BOARDING the plane with high hopes and sagging faces, nine British women headed for Wroclaw, Poland. Aged between 21 and 58, they were accompanied by a Polish guide, Alina, a veteran of multiple facelifts. Depending on the light and the camera angle, Alina herself could have been aged anywhere between 21 and 58. The party was on a plastic surgery package holiday, attracted by the fact that they could willingly lose face five' times cheaper than they could in Britain.
In Poland, you can have a facelift for as little as £800, liposuction for £400 and eye-bag removal for £800. Unlike the rest of Europe, Polish surgeon Henryk Knakiewicz has no qualms about digging into British meat. Network First: Cut Price Package followed the party as they endured anaesthetics for aesthetics and scalpels for sculpting. Like all invasions of Poland, this one was grim and gory.
Not that it was all about saving face by losing face. There were other bodily bits to be rebuilt. Debbie packed her new breasts a pair of Harley Street-styled, silicon "Hello, boys", in her suitcase before heading for the airport. Having recently lost her job as an interior designer, Debbie reckoned that a major mammary makeover would give her a lift. As her venture into exterior designing turned out, Debbie - much to her own satisfaction and, chances are, the satisfaction of others - ballooned from being a Kate Moss to a Dolly Parton. You just had to hope her spine could cope.
Others were not so pleased by Henryk's handiwork. That's the thing about package holidays, of course, they don't work out for everybody. Carol, at 21, the baby of the party, was not, pleased by the job done on her inner thighs. In fact, she claims now that she needs remedial surgery. Leather trousered Samantha, who shelled-out for liposuction on her hips, bottom and tummy,", felt it was all a waste of money
But most of the punters were satisfied. Nobody mentioned anything about pigs' ears and silk purses (far less, mad cow disease) but it was impossible, given the yearnings of some of the women, to stop such phrases coming to mind. Keep young and beautiful... if you wanna be loved played in the background as the women were wheeled into Henryk's production-line theatre. Then it got gruesome and the director spliced-in a few prime cuts of butcher-shop conceits.
Cut to a scalpel on an eyelid. Zoom-in. Cutaway to a butcher slicing a deep red cut of rump steak. The close-ups were, quite simply, revolting. At one point, Henryk made a deep gash beside the ear of a facelift patient. The flesh opened, like a red rose under time-lapse photography. Then Henryk began to dig with an instrument that looked like a miniature crowbar. Back and forth, back and forth.
One by one, the women were sliced open and stitched up again. Samantha's liposuction was conducted to the strains of Chopin, an ironic touch of Polish polish given the unsubtlety of Henryk's slashing. Within a few days, the women's holiday villa was like a scene from M*A*S*H: heads, swathed in huge bandages, made them look like they were holding a convention of wannabe mummies.
But the mummy-stage passed, giving way to the battered-wife look: heavy shades band-aids.
It's easy to dismiss the operations as being motivated by the women's vanity and Henryk's greed. Clearly, vanity and greed were, if you'll excuse the phrase, at the cutting edge of the enterprise. But the pain these people endured, while perhaps not quite purgative, testified to intense desires to become other than what they were. A kinder summation might point out that Henryk's patients/victims were just reacting to a world which, increasingly and - quite literally, takes too much at face value.
People contemplating unnecessary cosmetic surgery will have done well to miss this one. The problem with plastic surgery is that it's all too real. In one scene Samantha, who picked up with Henryk's sidekick, Dr Magyk (a Mr Bean fan), felt her ear loosen. Some stitches had snapped before the scars had healed and her ear was starting to flap like a little fleshy flag. Mind you, her face was as tight as a drumskin. Even so, a few tears found a way out.
CUT from Wroclaw to Ballymun. Ageing hippies may remember that heroin, before it became known as "smack" or "gear" was, for a time, called horse. Curiously, an argument that the choice for many male teenagers in Ballymun nowadays, is between horses or heroin, was at the heart of Short Stories: Urban Cowboys. The argument was strong, if not totally convincing, but this was a splendid half-hour of television.
You expect class clashes in Big House drama. But seldom are the as abrasive and compelling as in this tower-block documentary. On one side was a horde of flint-eyed teenagers "jockeying" some of the thousands of horses which roam around Dublin's north suburbs. On the other was Therese Cunningham, director of the Dublin. Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
A Control of Horses Bill is due to become law at the end of this year. It will mean that almost all of the Ballymun owners will lose their horses. It discriminates against working-class children and the king-class horse," said Vickie McElligott, co-ordinator of the Ballymun Horse Owners Association. Therese Cunningham disagreed.
