Big Brother (Channel 4, Tuesday)
Single File (RTE 1, Sunday)
True Stories (Channel 4, Monday)
Football Stories (Channel 4, Tuesday)
It's Not The Answer (RTE 1, Monday to Thursday)
Stripping down to the buff and smearing her body with wet modelling clay, 28-year-old self-described "Bolton lass" Nichole pressed herself frontally against a wall. The result brought back to mind the HBlocks dirty protest. Nichole described the gloopy brown stains as "body art". The fact that four other women and five men were watching muck-artist Nichole suggested that the exhibit was the result of exhibitionism. Anyway, not to be out-exhibited, some of the spectators undressed, lashed on the muck and similarly assaulted the wall.
We shouldn't have been surprised. Given the aims of Big Brother, an exhibition of exhibitionism was practically inevitable. The show is a combination of Castaway 2000, a game-show and interactive TV, in which viewers partially determine the outcome. Ten twenty- and thirtysomethings, five of each gender, have been selected to live for up to nine weeks under constant surveillance by 25 cameras. The group is incarcerated in a custom-built house in east London. Each member hopes to win the hardly spectacular prize of £70,000 by becoming the final survivor of the experiment.
The gig works as follows: each week the housemates nominate two of their number for elimination and viewers' votes will decide which one of the two will be evicted. Strict rules, meagre budgets and back-garden plots with their own vegetables and hens are intended to promote companionship and group self-sufficiency. For the record, the women are Anna, Caroline, Melanie, Nichole and Sada; the men are Andrew, Craig, Darren, Nicholas and Thomas. Channel 4 has described the show, which is sponsored by a drink outfit, as the TV event of the summer. Holland, Germany and Spain have already screened similar efforts.
In combining a number of genres, Big Brother is casting itself as not just television verite, but as a turbo-charged ratingsgrabber. Given that editors decide what fraction of the constant surveillance gets screened, television itself is, of course, the real big brother. Ironically, the guinea pigs are deprived of media. However, given that, with the notable exception of Thomas, a 31-year-old, single Northern Ireland farmer, they appear to be barbarously extroverted, they will doubtless be able to entertain each other between the inevitable ego clashes.
Tuesday's opening episode was a kind of hormonal carnival. There are two dormitories - one for the women and one for the men. In their lair, the women discussed the men as "love interests" and spoke in terms of "shaggability". The men, for their part, tried to eavesdrop on the women before three of them modelled a giant clay penis to leave outside the female dorm. For all their self-confidence and guff about "welcoming a challenge", these men rapidly reverted to adolescence. Perhaps there was an initial kind of lowest emotional common denominator at work in the early stages of male bonding. We'll see.
After Anna, a 29-year-old Dubliner and former nun, revealed that she is a lesbian, the male dorm became as gossipy as the female one. Anna's revelation was delivered during a "truth" game in which each of the 10 disclosed three "facts" - two true, one false - about themselves. Nicholas (32) divulged that he had been to public school "with Prince Edward". He had. Melanie (26), single and still living at home with her mother, appears to be the biggest hit with the lads. Pretentious hippy Sada and introvert Thomas are favourites to get the bum's rush after the first week.
If Big Brother, an Orwellian notion, proved anything, it was that Freud probably understated the centrality of sex in human relations. This crew, simultaneously bonding and competing, appeared to think of little else. The little else they did think of was drink, with the result that they spent more than half the meagre weekly budget on booze. In doing so, they forgot to buy toilet paper and now must go without for a week. After their recreation of those H-Block walls, there was a delicious poetic justice to this.
But insufferable as some of them are, there is a compulsive quality to the programme. Melanie, though suspiciously assured and slick, looks a good bet at present to survive to the end but Craig could be the dark horse, even though Thomas is the most civilised. Big sister Caroline (37), who regularly cackles like a Hammer Horror witch, can be expected to fray everybody's nerves. It should heat up after the first eviction. Freed from the hypocrisy of bonding, the nominee reprieved by the public ought to be a pretty competitive punter. The Big Brotherhood could get nasty as the commune is whittled down.
There are serious ethical questions surrounding this latest TV experiment. Tens of thousands of people applied and if these were the best candidates, you've got to wonder just how nauseating were some of the rejects. Clearly, fame - though notoriety seems more accurate - is an even bigger spur than the limited prizemoney. Whether or not people ought to be encouraged to behave like guinea pigs for viewers' amusement is a crucial question. A robust ego is one thing, a mature sense of self is another. The psychic adventuring of the 10 and the editing by the show's offscreen manipulators won't dampen rampant public prurience.
