Modern Times: The Price of Eggs (BBC2, Wednesday)
Cutting Edge: A Wedding in the Family (Channel 4, Tuesday)
This Rock (RTE1, Sunday)
Monsignor Renard (ITV, Monday)
Top Ten Really Annoying Records (Ch 4, Saturday)
As sure as eggs is eggs, there's always a new way to make a living in the dot.com economy. If you're a healthy young woman - an aspiring actress, perhaps, or a post-graduate student short on funds - why not sell your ovaries to one of the millions of couples desperate for a child? First, though, you'll have to do a video, in which you'll make your flirtatious sales pitch: "Hi there! I'm Caucasian, bright, athletic, cute little button nose - c'mon, let's make some babies!"
Pardon the pun, but this was fertile ground for the Modern Times team, with its Brave New World connotations. Reproductive technology opens up all sorts of possibilities in an unrestricted free market. On this side of the Atlantic, it's illegal to sell your eggs for profit. Not so in the US, where a healthy batch can fetch anything up to $50,000 on the open market. In California, eggs are big business - if you've got the genes, they've got the bucks. It's all about supply and demand - you want your child to have blonde hair? Long legs? Just point and click.
Rob Harris used to be a horsebreeder, but these days he sells supermodels' eggs to the highest bidder on the Internet - more of a career veer than a career change. Other egg agents tried to present themselves as the modern equivalents of matchmakers, although, despite all the hifalutin' science, the buyers' criteria don't appear to be all that different from those used for a pickup in a nightclub. Nobody wants what were euphemistically described as "heavy genes". Blue eyes fetch a premium price, but IQ scores seem less important. Recessive genes, which might crop up after a couple of generations, are a big fear for the customers, so the screening process features a lot of questions about prospective donors' grandparents.
Nothing gets the Modern Times team's juices flowing like a good old ethical minefield, and the first part of this programme invited us to gape in horror at the hard-nosed commercialism of the egg trade, which seems to be most advanced (if that's the word) in California. There's a theory that the southern part of that state has a disproportionate number of leggy blondes because of the waves of wannabe starlets who have washed up on its shores over the years, enriching the gene pool, and several donors were promoted as: "all-American, California girls".
So far, so good - this was a typical British venture into the tried and trusted isn't-America-weird-and-scary? genre. But the programme took a sharp turn when it focused on one donor and the couple buying her eggs - there was a tenderness and sense of humour about the whole process which had been absent from the sales pitches. For the first time, we got a sense of the real human dilemmas behind the sales pitches and the scarifying razzmatazz.
IT IS a terrible burden for a man to bear, but Paul Watson is widely and unfairly regarded as the founding father of fly-on-the-wall documentaries. In fact, if he is a fly, he's a rather noisy one. The Watson style, where the director himself becomes an audible but invisible presence, was mercilessly lampooned in the recent spoof series, People Like Us, in which an obtuse interviewer with a plummy, Oxbridge accent delved into the lives of the suburban, lower middle-classes, with disastrous results. The first 10 minutes or so of A Wedding in the Family suggested that Watson hadn't taken the lessons of People Like Us to heart.
Anna and Stuart were walking up the aisle, as we flashed back to a series of interviews with their respective families, some of whom were more forthcoming than others. Stuart's mother, Jean, was clearly uncomfortable in front of the camera. "She is deeply distrustful of television because `it shows things that should not be shown'," Watson intoned disapprovingly. The possibility that she might be right was not entertained. Stuart's dad, Steve, a fish and chip shop owner, fondly recalled his son's early triumph in winning a national competition for "Young Fish Fryer of the Year", and one feared that this was going to become the worst kind of sneering, snobbish film. That it didn't owed much to Watson's undeniable skill as a programme-maker. The families' unhappy stories (or those parts of them which they chose to reveal) were drawn out with delicacy. Deceit, betrayal, compromise and disappointment figured large, but so did stoicism and survival. Sometimes deeply depressing, sometimes surprising, occasionally very funny, A Wedding in the Family was often uncomfortable to watch as it laid bare the pain behind the statistic that half of all British marriages end in divorce.
