WHEN Wax meets silicone you might expect the result, to be as polished and shiny as a sideboard savaged by Mr Sheen. Think again. On the evidence of Ruby Wax Meets... Pamela Anderson, the result is quite the opposite - rough and dull. There were a few good lines ("Pammie is the real reason women's lib will slide back into the slime") but mostly the meeting of sarcastic sycophancy and Baywatch babery was bloody boring.
A week earlier, Ms Wax had met Imelda "Shoes" Marcos, widow of Ferdinand Marcos, the great democrat, freedom fighter, libertarian and humanist. (At least those, were terms used by "Shoes" to describe her dead hubby.) As interviews go, this was bizarre in one way and offensive in another. Ruby Wax trades in steamroller irony and, fair enough, who's complaining if "Shoes" is steamrolled a bit? But when the victim utterly misses the savage wit, it's a bit like witnessing an assault on a simpleton, albeit a nasty simpleton. It just doesn't feel quite right.
The Wax way is to turn the victim into a laughing stock and to make this acceptable, she pokes fun at herself. So, we get Ruby acting the Baywatch babe in order to grant herself additional licence to take the mick, out of "Pammie". The results can be initially funny, of course, but when you see that Ruby is at least as much into Ruby as Pam is into Pam, there is a hypocrisy about the technique which rather spoils the joke.
Still, there's an undeniable energy about Ruby Wax's motormouth wisecracking. Sitting on a caravan floor with Ms Anderson, she tried to demonstrate what giving birth feels like. "Just try and suck in the floor with your butt," she advised. "Yeah ... the whole floor." Pammy, dressed in regulation swimsuit (and bizarre furry boots) seemed, to be fair to her, game for a laugh at this point. Her butt, of course, would feature a lot more before this show was out.
Unfortunately, to justify this concentration on Ms Anderson's butt, Ms Wax's butt butted in too often. It was always going to happen - Ruby was going to get rigged out in the Baywatch gear. "It's just amazing what you can do with a red girdle and a couple of udders," she said. Amazing indeed, but stretching one good joke for two thirds of the programme wasn't even amusing. Would we see Ruby in a line of hunks and bunnies running along the beach in slow motion? Would a cat drink milk? Would Dick Spring take a trip abroad?
Of course we saw it: butt shots, cleavage shots, chest shots, crotch shots - the camera grammar of Baywatch. The show, watched regularly by 142 million viewers worldwide, deserves to be parodied. But it's been done so often at this stage that Ruby Wax had nothing new to add except her own butt and a few mildly funny expressions. By this stage Pammy, having survived questions about breast implants, and marriage to a bloke who sounded like one of the Hollywood Men monsters (in every way!), had gone.
Where she had been funny, interested and amusing at the start, she had become monosyllabic as soon as she twigged just how sarcastic Ruby's sycophancy was attempting to be. And that, really, was the programme's main problem. Once Pammy pulled out, there was too much Ruby. But isn't there always too much Ruby in Ruby's shows? Tomorrow night she tackles Roseanne Barr, another woman who was funny until she started to believe her own dope.
THE women featured in The Decision: The Wrong Body were anything but funny. Indeed, as far as they were concerned, they were anything but women: they were men. We saw pictures of grown men as young girls. This was the first in a two part documentary about transsexuals but in spite of its understanding, concerned tone, its explanations about "gender confusion" were less than convincing.
"One in 17,000 people is sure from the start that they are in the wrong body," said a voiceover. Perhaps this is true. But there was an arbitrariness about the criterion offered as proof of this. Post mortems on the brains of transsexuals showed, the programme said, "that they were always the gender they thought they were" (i.e. the opposite gender to the genitals they were born with).
It may well be - though it was news to me - that brain is the most fundamental determinant of gender. Certainly, it's hard to appreciate the point after seeing, say, Pamela Anderson. Most people, I would have thought, would find it easier just to go with what, they've, been given physically (with all right, a little hormone treatment in some cases). But clearly, some don't. Near the end of this extraordinary programme, a group of teenage British transsexuals and their parents visited the Free University Hospital in Amsterdam where they met a 24 year old man very pleased with himself.
Having undergone eight years of hormone treatment, a double mastectomy and been rigged out with a custom built penis, he was sitting up in bed, happy as Larry (or Laura, for that matter). So, how had it been for him when he was a her? It was terrible, he wanted to mutilate herself (the pronouns are a minefield in recount in this) and now he's really glad she had the treatment and the surgery.