More Freudian shenanigans were considered on Single File, which examined the Irish "dating industry". Opening in Night Owls, a southside Dublin club, which, on Tuesdays, runs "singles nights" for people over 30, it may well have come as a shock to some viewers to witness their spouses or partners John Travolta-ing (or Joanna Travolta-ing) amid the dozens of punters looking for "that special other". Though it was billed as a "singles night", a significant proportion of the revellers were in marriages or long-term relationships.
Still, for those caught on camera, it's likely that they are single now. One man phoned and had his wife paged at Night Owls. Monica and Mags, regulars at the club, rejected the rumour that the night of children's allowance day is invariably a bumper occasion, but you had to wonder. Anyway, reporter Brian Flynn moved on to interview Sigrun Massman, an executive-looking matron who runs the upmarket Elite Introductions dating agency. For £495 a year, lonely hearts (or lonely other parts) are guaranteed a minimum of one introduction a month.
Anthony is one of Massman's customers. He said that she came to his house to suss out his circumstances, adding that he has been well-satisfied with the service Elite provides. For her part, Siggy (as Anthony repeatedly called her) admitted that her most difficult-to-get-fixed-up clients tend to be single men in the 50 to 52 age group. Referring to the phenomenon of an "old, old geezer of 50 looking for a woman of child-bearing age", won't have inspired confidence in mature men. But in a game of euphemisms, Siggy's lack of subtlety was almost as refreshing as it was rude.
Less expensive is Marie Hand's Heartmatch agency. There, a full year of introductions costs £295. Maura recounted her first two experiences - one with a drunk, the other with a married man - and this gig seemed to be for the more adventurous. At Knock Marriage Bureau, the ambience was significantly more sedate. Matcher-upper, Marie Page, listed age, height, occupation and education as her criteria. It costs just £50 a pop but Father Michael Keane said that the bureau is "thinking of raising it a bit".
After Knock, it was time for cyberspace. A bloke named Alex told of people "falling in love on the net" but not hitting it off in reality. So, the programme pondered, is there somebody for everybody? Almost all of the dating professionals and punters said, yes, there is. Who knows? But it was difficult not to conclude that random meetings retain an appeal that structured ones can never have. Maura, incidentally, is set to marry Chris in September. She didn't, by the way, meet him through a dating agency. The agencies struck you as more interested in cupidity than in Cupid.
Hatred, not love, was the theme of True Stories: One Hundred Per Cent White. Revisiting three former National Front skinheads 10 years after detailing their thoughts and activities for his book, Public Enemies, Leo Regan produced a splendid if depressing documentary. In a week when British Home Secretary Jack Straw rightly condemned the dregs of empire delusions which make much of English nationalism racist and ugly, this was timely television.
Neil and Nick, both harder than Colin, have moved on. Colin has not. All three were hideously tattooed and even though you wouldn't cross them lightly, Neil and Nick were capable of self-reflection. Colin, on the other hand, seemed constitutionally incapable of being honest. Victims of a poisonously class-ridden system, with its almost infinite gradations of oneupmanship, the three turned to their Englishness and whiteness in order to delude themselves that they could look down on somebody. Though they live at the bottom of British society, the ethos they inculcated comes directly from the parasite class at the top.
The ethos of Football Stories: Bad Boys was similarly violent. Though "respected" by partisan fans for their aggression, the viciousness of some of soccer's thug players was beyond excuse. We saw German keeper Harald Schumacher's 1982 World Cup semi-final assault on France's Patrick Battiston. Schumacher ought to have done a jail term but didn't have even a penalty awarded against him. Even more cynical, perhaps, was former Liverpool clogger Tommy Smith's anecdote about Bill Shankly.
Smith told us that it was commonplace for Shankly to knock on the opposing team's dressing-room door shortly before kick-off. Ostensibly there to wish his opponents the best of luck, Shankly would scan the scene, return to Smith and give him info such as "their right back's got his ankle strapped up, so you know what to do". Very sporting, Shanks! Still, Francis Lee's diving provided humour. Beside Franny, Klinsmann was a total amateur, a real telegraph pole of perpendicularity. Though engrossing and amusing, there was a dubiously lighthearted acceptance of savagery to inspire the Colins, Neils and Nicks of the world.
Finally, It's Not The Answer. Well, it's desperately tempting to agree that, indeed, it isn't, but RTE's latest quiz show is a pretty harmless affair. Presented by the personable, if rather male-modellish Bryan Smyth, it uses most of the conventions of the genre: vacuous banter with the contestants; multiple choice questions; rewards for speed of answering; ominous music for the finale and a semi-delirious voiceover from the era of Nicholas Parsons to hype the prizes. The scoring system is almost as complex as integral calculus but at least it's all non-toxic in ways that Big Brother may not be.