"It's not that I don't want these children to have the pleasure and fun of horses, she said: It's just that it's deeply depressing to me to see animals walking around on, plastic bags and broken glass. Since the start of the year, 99 of these horses have died, many of them put down by the DSPCA after suffering dreadfully from chronic, neglected injuries. It's a difficult issue. Clearly, many of the teenagers have little, enough, without taking away their horses.
Though elegantly filmed, perhaps Urban Cowboys overdid the spaghetti-western soundtrack for the tower-block background. But, it was winning in the way it got the young horse-owners to talk around (of course) a camp-fire. It might be maudlin on a Disney scale to talk of the kids' love for these horses. But, for some of them, at least, it was real and it was marvellous in the true sense - you could only marvel at it.
Still, this was not the whole picture. Many of these horses are neglected and roaming wild. They are a danger to themselves and to motorists. So, what to do? Must horses remain the preserve of middle-class pony clubs and the privileged, high-horse sentimentality that goes with these? Certainly Ms Cunningham's campaign against cruelty deserves support. But so do the young people of Ballymun. Are there no Lottery or other State funds which could be used to guarantee continued horse-ownership for youngsters who can prove they are responsible?
Restricting the number (estimated at 3,000) of working-class horses is inevitable. But, on the evidence of this documentary, a total ban seems cruel. Regulation, of course, would impair the wild west ethos of council estate equestrianism. But cheap, functional, concrete and galvanise stables for some of these horses would hardly break the State. Most of these kids won't get jobs anyway, so the deal, if they wish to keep horses, could involve their learning about animal care and stable maintenance. A little horse sense could go a long way.
ANYWAY, from tower-block documentary to big house romantic comedy, Screen Two's film, Loving, had all the stylistic metaphors in place: strutting peacocks, blooming daffodils, empty ballroom. If, it is true that God is in the details, then He (or She) was present in this one. But, as in all above and below stairs drama, the class rigidity, even allowing for the times that were in if, stung like Henryk's scalpel. So many brutalised lives in the service of the privileged few...
Loving was set in Ireland. It is 1941 and London is being blitzed. Here, there's just an easy going Emergency. But life in Kinalty Castle seems frozen in another time, It is a place of secrets and suspicions and simmering sexuality at both ends of the stairs. Mark Rylance plays Charlie Raunce, the first-footman newly promoted to butler. Opposite him is Georgina Cates, as the ravishing maid, Edith.
Raunce is initially presented as devious, cold, always with an eye to the main chance. Edith, in contrast, appears to be blamelessly seductive, a bare-breasted innocent - unaware that she is the sexual equivalent of a nuclear bomb. But, even in the claustrophobic world of a big house, things change and change utterly. By the end, Edith, through recognising' the power of her sexuality, is in control. She and Raunce take the boat to be married in England and it is clear who is boss.
Really, though such a separation may be ultimately meaningless, it was the form, rather than the content, which shone in Loving. With the big house as an oasis of decaying empire - outside there could be Germans, or even the IRA - there was an elegaic air about it all. What romance there was, was more convenient than grand and the comedy was cumbersome. But, for period, atmosphere and dialogue, it was faultless. It is just that some of us are tired of the big house on TV.
Little houses have equally valid stories; more in need of telling.
FINALLY, Telling Tales, Cathal O'Shannon's four part series ended this week with a visit to Delvin Co Westmeath, home of Brinsley MacNamara's, Valley of the Squinting Windows. After tower block documentary and big house drama, this was a tale of villagers on the rampage. In 1918, MacNamara's novel was published. Local people were convinced that the vindictive yokels of the story were based on themselves and a spot of rioting, book-burning and boycotting ensued.
Eventually (in 1924) MacNamara's schoolmaster father, James Weldon (Mac's real name was John Weldon), was run out of Delvin. The village became a byword for bigotry and hushed-up scandals; its name synonymous with provincial narrow-mindedness. Nowadays, they'd get a crisis PR outfit to rubbish the Weldons and they'd probably be advised to begin a major push for Tidy Towns glory.
Telling Tales has been an entertaining series, though perhaps overly anecdotal in parts. The Singer stamp scam, the Baltinglass post-office row and the disgraceful treatment of the deported-to-America Leitrim communist James Gralton, featured in the first three episodes. The Gralton programme reminding us that, even in the 1930s, Fianna Fail could be selective about the workers it claimed to support - was the most valuable.
Even today, FF and the Catholic church seem unwilling to face the fact that, on soap-box and in pulpit, they behaved disgracefully towards Gralton. O' Shannon might have hit them a bit harder too . . . a bit more of the Henryk crowbar manoeuvre wouldn't have been out of place.