With that, he whipped off his pyjama top and showed his manly chest. The wannabees in his audience oohed and aahed. In fairness, it looked like a neat piece of surgery. Buoyed up the gushing audience he decided he might as well go the whole hog. He pulled down his trousers and beamed with self satisfaction as he displayed his new manhood to the cameras. You had to, as they say, see it, to appreciate the weirdness of the moment.
In spite of the triumphal demeanour of the young man (the ultimate New Man) in the bed, there was something desperately sad about this programme. Certainly, those who seek such utterly fundamental changes to their bodies cannot be happy to begin with: all that psychotherapy, hormone treatment and surgery is a huge price to be willing to pay. But, for all that, it is not simple to understand that they find it easier to change their bodies than change their minds.
What makes it even weirder is the thought that transsexuals - at any rate, heterosexual transsexuals - after all their surgery, go out in search of what they've lost.
A male brain in a female body or vice, versa should, logic suggests, result in the possibility of the person fancying him or herself. But instead of becoming contented autosexuals, victims mutilate themselves and really, while it is genuinely sad ... it's also very weird indeed. The Christian Brothers never explained it in school - anyway.
THE best television of the week was Timewatch's Bad Boys. It traced six, young offenders featured in a 1973 Man Alive documentary and was able to show the 1970s teenagers, who were fathers to the 1990s men, meeting those men on split screens. Michael Apted's, celebrated Seven Up (and its successors) is the best known example of documentary television allowing the past to come face to face with its impossible to know future. This programme was just as engrossing.
The six were inmates (or clients, to use the PC term) of Peper Harow, an approved school in Surrey. At the time, three out of four approved school clients re offended. Would the Peper Harow boys be any different? Well, six, of course, is too small a number to be statistically significant, but the personalised approach of Bad Boy's made its findings fascinating.
Given the understandable, if not necessarily justified, hysteria about crime in this country, this programme offered no encouragement to the birchers even the intelligent birchers - among us. Peper Harow was a place which really wanted to help these lads rather than simply hurt them back for the hurt they had caused to others. That said, it was no holiday tamp. Community meetings (giant group therapy sessions) could get to the parts no birch could reach: the lads' screwed up emotions.
Film from the original Man Alive documentary showed the therapist, Melvyn Rose, with permed hair, full beard, flared jeans and a darkish, hooped pullover. The lads looked, as most did then without knowing it, like the flotsam of the glam, rock era: straggly hair, baggy jeans, retina piercing shirts and tank tops.
For the record, only two of the six reoffended. One is a community nurse, another is assistant director of an institution similar to Peper Harow, a third runs a centre for abused children, a fourth is a welder and a fifth is unemployed, but quite happy. Just one of the original six - Pete - proved untraceable. The producers discovered that he was released from prison in 1991, which showed that nothing is perfect. Still, the abiding lesson was that Peper Harow had given most of these lads what their families had not.
FINALLY, Across the Line, RTE's eight part travel series, left Busaras Wednesday. Apparently, 8,000 hopefuls replied to an ad last March seeking two people to make a 14 week, overland journey to Australia with a camera crew. The pair chosen were a 26 year old Dublin nurse, Patricia Mooney, and a 30 year old Co Cork musician, Gavin Harte. Ms Mooney seems volcanically vivacious; Mr Harte rather more introspective. Both have what we might charitably call a strong sense of self.
This is young people's television, or more accurately, television for members of the Heineken Generation: Gerry Ryan listeners, young Europeans, people who do the Guinness dance after a few pints - that sort of creature. In the first episode, the pair travelled to Istanbul. Along the way, we saw them in London, Paris, Rome, Brindisi and the Greek islands of Paros and Samas.
There is a frantic, youthful, energetic feel to Across the Line and for frantic, youthful and energetic people, it is probably entertaining. Certainly John Murray's snappy and busy production captures the sense of people moving Quickly and cheaply (£25 a day each) and is refreshing on RTE.
Ms Mooney and Mr Harte have a long way to go yet, but you get the sense that, as happened between Ms Wax and Ms Anderson, their relationship will decline after a pleasant beginning - One star good, two stars bad, is the general rule.