TV REVIEW: They set people up to fail, then encourage us to smirk or weep at their misfortune as they become 'losers'.
Jamie's Kitchen -C4, Tuesday
The Project - BBC1, Sunday and Monday
Marrying a Stranger: Shabba -C4, Monday
Would You Believe: Serena's Promise - RTÉ1, Thursday
Television has already desensitised us to violence, sex, death and poverty. We're tired of all that. Next on the agenda: desensitising us to ritual humiliation.
We're becoming smug sofa bullies who relish seeing others stripped of human dignity. Even my 11-year-old daughter, who watched What Not To Wear, Popstars: the Rivals and Jamie's Kitchen with me, can see how sick such programmes are. They set people up to fail, then encourage us to smirk or weep at their misfortune as they become "losers".
At least in What Not To Wear and Popstars: The Rivals and the like, the contestants willingly engage with the process, however unwisely. They perceive some pay-off, whether it's a £2,000 sterling cheque for new clothes or a stab at mercurial fame. But Jamie's Kitchen takes ritual humiliation onto another level, where the contestants are so cynically exploited that the series should be pulled off the air.
In the publicity surrounding the programme, all we've heard is about Jamie's new baby, Jamie's new restaurant and Jamie's beneficence at taking on a group of unemployed youths and training them as chefs.
Now let's talk about the contestants, for that's what they are. They come from disadvantaged backgrounds; many have been repeatedly excluded from school (one confessed that he had been excluded 132 times); many of them have learning disabilities and special needs, such as ADHD, dyslexia, problems with organisation, sensory integration and so on. They need help - the kind of help they should have had 15 years ago.
They don't need to be bullied by arrogant chefs into chopping leeks precisely into uniform one millimetre squares and strips. The first two programmes showed no evidence of any of them being supported or enriched in anyway by being used as TV fodder - quite the opposite. It is really painful to watch a young person with concentration difficulties attempting to absorb French terms describing the intricacies of leek-chopping. And when the young people didn't "get it", they were blamed . . .
Every system has failed these teenagers - and now they're expected to pull themselves together and get with the Jamie programme. They are being taught by chefs who obviously have no training in teaching people with learning disabilities. So all the failure messages the young people have heard all their lives are being reinforced. Would you ask a man to run up a hill if he had no legs? This is what the series is demanding.
And to make it worse, these young people seem pressured into participating and are receiving no financial recompense. Three young women in the group were "truanting" from this week's programme - just the use of that word shows you the Victorian ethos behind it all. When Jamie confronted them, two of them wept that they could not come to classes because they could not afford the busfare.
Jamie could not get his head around this. He tacitly accused them of lying. They were getting expenses, he patiently explained, the halo shimmering over his head. All they had to do was to hand in the receipts and they would be reimbursed. So how could they say they couldn't afford it? He had no grasp of the notion that to get the receipt, you first have to spend money you do not have.
A third young girl reacted blandly, smiling inanely, when he told her that if she missed another day she would be thrown off the course. Jamie humiliated her, asking her why she was so blasé. He could not see that to set oneself up for rejection, then to react passively to rejection when it comes, is a learned response that comes from growing up in a world where you're regarded as a "loser" from day one.
Maybe by the end of the series, we will get a heart-warming story about how Jamie turned around the lives of his victims - but I doubt it. And even if we are told by the BBC or the Mirror about Jamie's latest successful recipe for treating people with learning disabilities and disadvantaged backgrounds, I won't believe it.
Jamie is typical of Blair's Britain - all surface panache and no substance. If we believe that Jamie is wonderful, we'll suspend our ethical boundaries. If we believe that Tony Blair is wonderful, we won't look beneath the spin to see the Tory policies that lurk there. (For that matter, if we believe that Bertie is wonderful, we may not notice social deprivation.)
The Project was billed as a drama but was actually an exposé of New Labour's ethics, which it branded as corrupt, dishonest and manipulative of public opinion. Shown for four hours over two consecutive nights, The Project was a mixture of soap and politics, The West Wing meets Newsnight.
