Mary Hannigan's TV reviews including Heather Mills: The Real Mrs McCartney.
Heather Mills: The Real Mrs McCartney
Channel Four, Wednesday
Any Given Sunday
RTE1, Tuesday
I'm a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!
ITV, Monday, Tuesday
Blood Under the Carpet
Channel Four, Tuesday
Blair at 50
BBC2, Sunday
Heather Mills has made many mistakes in her life, but she has only, to our knowledge, committed one heinous crime, from which redemption will always be denied her: she married a Beatle. The British public and media might, in time, forgive most misdemeanours, if sufficient remorse is shown; but, as Yoko Ono and Linda McCartney discovered, they'll never pardon you for snaring John or Paul. They are the mother-in-law from hell. "Nobody's good enough for my Beatle." From the moment you say "I do", the gloves are off.
And off they were in Channel Four's Heather Mills: The Real Mrs McCartney, in which we were told by sundry contributors that Mills is "a damaged personality", "a compulsive liar", "a preying mantis", "a confused fantasist" and a woman whose "ambition was to meet a wealthy man who would be able to give her a good lifestyle and a little bit of prestige and status". After that it got nasty.
Mills, we learnt, has much the same rocky relationship with the truth as Jeffrey Archer, sharing the same flair for embellishing her CV and fabricating or over-dramatising large chunks of her life story, her autobiography containing almost as much fiction as one of the jailbird's blockbusters.
Her first husband, Alfie Karmal, only agreed to marry her on condition that she'd agree to see a psychiatrist. She did, but five years later Karmal had evidence that the sessions hadn't quite worked. When he returned home one night he thought their house had been burgled - most of its contents were gone and the place had been trashed. This, Karmal guessed, was the missing Heather's way of saying "the marriage is over". He was right.
Worse, much worse, than any of this: McCartney has dyed his hair orange-ish since meeting Mills. "Enough said," was the message behind this snippet of information. Worse again, McCartney has started hitting the town and living it up since Mills came in to his life, no longer remaining behind the walls of his substantial home grieving for Linda and living on microwaved vegetarian sausages. Is it any wonder they loathe her? A deliciously salacious documentary, then, wonderfully trashy, ultimately pointless and not very successful. Yet another documentary will examine this sort of carry-on: Tabloid Tales (BBC1 Tuesday May 20th at 11.05 p.m.) will give Mills the chance to comment on her experience of attention from celebrity-hungry media.
A bit like Stars on Sunday, the demise of which was charted in the second and concluding part of Any Given Sunday.
If you'd been unaware of the fate of the project, you'd have guessed there were problems ahead when the newspaper itself missed the launch party, as did head designer Dee Cunniffe, who was back in the office attempting to get the first issue ready for publication. "Basically, I'm just plonking pictures of Kiefer Sutherland eating a burger on to a page," said Cunniffe, hinting that he wasn't tremendously excited about the paper, "It's not something that I'll be particularly proud of when it comes out; it won't be portfolio work." Publisher John Ryan, too, admitted that "this kind of stuff doesn't float my boat", but clung to his belief that women like pictures, not words, and so would buy it in their droves. They didn't, of course. He seemed to have a strange notion, too, of what floated the boat of your average non-Dublin newspaper reader. "Is that the Fianna Fáil stuff, Aoife," he asked. "Pretty rank, isn't it? That's my fault as well. I just thought it would be something for the muckers." Ten weeks, then, after its birth, Stars on Sunday was laid to rest. "Something tells me maybe the product was a bit before its time," said John Donnelly. Ryan was a bit more frank. "I discovered everything I knew was wrong. How do I feel? Shit."
If Stars on Sunday was still alive, it might well have devoted 20 pages to I'm a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here in its next edition, 18 and a half of them to actress Danniella Westbrook after her escape from the Australian rainforest this week. On Monday, she pleaded with the British public to vote her off the show because she was so miserable; when they didn't she called them "f***ing w*****s".
Westbrook is a reformed cocaine addict who thought a spell in the rainforest on prime time television would help her "achieve things". She didn't specify what she wanted to achieve, certainly not a desire for casting directors to know that she's available for work.
