TV Review: Time to check back in with the folks at Fox News, which this week cranked up in response to Operation Vigilant Resolve. By the way, isn't that such a dull name for a military operation? It sounds like a bullet-point that's been given a promotion. Nobody would ever rent out a movie called Operation Vigilant Resolve.
The news station continues to be uncomfortably addictive, perhaps because of the peculiar thrill it gives as it makes your blood simmer. There is a particular anchor called Bill O'Reilly, presenter of a nightly show, The O'Reilly Factor, whose cab-driver commentary must be a barometer of right-wing sentiment because mercury seems to have seeped into his brain. He needs so much time to blame the US's woes on the French, Ted Kennedy, the UN, the liberal media, the new Spanish government, the Iranians, Bill Clinton, the cowardly Iraqi police and the ungrateful Iraqi people that it is illustrative to find him now making time to criticise Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush.
He is so convinced of his mastery of debate that he doesn't notice when it doubles back on itself. He begins each day with a few main points on the screen that help him get his opinions in before anyone else. Such points as: "History may show that the Iraqi campaign was a mistake, but it may show the opposite." History cannot argue with that.
Through most of Fox News, the commentary continues to be almost solely reactionary, its analysis yelled at the pitch of sports commentary, its insistence that it is "fair and balanced" sinister in its sincerity. You will have to wait around a while before finding any deep contextualisation, but a dig at the French is never far away.
Its journalists are aroused by displays of US military power. This week, according to the screen caption, it was "Hammer Time" in Iraq. Time for those Iraqis to lie back and be pacified.
Steve Doocy and a guy called "The Judge", whose real name seems to have been lost in a stampede towards informality, present a morning show called Fox & Friends, which, come to think of it, sounds like a kids' cartoon. On Tuesday, they interviewed the US administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, in the manner of two boys shuffling for autographs. At the end of the cosy chat, code-named Operation Timid Reverence, Doocy offered to buy Bremer a cocktail when he returned to the States. Your first thought was that from where Doocy had positioned himself, if he opened a cocktail umbrella it would cause Bremer some nasty internal damage.
They hosted a phone-in during which callers did not hold back. "God bless President Bush," they would say. "God bless the troops," they would add. Doocy and The Judge agreed with these well-argued points before adding to them.
"This is going to end with the rehabilitation, liberalisation and democratisation of the Iraqi people," decided The Judge. Or at the very least, they'll kill 'em all trying.
"If Iraq was only water and rushes they wouldn't have gone in at all," said someone in Frank Ned and Busy Lizzie, an unusual documentary about a 70-year-old bachelor farmer in Co Donegal and the woman who comes 50 miles from Bridgend every week to clean his house.
It gave us subtitles, even when everyone spoke English, perhaps so that those of us massed on the eastern edge of the country could understand the words of those dotted along the north-west. Otherwise, Frank's gentle humour might have been sunk in his sodden accent, as he rambled through the deep Rs and soft Ds. As happens on TG4, the subtitles were bashful. "Feck" was printed, for instance, when it was obvious that its bolder cousin had been spoken. Some words need no translation.
Anyway, it was a film in no great hurry, so that it sometimes just watched as Frank nodded off in his chair or as he and the young men who worked his farm yawned over their tea. It followed him on the land and into the barn, in a Donegal that seemed to be always battling against twilight. It came across as a dispatch from the edge of the world, the cheap glare of the digital lens thinning the atmosphere.
Frank was an endearing character. In his chair he was as regal as you can get with several layers of wool on your body and a gummy grin. Lizzie, meanwhile, had a sharper edge to her. She had arrived down his road one day as a travelling saleswoman and stayed to wash the dishes. We were led to believe that rumours were rife that she had since moved in to his will. However, this was gossip passed on to us only by Lizzie, who would occasionally blow the dust from the day by telling us how much she hated Frank's part of Donegal and its nosy inhabitants. But we met few of the latter, who were either disinclined to feature on camera or just not as interested in the whole affair as had been suggested.
There was a certain ambiguity in their financial relationship, emphasised by Lizzie encouraging Frank to buy another farm. However, it was left open-ended and unsatisfactory and the film's gentle observation floundered on the need for a plot.
Frank has halved his chance of dying in the next 12 months simply by making a new friend, according to Robert Putnam on Agenda. Putnam wrote Bowling Alone, in which he argued that modern Americans are drifting away from friends, family, neighbours and community. He claims that joining one social group halves the chance of dying within the next year and that joining two groups reduces the risk by three-quarters.
"Social isolation is as big a risk factor as smoking," he insisted. Perhaps the Government might next consider a ban on sitting at home on your own.
There was a much more unusual pairing than Frank and Lizzie in Secret Intersex, a two-part documentary in which we met Paula and Andrea: hermaphrodites and proud of it.
Given this fact, perhaps the first surprise about the programme was that it wasn't titled "The Men Who Grew Breasts" or some such thing, in keeping with Channel 4's recent transformation into The Channel With Strange Human Conditions On The Brain.
Somewhere along the line, Channel 4 became obsessed with the ugly nitty-gritty of anatomy, with an emphasis on those more outré conditions that are then sold on with added B-movie sheen.
Surgery has been a favourite subject of British television in general for a few years now, but there has been no channel more determined to sit us down, force our eyelids open with callipers and make us watch the beauty of biology at its goriest.
It was epitomised by its screening in 2002 of The Autopsy, during which a Dutch artist popped a man's brain out of his head and then pulled a rabbit from his skull. Of course, I could be a little sketchy on the details, having watched most of the programme from behind the sofa.
Monday night's Secret Intersex featured quite explicit footage of operations that shaped the genitalia of some people born as neither fully male nor fully female but as one of the shades in between. It was wholly in keeping with its lurid interest in the carnal, but unnecessary and distracting because this was an otherwise fascinating and compassionate documentary, most particularly on its second night when it featured Paula and Andrea.
Born with the chromosomal condition Klinefelter's syndrome, when the two, then called Paul and Andrew, reached puberty they began to grow breasts. Only in adulthood did they realise that they were biologically both male and female. They each chose to live as a woman and to an ignorant world they could be mistaken for a couple of ageing transvestites, with the cruelty of biology easily matched by the cruelty of the kids who taunt them on their street. But their comfort in their skin made for uplifting viewing, as if whatever their own minds had confronted them with as they grew up had hardened them to whatever the rest of the world could do.
It would be much easier to be annoyed with Channel 4's interest in the medically offbeat if it didn't keep coming up with programmes that were so good.