It's hard to imagine a programme like A Wedding in the Family ever being made in Ireland, for which we should probably agree with Jean and be grateful. It needs a larger, more impersonal society for people to feel that they can safely reveal themselves in such a public way. The downside is that most Irish documentary series aim for the big picture, but rarely get under the skin of our beliefs and prejudices. The second instalment of On This Rock, the RTE/BBC co-production on Irish Christianity, attempted the daunting task of compressing the entire story of Protestantism on this island into one 45-minute programme. Not surprisingly, the results were sketchy.
The credit sequence of On This Rock, a fancy, computer-generated affair with dolphins, crashing waves and soaring cliffs, along with the tone of the first programme in the series, suggest that that there is some kind of eco-Christian, back-to-roots agenda at work in the series (tomorrow night's programme, about the reinvention of the Catholic church in the 19th century, should serve to prove or disprove this theory). Of course, there's a longstanding back-to-basics religious tradition in this country, represented by evangelical Protestantism, but it's a harsher, more politicised one, defined here by Ian Paisley and a member of the Royal Black Preceptory, among others.
For those who object to the sound of Orange feet tramping down Dawson Street in Dublin, there was plenty here to reinforce prejudices - grim-faced, bowler-hatted men marching in the rain, murals and banners making explicit the link between political allegiance and religious belief. What was striking in this portrait of Ireland's Dissenter tradition was the absence of dissent - at least the sort of dissent which a similar portrait of contemporary Catholicism would undoubtedly uncover. There was some mild criticism of siege attitudes and sectarianism, but no overt critique of, say, the institutional links between the Orange Order and the Ulster Unionist Party. Remarkably, there was not one reference to what is usually regarded as the main challenge facing organised Christianity today - the onward march of secularised consumer capitalism. After all, the only Romish influences the Orangemen are likely to see on Dawson Street are in the paninis and lattes being guzzled by Dublin's post-Catholic bourgeoisie.
He may have relocated from vaguely contemporary middle England to Nazi-occupied France for his latest drama series, donning a cassock and clerical collar along the way, but John Thaw is still playing the same disgruntled old codger familiar from Morse. As the eponymous hero of Monsignor Renard, he arrives back in his hometown, a small village in western France, to take up his new position as parish priest while the British are scrambling off the beaches at Dunkirk and Petain is announcing France's surrender. As the villagers come to terms with life under German control, Thaw becomes their de facto representative in dealings with the occupying forces.
Wisely eschewing "funny" accents (the villagers speak with a variety of English accents, while the Germans are subtitled), Monsignor Renard started off promisingly. The portrait of the chaos and power vacuum of the French collapse was convincingly understated, even if the battle sequences were Spielberg-on-a-shoestring. The concept is a TV programmers' dream - Ballykissangel-meets-A Year in Provence-meets-Saving Private Ryan. Thaw should help to pull in viewers who might be put off by the unusual setting, and the range of characterisation is admirably varied, with potentially interesting shadings of ambiguity across the board among French and Germans.
As with any opening episode, you could see the plot points being set up for the coming weeks: anti-Semitic rumblings among some villagers; potential collaborationists; likely Resistance fighters; a burgeoning relationship between a local girl and a young German soldier. What's most interesting, though, is that ITV has actually commissioned a series set on foreign shores without inventing a British central character to sweeten the pill. Unusually for British TV drama, Monsignor Renard invites its viewers to imagine themselves as French - a small blow against Europhobia which is far more remarkable than it should be.
Here be monsters . . . Channel 4's Saturday night listomania continued with those dread words: novelty records. The Top Ten Really Annoying Records, presented, appropriately enough, by the Really Annoying Keith Chegwin, ignored such strong contenders as Barbie Girl, Mull of Kintyre and anything at all by Cliff Richard in favour of one-hit wonders. It came as a shock to find that the writer of the horrifying Grandad (the one with Clive Dunn of Dad's Army fame in a rocking chair surrounded by adoring, sicklysweet kids) was the same bloke who played that memorable bassline on Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side, but after Renee and Renato, after Keith Harris and Orville, it's fair to say that Grandad started sounding better. Top spot was reserved for Black Lace's Agadoo, but the greatest horror was the inaccurately-named Little Jimmy Osmond belting out Long-Haired Lover from Liverpool. Twenty-five years on, time has taken its toll on Little Jimmy. Only a shadow of his former chubby self, he still seems to harbour a grudge against his cruelly prettier, thinner sibling, Donny. Which just goes to show that, no matter where you get them, eggs ain't always what they're cracked up to be.
