TV Review Hilary FanninI blame Marnie. Marnie's recalcitrant attitude towards her radical surgery, her disregard for her post-op exercise programme (four-hour workout in the morning, dance class all afternoon, chucking the ice-cream tubs out of the freezer in the evening), her wilful inability to string a coherent sentence together for the judging panel ("I want to go forth and give joy" worked perfectly well for the other contestants), not to mention her slovenly attitude towards her chin-strap, which is only trying to keep her face in place . . .
Goddammit, "YOU'RE NOT WEARING YOUR CHIN-STRAP, MARNIE!"
I blame Marnie for ruining a perfectly good freak-show and making me weep.
The glittering, horrific finale of The Swan rolled on to our screens this week, featuring nine women who have endured three months of surgery, training and therapy, who have lost noses and chins ("you've got really great bone structure, it just needs to be uncovered"), lost the insides of their calves ("don't you want elegant legs?"), lost, apparently, their feelings of low self-esteem - although nearly all struggled with post-operative depression - and competed to be crowned "the ultimate swan" or Miss Customised-Most-Mutated-America or some such garbage.
The basic premise of the programme was to turn a bunch of ordinary-looking women (who perceived themselves as ugly) into idealised women - big breasts, big teeth, big hair. "It has been an incredible challenge just to get through the Swan programme," said the presenter, a reedy, self-satisfied Amanda Byram, before culling some finalists. Oh Amanda, you can say that again.
Watching pre-sliced Swans emerge from behind blown-up photos of their former selves and pick their way across the stage in their stilettos, their lingerie delicately obscuring their scars, was just that.
You can't turn on the TV to see the sports results these days without falling into someone's implants. Before the "ultimate swan" even had the chance to be crowned, the next bunch of hopefuls were lined up over on RTÉ.
DESPERATELY SEEKING SURGERY followed the now-familiar journey of yet another friendly wannabe model with a head full of highlights as she bought herself some new breasts. Her surgery made her very happy, seemingly, and with her "mammary inequality" sorted out, she got to try on a lot of new tops.
Her surgeon's chatty operating-theatre manner, however, was a little alarming. Likening his implant work to Hannibal's Alpine adventures (no, I have no idea what he meant either), he told us that most women had asymmetrical breasts and suggested that if he got all the nurses in the operating room to "peel off" and compare shapes and sizes we'd see that, like the right side and left side of the face, they're different. "It's all right, girls," he said blithely over his shoulder. "I won't do that." Unfortunately, his girls were masked - I would have paid to see their expressions.
In this quite jolly programme, we got to see Botox injections and acne treatments and lots of inside-out skin without the scary music and intense narration of similar slice 'n' splice shows. And you don't need to be Einstein to see that TV surgeons are only a scalpel away from small-screen celebrity.
WHISKEY ECHO (the title is taken from the Alpha Bravo code) shot out of the scheduling gates this week, strengthening RTÉ's new love affair with quality drama. The programme, the first of a four-part Irish/Canadian co-production, dealt with the experiences of a group of young international medics running a health centre in southern Sudan. There's blood and guts here too, and some gruesome surgical procedures carried out with rudimentary equipment. Among the health centre's staff are two Irish medics, Rachel (Dominique McElligot), a nurse on her first mission out of Ireland, and field doctor Raif (Jason Barry).
Whiskey Echo, filmed in Johannesburg last year, is atmospheric and quite beautiful. The first episode introduced the small field hospital and its struggle for survival against a background of increasing instability in Sudan, with hostile warlords pilfering supplies, child soldiers high on khat and the Khartoum government trying to ram an oil pipeline through tribal lands.
The aspiration is high, the ideas worthy and the heroic nature of the work depicted fascinating. But the territory is populated by stock characterisation and uneven acting. The clinic's team coordinator is a swaggering, self-reliant young woman in khakis, a take-it-on-the-chin type who, in an ill-advised fit of pique, slaps a local warlord across the face.
As is the way in these things, she looks set to fall for the sensitive, literate, military tribal leader who hopefully can teach her to curb her excesses. Then there's Rollie, her when-you've-done-as-many-missions-as-I-have sidekick; maverick Carlos, the sexually predatory Latino; Rachel, the nurse on her virgin mission; and, of course, the smouldering, enigmatic former plastic surgeon hiding his past.
Given the complexity and seriousness of the crisis in Sudan, Whiskey Echo is demanding a lot of its format, cast and writer. But in a schedule top-heavy with mind-numbingly visceral reality TV, it is welcome and certainly worth watching.
DOES INTELLIGENCE RESIDE in one and a quarter kilos of fatty tissue? Or is it something mysterious and incorporeal? What do you think, Marnie? These questions were the subject of The Riddle of Einstein's Brain, a documentary which compared the conflicting theories of doctors Mark Lythgoe and Jim Al-Khalili on the nature of genius. Einstein died in the Princeton Hospital in 1955 at the age of 76. In the 24 hours between his death and cremation, the then pathologist at the hospital, Dr Thomas Harvey, performed an autopsy on Einstein and, without the prior consent of his family, removed his brain. Harvey then became the curator of "the greatest mind in science".
One of his first actions was to preserve the brain in alcohol (a lot of people try that) and then cut it up into 240 sections. Some of these he distributed among colleagues - one scientist described many years later opening her post and receiving four sugar-cube-sized pieces of Einstein's brain in an empty Miracle Whip jar.
Lythgoe and Al-Khalili went in search of the remaining parts of Einstein's brain, each hoping to bolster their viewpoints. Al-Khalili, a physicist, argued that genius comes from the imagination and cannot be measured by man or machine; Lythgoe, a brain specialist, argued that the secrets of creativity can be hunted through nerve cells which can be analysed.
Using computer imaging, Lythgoe recreated Einstein's brain in 3D and began uncovering evidence of neuro-physiological differences, or physically recognisable symbols of genius in the brain.
Some of these differences - increased lobe size, difference in the size of ridges and grooves - are common to certain brain disorders such as autism. Einstein, who said: "I think in music" and whose life's work was "to control the music of the universe", showed physical signs of connectivity, whereby the senses overlap. One interviewee said his experience of connectivity involved a physical sensation of taste when he heard words - when asked what the words "Albert" and "Einstein" tasted like, he said "yogurt and wafers".
This extraordinary search eventually led the two scientists, who seemed to be enjoying their own experience of celebrity (lots of Hawaiian shirts and putting on sunglasses while looking into the middle distance), to the remainder of Einstein's actual brain, sliced and pickled in an undisclosed laboratory somewhere in the US.
The documentary finished with an interview with a futurologist, who said that by the late 2020s, reverse brain engineering would be so advanced that every detail of someone's personality would be able to be scanned and fed into a non-biological entity. This brain-like system could then be set problems, which it would be able to solve a million times faster than a human being, giving it the potential to develop far greater skills than us mere biological entities.
Scary.
I'D LIKE TO ask that super-brain a couple of questions. One: why do celebrity entities crawl through plastic tubing in big pink nighties? Two: why should any of us care? Oh dear, the super-brain's circuits are malfunctioning . . . oh no, the mystery of Celebrity Big Brother has proved too much for the greatest brain in the universe . . . With this week's culling of personality the remaining housemates are, once again, the bland leading the bland. Celebrity sock-knitting would be infinitely more exciting. Maybe Big Brother should throw in a celebrity surgeon - implants, anyone?
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