The drama revolved around a group of idealistic and appealing young activists who became seduced by New Labour into believing that Tony would change the world. As the drama unfolds, Realpolitik teaches them that there is no place for ideals in a party that only cares about focus groups and digging up dirt on its own candidates so that it can blackmail them into submission. The dramatic tension was between an evil spin doctor and the green (as in innocent) Paul, who found himself catapulted into the upper echelons of Tony's campaign.
Paul gradually discovered that the spin doctor is marketing Tony the way you market detergent, finding out what people wanted (more Tory politics) then making sure Tony gave them this, but in the guise of change. But you can't reform the NHS without raising taxes, so Tony makes do with pretending to reform Tory policies, while actually reinforcing them.
So while cutting benefits for single mothers, Tony was entertaining luvvies with champagne parties in Downing Street.
We never actually saw Tony in the drama, except in TV news clips, which was clever. His presence permeated the drama to the extent that during the real-life news-break on the second night, when Tony appeared in white tie and tails at a City of London banquet, we felt as if we were still watching the drama. The real Tony looked absolutely sinister by his "association" with The Project. There hasn't been any shocked reaction to the programme, which just shows you how cynical New Labour actually is and how desensitised the rest of us have become to political manipulation, along with everything else.
Politics is something that young people go into with the highest ideals and expectations, only to realise that they have to surrender their fantasy to reality.
Marriage is the same, really. When you walk down the aisle, you could be marrying the "spun" image rather than the actual person. In a state of infantile love, you believe that the person you are marrying is the person you fantasise they are. It's only when you wake up from your dream (Shakespeare wrote a play about this, so it's nothing new) that you realise your handsome prince/princess is an ass.
So why not just start out marrying the ass? There's nowhere to go but up. That's the premise of arranged marriage, kind of. When strangers marry, there is no question of being "in love". If love grows, that's a bonus. Otherwise, you just stick by the agreement and you know exactly where you stand. That young people would continue to submit to arranged marriage may not be as extraordinary as it seems. Look at it this way, while Shabba, a 26-year-old British Muslim, watched his brother going to discos in a vain attempt to fall in love, he side-stepped all the pain and went straight to the marriage broker.
Shabba trusted his parents to choose the right partner for him, just as his Pakistani bride, Tayyaba, trusted hers. Many an Irish parent will tell you that they knew a marriage was right or wrong from the beginning, but parents aren't allowed to advise on such things any longer. Arranged marriage is antithetical to the liberal ethos, which sees self-realisation as the goal of life. The traditional sees the economic realisation of the family as most important.
Until recently, arranged marriage was popular in Ireland too, not that I'm recommending it. Occasionally, though, you hear of an Irish high-flyer who has no time to meet the opposite sex and relies on an introduction agency to do pretty much the same as Shabba's parents did.
Hanging on to ideals for dear life is unusual. But that's just what Serena Bryans did, profiled in Would You Believe - and featured in The Irish Times earlier this year. When Serena suffered a series of miscarriages, she pledged that if God let her have a baby, she would help another woman.
Now the mother of two children, she has made good her promise. Serena started by donating eggs anonymously, but when she got a call from an infertile British couple in Manchester she offered to help them personally.
She now knows the couple well and has given them her eggs through the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast, since no Irish hospital would co-operate. A child will soon be born, but Serena doesn't see the child as her own . . .
There may be some genetic similarity, she told Gemma McCrohan, but the child belongs to the couple who are nurturing it. Ethical issues, such as how the child may feel to discover that its natural mother was an egg donor, or how her own children may feel to learn they have a half-sibling out there somewhere, didn't concern Serena.
Would You Believe is visually basic. Serena was an interesting subject, but all we saw were the standard views of the subject at home, at the zoo, in the hospital carpark, at work, long-shots and close-ups, with the voice-over explaining the story, interspersed with the subject's own words.
It could have been so much more. A fascinating subject came across as mundane. Or maybe we're just so used to having ethical boundaries pushed, that we're desensitised to issues such as egg donation too.
tvreview@irish-times.ie
Shane Hegarty is on leave