By Tuesday, though, she'd had enough. "By staying here I'm sitting in a world of hurt, and that's not good for me, so I have to go," she told the show's Bush Telegraph (a copy of Big Brother's diary room, only it looks like an outside toilet). "I've got to get out and go to an AA meeting and centre myself." One could only conclude, then, that the programme makers had dragged Westbrook kicking and screaming back in to the spotlight and forced her to accept the £25,000 payment for appearing on the show. Lousy shower. But, at least her departure left a possible opening for substitute celebrities Tim Vincent and Jodie Marsh who are, respectively, famous for . . . for . . . anyway.
The previous owners of the houses we saw on Channel Four on Tuesday night are famous for, well, being murdered. "They was having a domestic in the kitchen, and it went a bit too far," explained Craig Valance in Blood on the Carpet. How far? Well, the victim of the "domestic" ended up buried in the garden - David Hampson disposing of his wife's body after killing her with a hammer.
Two years later, her remains were found; 12 months after that Valance bought the semi-detached "house of horror" in Cambridgeshire, "from a solicitor, because the gentleman who owned it was in prison", at a knock-down price of £30,000. "It's a foot on the property ladder, though, innit - a good foot," said Valance, who is now creating a herb patch where Mrs Hampson once lay.
Say what you like about Channel Four, but it can't be denied: if they're out there, they'll find 'em. And if they're short of ideas for documentaries, they'll just dig a little deeper, like Valance in his herb patch, and come up with something like Blood Under The Carpet.
Over 10,000 homes in Britain, we were told, have witnessed a violent killing. The most grisly of them, such as 25 Cromwell Street, are bulldozed, the rest are bought by people who aren't squeamish and who love a good bargain. Such as Valance. And Andrew and Louise Bloomfield, who bought their house two years ago, again at a bargain price, after it had been on the market for three years.
Louise thought about Ann Heron, the prior owner who had been stabbed to death in the living room, a lot, but probably thought about her still-at-large murderer a little more. The couple, though, are trying to get on with their lives by building luxury boarding kennels for "cats and dogs, budgies and goldfish" on the land. "It'll be like the Ritz," said Louise, "they'll have their own kennel maids who'll be there all day long to play with them and read them books."
"They'll have a television and a video recorder and there'll be a webcam so when people are abroad they can see their pet on the Internet," explained Andrew. Trust us, the still-at-large murderer will never return, he'd be too afraid of the Bloomfields.
Louise - who never explained why she'd named one of her dogs Orly, "after the airport" - was pregnant and intended having the baby in the room where Ann was murdered, replacing one life with another, "putting love back where there was no love". "She might have put us here," she said, before asking: "do you think I'm mad?" Well.
Patrick and Eileen Withers, meanwhile, were renovating their house in Norfolk, where a double murder took place in 1999, with the intention of selling to make a large profit. "It sounds mercenary," said Patrick, "but one person's misfortune is another person's gain, simple as that."
"Well, it is in this case, innit," agreed Eileen. Patrick nodded. "We did really buy it to make a killing," he said.
On a happier note, warm and admiring tributes were paid to the British Prime Minister on Blair at 50, but most of them came from non-Labour people - which, his old-Labour detractors would claim, says it all. "He has a charm that is almost irresistible," gushed Paddy Ashdown, before Michael Portillo and Michael Howard were moderately complimentary too.
It was left to Oldish Labour folk like Roy Hattersley, Mo Mowlam and Peter Kilfoyle to wish Blair a not altogether happy birthday. "Roman emperors used to have an official following them around to remind them of their own mortality," said Kilfoyle when asked what present Blair should get for his birthday, "maybe that's what he needs".
The programme ended with Cilla Black singing Happy Birthday to Blair, a rendition that was not a lora, lora like Marilyn Monroe's version, but lusty all the same. Black is a dyed-in-the-wool Tory. By the time the credits rolled, Blair must have concluded, "with enemies like these, who needs friends?"
Shane Hegarty is on leave