Thursday)
Ginger Spice stares at a derelict crematorium in the ruins of Sachsenhausen concentration camp. A camera zooms in on an oven and lingers before cutting back to the star, now welling up with tears. Is this merely an effective way of bringing home the horror of genocide to a new generation? Or is there something obscene in linking the Spice Girls and the Holocaust? It's true that one generation's crass trivialisation is often another's valid populism. But Sachsenhausen and Geri Halliwell: might this union represent, ironically, the final dissolution?
The opening episode of the two-part Geri's World Walkabout featured Ms Halliwell in her latest role as a United Nations goodwill ambassador. Now even with all the goodwill in the world, it's got to be pointed out that there's a very heavy degree of levity about this appointment. How cheesy should this trend become? How about Mr Blobby as a special envoy to Belgrade? Or Barney as the main man (sorry, main cuddly purple dinosaur) in Middle Eastern diplomacy? Westlife as advisors on world refugee problems? Where does it end?
The argument could be made, I suppose, that, in spite of Primo Levi or Bruno Bettelheim or Hannah Arendt or any of the scores of heavyweight thinkers who have dedicated themselves to the Holocaust, genocide, albeit on a smaller scale, still broke out in Europe again. Perhaps a fading pop star, not especially noted for the development of her brain, whatever about other parts, can be more effective in preventing recurrences of mass barbarism. Maybe that's the truth. If it is, we may have to decommission what usually passes for knowledge, learning and common sense.
At Sachsenhausen, the former Ginger, blonde now (or she was when the programme was shot late last year), met a bloke named Jorg. He used to be a neo-Nazi but is now a committed anti-fascist. Jorg has done this ideological somersault because he's gay and Nazis don't approve of homosexuality. We should, I suppose, be grateful that Jorg has changed his mind at all. But still, it might be more satisfactory if people opposed fascism because they are human, not merely because of what they want to do with their reproductive organs, even accepting that that is a significant part of being human.
Anyway, before meeting Jorg, Geri had begun her goodwill ambassador-ing in the Philippines. There she met Kris Aquino, daughter of two former presidents, Benigo and Cori Aquino. Kris presents a popular TV talk show - real Oprah-opera. "Your life has been like a soap opera," said Geri. But having survived privilege; "exile" (to Boston, which, fair enough, has cold winters and an even colder caste system, but is hardly Devil's Island); the assassination of her father; election of her mother and personal success on TV (maybe her name and contacts didn't help!), it wasn't the sort of life you'd find in Coronation Street, Eastenders or Brookside.
Certainly Kris's life didn't seem quite as tough as Jessica's. Now 19, Jessica used to be a scavenger on a rubbish tip. An estimated 30,000 people scavenge on the nine square miles of garbage mountain at Payatas in north Manila. Jessica recalled once finding a human arm and another time "a bag of foetuses" there. "I pretended to be a priest and then we buried them," she told Geri. Jessica has escaped the dump and continues to study hard. She showed more goodwill than anyone else in the programme.
Other stop-offs on goodwill ambassador Geri's world walkabout brought her to New York, Rio de Janeiro and Pembrokeshire in Wales. Certainly, there have been more airheaded travel programmes made. But there was something quite disturbing about this one, something even more unsettling than Geri's sculpted nose and rock hard neck. Having her present it is both perverse and clever. But with the UN endorsing this one, do no spaces remain safe from the cult of celebrity, which in some contexts, surely is itself a kind of violation?
It's not as though Spice Girls have less right than anyone else to visit Holocaust sites. But if such places need a pop star to make them significant to young people, their significance has already been lost. Geri Halliwell became famous because she and four other young women shook all they had and hit the pop music jackpot. Fair enough. There's a place for that sort of fame and that place is on youngsters' bedroom walls, not in the hell holes of Nazi Germany or even modern Manila. More Unbecoming Nonsense from the UN.
Columnist for London's Observer and Express newspapers, Andrew Marr also went walkabout this week. Clearly less of an international figure than Ginger Spice, Andy confined himself to Britain. As his quest was to find out whether "British identity" still exists, this was probably logical. All the same, had he embarked on a similar quest a century ago, the sprawling British empire would have given him a trip even greater than Ginger's. That's downsizing for you.
It's also the context in which notions of British identity exist. Winning what, in football parlance, might be termed "a result" in World War 2, Britain was able, as Marr argued in The Day Britain Died, to "bathe in the light of victory over Nazi Germany". It was a fair point, but only up to a point, because the reality of the second World War in Europe is that its core was a struggle between fascism and communism in which the Soviet Red Army triumphed over Hitler's overstretched military machine, 80 per cent of which was deployed on the Eastern front.
