For The Love Of (Channel 4, Monday)
Cutting Edge (Channel 4, Tuesday)
Champions League Live (Network 2, Wednesday)
The Lives Of Our Time (BBC 1, Wednesday)
Leargas (RTE 1, Tuesday)
The late Princess Diana who, as most of you probably know, was a direct descendant of Jesus and Solomon, was murdered by CIA and MI6 conspirators using a ray gun disguised as a dog in a superpowerful Fiat Uno. Or, was it all quite so simple and obvious? No, it was not, said Charlotte Cox, who told us that, very likely, Di ran away from the wreckage and is still alive, "probably in America". Welcome to the Elvisisation of Diana.
For The Love Of, Channel 4's weirdo successor to After Dark, screened an episode entitled Diana Conspiracy Theories. Host Jon Ronson gathered six theorists/ comedians/paranoids/nutters to discuss Di's death. Perhaps it was all an enormous mick-take. But if it was, the standard of acting would make Olivier and Gielgud seem like embarrassing bit players in a village, amateur dramatic society. No, we can take it that Ronson's guests were not struggling Equity types, glad of any sort of gig. This was bona-fide fantasy.
Talking into his hands and through his behind, Jeff Steinberg (a disciple of arch conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche) insisted that Diana was not rushed to the nearest hospital. Therefore, she was deliberately left to die when she could easily have been saved. Sharon Campbell, however, shook her head and smirked at Steinberg's naivety. Diana, she said, was killed before the car left the Paris Ritz. The Di filmed by a security camera going through a revolving door was merely "a lookalike".
Mildly exasperated, Ms Campbell felt compelled to explain the full story to her guileless colleagues. She spoke about "brahmins" and the "Merovingian blood line". The connection was unclear. But, talking slowly, like a galled schoolmarm, she explained that the Merovingians used to practise human sacrifices on the site of the current Pont d'Alma. Diana (or, more precisely, the Diana lookalike) was just the latest, she said. Some of the others nodded, clearly mortified at not hitherto realising this self-evident truth.
After this nugget, the conversation began to get seriously wild. Ms Cox, who blamed "MI6 and Big Brother", said that the Al Fayed Mercedes had been broken into four weeks before the crash. Devices which made the car amenable to remote control were installed and after that, well, Bob's your uncle. Even the seat belts could be whipped off at the touch of a button miles away. Simon Regan, who insisted that for "the only time ever" all 28 traffic video controls along the route taken by the Mercedes were not working, introduced the ray gun theory.
Jon King, describing himself as an "investigative journalist", told the others that, days before the crash, he "heard it was going to happen". Of course, he couldn't reveal his sources, you understand. But the "murder" was connected with CIA and MI6 dissatisfaction over Diana's campaign against landmines. And so it went - weirdness piled upon weirdness. By the time it was revealed that most of the paparazzi were, in fact, trained intelligence agents and the "Judaic royal dynasty, which includes Solomon and Jesus" was implicated, we were well into Champions League lunacy.
Oh, the dog. A big dog was allegedly seen in the back of the allegedly super-charged, white Fiat Uno. Well yes, of course, they smirked, it's easy to disguise a ray gun as a dog. So that was that then. On the matter of Jesus's bloodline, well, sure everyone knows that it's only church propaganda that he died childless. Diana and her one-time husband Charles Windsor are direct descendants of Jesus Christ. Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, William Hague, Phil The Greek and the Imam of Karachi were also involved in various ways. So too, apparently, were "the Libyans" and "there was a very high level of Masonic involvement".
Masonic symbology (don't ask!) was glaring at the crash scene. But "Muslim-hatred" - Di, one of them said, had met the Imam to prepare to become a Muslim - was, they all agreed, at the root of the plot. The quote of the night though came from Mr King, the, eh, investigative journalist. Deriding the theory that Diana had staged her own death, he remarked: "This is taking it into the realm of fantasy." It's so good to see a man stick to the facts, isn't it?
Throughout it all, Ronson kept a poker face behind idiotically theatrical gestures. In its own way, For The Love Of (which might more accurately be titled For The Love Of Sweet Suffering Jesus) was amusing. But the urge to aggrandise icons through conspiracy theories about their deaths - Hitler, James Dean, JFK, Elvis and now Diana Spencer - reflects not just a demented paranoia and/or an eye for the quick publishing buck. It also suggests that many people deeply distrust "official versions" of major events. The cod media has a role in this sort of lunacy too - if that's not too conspiratorial!
Young women travelling to the US to work as au pairs would be well-advised to be deeply distrustful of the agency ads which attract them in the first place. Cutting Edge, clearly motivated by the Louise Woodward case, screened an episode titled Holding The Baby. It followed four British nannies, aged between 18 and 26, who went in search of Brady Bunch America and found that, as often as not, they ended up tending to neurotic, bullying individuals and, of course, their children.
The documentary opened with a zoom-in on a novelty paperweight, glitter swirling in water. As the swirl subsided, a montage of Manhattan skyscrapers became visible. As a visual symbol for glittering illusions, this was effective. But between opening and closing, by focusing on the paperweight, Anne Hawker's film played it straight - and rightly so. This was an old-fashioned documentary. It was also, like good reportage, tight and moving.
The "host" families had children with first names which are more generally surnames - Harris, Griffin and Gaynor. Perhaps the ludicrously monikered Macaulay Culkin has accelerated this trend. Anyway, for bed and board, 45 hours of childcare, one and a half days off a week (with a full weekend off once a month) and two weeks paid holiday, if they complete a year's contract, the nannies are paid $140 (about £80 to £85) a week. Leaving before the contract is completed, they are fined $400. It's hardly the glittering American dream.
One nanny, forbidden to use the car, was pretty well trapped in a house all winter. The nearest shop was 25 minutes walk away. Another was asked to mind three children while the parents took a month-long cruise. The Glucks, whose children are aged 13, 11 and four, were seriously obnoxious people. Mother, Karen Gluck, insisting that her progeny be ferried to gymnastics, horseriding, martial arts, religious school and sometimes barmitzvah classes, was so self-centred and pushy that she must have put off any young woman tempted to go nannying in the US.
"This is an employer/employee relationship," she said, refusing to recognise that the young nanny was little more than a child herself and could sometimes feel lonely. Many of the nannies go, it seems, hoping to be made feel, to some degree, a part of a family. Few are lucky. Laura Lobb, the woman cooped up during winter, was filmed coming home to her parents at Manchester airport. You could feel for her as she burst into tears. As a chronicle of the choc-a-bloc but ironically vacuous lives of so many professional achievers, this Cutting Edge cut to the heart of the matter.
Liam Brady made his pundit debut on Champions League Live. It wasn't quite as spectacular as his international debut, when in 1974, aged 18, he was splendid in the Irish side which beat the USSR 3-0 at Dalymount Park with a hat-trick from Don Givens. But, as Manchester United played, uncharacteristically, so defensively that they made Jack Charlton's Ireland look like Kevin Keegan's Newcastle, he didn't exactly have a classic to dissect.
Still, the boy Brady dun well. Measured and assured, he played his own game, confidently and correctly refusing to be nudged by Bill O'Herlihy into describing the match as "boring". Since well before the boy Dunphy's transfer to Today FM (where after a superb start, he produced a Beezer Homes League performance interviewing Pat Buchanan this week), RTE has tried a number of pundits to partner Johnny Giles.
Brady, as composed in the studio as he was on the ball, could be the answer. With the World Cup in prospect, he might yet be a TV star. He does not engage in histrionics or in any Brady Bunch bonhomie so perhaps he's not sufficiently different from Giles. But a professional spat between the pair ought to be interesting. Mind you, a professional spat between Brady and Jack Charlton could be very interesting. Anyway, given his continental experience, Liam Brady should be able to score analysing the Champions Cup. It's all to play for.
A kind of People's Century on a shoestring, The Lives Of Our Time is an oral history recalling the 20th century in Northern Ireland. There are, of course, people who argue that the 20th century has never reached Northern Ireland but, facetiousness aside, this week's first episode, mixing excellent stills with anecdotes from elderly Northerners, was engaging. The first World War, Home Rule, the Titanic and the anti-Catholic pogroms of the 1920s were part of the grand narrative of the first 25 years of this century in the North.
But personal stories of work, school, shopping, hopes, careers, travel and the all the rest that make up individual lives enriched the overall. Seeking balance between religions, classes and genders, the programme has chosen well. Perhaps it understated the sheer sectarianism of the North - we'll know better from its remaining three episodes - but the opening episode was as promising as Liam Brady's punditry.
Back on RTE, where Dermot Morgan's death reminded us of Montrose's corporate timidity and where the Angelus row rings increasingly hollow, Leargas produced a first-rate documentary about the landless movement in Brazil. Land, the programme argued, is at the heart of gross injustices in South America's biggest country. Given the historical Irish experience of landlords and landlordism and the late 19th-century land war, this struck a bell which still has resonance here.
Police, at the behest of landlords, have killed about 1,000 protesting peasants and trade union members in the last decade. Unions, which would allow workers to organise themselves, are detested and feared by Brazil's powerful - not that any conspiracy theories are necessary to understand the machinations of international capital on the cusp of the 21st century. It's just, like the British au pairs in America discovered, bullies doing what bullies have always done.