That does not in any way detract from the British contribution, much of which was crucial. It just puts it in a context that Andrew Marr might have included. Starting off in his home town of Dundee, which is also home to the comics of the DC Thomson outfit, he recalled that, up until the mid 1970s, British derring-do in WW2 was a major element of those comics. The rather colourful language of "achtung" and "krauts" and "pig-dogs" and "Nazi schweinhunds" were part of the WW2 cult. Even those who produced them admit that they would be less than appropriate today.
So the wartime "glue" which had held Britain together somehow "came unstuck" said Andy. With home rule for Wales and Scotland (which anyway, was part of Great Britain, not Britain), London rule drifting, a federal Europe and a globalised world, the three-century-old notion of "Britain", is increasingly redundant. There is England, Scotland and Wales (and yes, there is Northern Ireland too, but that was never part of Britain, great or otherwise, but of "the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland") and each, especially the small nations, is currently finding it more in its own interests to stress its differences from, rather than similarities to, the others.
Marr could have saved himself a lot of shoe leather by just looking at film of England's World Cup games at Wembley in 1966 and its European Championship games there in 1996. Thirty-four years ago, Union Jacks (as they are commonly if incorrectly known) waved England on to victory. Four years ago, flags bearing only St George's cross predominated. It was clear that the populist synonymity between England and Britain had declined hugely.
Still, on the matter of what nationality has to do with identity, volatile passions remain. It was telling that supporters of Scotland's national football team told Marr: "We're not British, we are Scots". The formation of national identity is, of course, complex and identity itself is multi-layered. Ideas that it's not are what lead to bitter local wars like that in the North and to global cataclysms like WW2.
So Andrew Marr found a Britain of the disunited nations, in which traditional notions of identity are just as much in flux as traditional notions of identity are in this country. Tensions nowadays are probably as much generational as geographical. The North, of course, remains more acute. There, notions of identity are still so raw that decommissioning cannot, at least as yet, be achieved. For the IRA it's far less about the capacity to wage an armed campaign as it is about sovereignty of self. Issues don't come more explosive than that so, wisely, Mr Marr didn't cross the Irish Sea.
THE nuclear family remains a favourite unit for game show producers, so RTE has given us It's A Family Affair, presented by Dara O Briain. Transmitted in the traditional, early Saturday evening, happy families' slot, this, like The Generation Game, is showbiz of a lightness that would make even Ginger Spice seem profound. But there's a place for that too, even if the public manufacturing of family fun always leaves itself wide open to the most unmerciful savagings and parody.
The presenter is normally the crucial element of such shows, although gimmicks occasionally make powerful impacts. For his part, O Briain seems sufficiently bubbly, even if it's difficult to forget the fact that he shows a more sarcastic persona on Don't Feed the Gondolas. A dark sarcasm to an enthusiastic child is not really the stuff that these shows require. In the event, through the standard silliness of ominous music and gaudy gimmicks (the robot `Shredder' is a bit dubious) the required engagements with viewers were probably maintained.
Certainly, it was as well that the first winning family - the Nevilles of Tallaght - took home a car. RTE needs a few winners these days, and a bum start to the series would certainly cost more than the price of a car. There are, of course, some ropey bits that need tightening, but the amateur talent contests in the provinces are quite a slick idea. However, links between live studio action and recorded inserts rather break the spell. A few more tricks with lights wouldn't go astray either. These gigs can be better but we've seen them worse too.
After last week's opening episode, Harbour Nights introduced the quite bizarre Fr Paddy Norton on Thursday. Described as a "healing priest", Fr Norton, who returns to Courtown from America every summer, aggravated tensions in the village by describing local people as "sheep" and holidaymakers as "goats". He also referred to some people as "the dirt of Dublin". His supporters consider him to be quite a character.
What the caged parrot goaded by him into repeatedly banging its beak against its cage thinks of the healing priest is another matter. But Fr Norton certainly has the showbiz touch. In true televangelical style, he produced a formerly crippled man testifying to the miracle cure. The priest then proceeded to heal what a voiceover described as "his flock". After the sheep and goats controversy, you had to hope that the flock remark was ironic but it didn't sound like it was. Still, Fr Paddy should spice up a docusoap that is likely to be worth another visit.