TV REVIEW: Uri Geller had better start using his powers to some effect. Geller is a mind-reader and psychic. All across the land, people keep a straight spoon and a stopped watch stashed in a drawer, in case he pops up on the Late Late Show.
He is also one of eight lower-division celebrities in I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here, spending two weeks in an Australian rainforest, miles from civilisation and only yards from Ant and Dec's enormous purpose-built studio. There could be no greater proof of Geller's power than in how he saw, brilliantly, that one of the first things anyone will do if trouble hits camp is turn to him for a psychic leg-up.
"I said I would not use my powers on this programme," declared Geller. "It would be ethically wrong." He wavered after three days, encouraging the group to chant at the rain to stop. The rain remained stoically sceptical. Later in the day, the group had a 50/50 choice between a booby prize and a box of Burgundy wine. They chose box B. The wine was in box A, so the group went sober for the night. Geller's ethics stood fast.
Geller has famously used his powers to bend spoons, win football matches and fix watches. He once stopped Big Ben ticking, although he only mentioned this after it had stopped. He has not used his powers to solve crimes or decommission guns.
I'm A Celebrity is Survivor meets Celebrity Big Brother. The latter was an unexpectedly entertaining experiment in how people who want attention all the time react when they get it all the time. Keith Duffy owes his career to it; Jack Dee wishes he didn't. Vanessa Feltz was left whimpering among the shattered pieces of hers. It was practically a new genre of programme, packing all the novelty that I'm A Celebrity doesn't.
Here, presenters Ant and Dec are the oil that keep the rusty wheels of entertainment turning. If The Muppet Show's Waldorf and Statler had joined a boyband, they would have been Ant and Dec. That they must appear so regularly to tell you how great the show is should be a signal for you to check what's on the other side. "It really is amazing to be here," said Ant or Dec, glancing at the surroundings. The beauty of the rainforest so struck the producers that they have recreated it in the middle of the rainforest.
As with Geller, it is about what is not happening. The climax of each night has been the result of a public vote to see which celeb is to be subjected to the Bush Tucker Trial, where creepy-crawlies must be bathed in or stroked in return for food. "Don't miss it. Live!" they say. "Coming up. The announcement. Live!" The trial itself is then recorded and edited for the next episode. It is like being shown the toss of the coin, but not the match itself.
Meanwhile, Tara Palmer-Tompkinson refuses to lose her mind. Palmer-Tompkinson became famous as an It Girl, before stepping down a notch by becoming the girl famous for Losing It on national television. Her addled, incoherent appearance on The Frank Skinner Show put her first in celebrity rehab, and then in the fantasy green room in which George Best, Oliver Reed and Brigitte Nielsen are also tanking up on free wine. It would not seem unfair to suggest that her prime qualification for appearing on this show is that there is a nagging hope on the viewers' part that she will "do a Vanessa". To her credit, it is a role she resolutely refuses to play.
Otherwise, the entertainment comes in guessing why the celebrities are there. Maybe they have a need for constant publicity (Geller, Palmer-Tompkinson); or need more positive publicity (Christine Hamilton); or need any publicity they can get (Nigel Benn, Rhona Cameron). When it comes down to it, though, it is no more entertaining to watch celebrities being bored than it is to watch civilians. Only Geller can save us. He's a great man for the advice, always standing by to give someone an insight into themselves that they didn't ask for. Geller is getting into their minds, and hopefully on their nerves too. Your powers are needed, Uri. Ethics demand it.
I spent a week in Tunisia earlier this year on the basis that if you want sun, the Sahara has somewhat of a reputation for it. It poured rain for two days. While it did, newly arrived holiday-makers spent their time drinking from breakfast till bedtime, watching loop after loop of Sky News, and growing more mutinous by the hour. It culminated in a mid-afternoon scuffle between guests and reps that stemmed from one man's insistence that the beer in the hotel must be watered down, because he had consumed 15 pints and wasn't drunk enough. It was a depressing sight. Tunisia had fought off the oppression of the Romans, Nazis and French, only to invite that of the pink-skinned, blue-tattooed hordes from the north.
However, as we were reminded in Paradise Exposed - a programme which pointed us away from the pool and the camel rides to the less savoury life behind some package destinations - Tunisia is already a repressive place. It may be liberal by Arab standards, but it is tyrannical by Western ones. If you move away from the imported English tabloids and to the local press, it is quickly obvious that the media is horribly acquiescent and the president, Ben Ali, unnaturally popular. He has recently been handed a further seven years in power through a referendum in which 99.5 per cent of voters backed him (99.6 per cent of eligible voters took part).
In Paradise Exposed, an ironic Holiday Programme pastiche was laid on a little thick, but the point was well made. Journalist David Aaronovitch wandered the bazaars and visited the tourist spots, while in between talking to a victim of police torture, meeting the few opposition leaders not in prison, and attracting the attention of the secret police.
In Thailand, meanwhile, journalist Decca Aikenhead visited the Burmese border, where tourists pop across for knock-off designer goods and the thrill of stepping into a political hotspot. In the opposite direction come refugees from a vicious Burmese regime and young girls sold into the clutches of sex tourism. Her footage of two Americans taking their pick from group of 13-year-olds in a Thai brothel was gut-wrenching.
It was not a programme urging you against visiting these places, but one that asked you to learn a little more about them when you do. Ultimately, though, Paradise Exposed will be nothing more than a pebble in the avalanche of travel programmes.
As if to prove it, on Wednesday the more conventional Holiday on a Shoestring also visited Tunisia. Presenter Jayne Middlemiss treated the country as a giant catwalk, slowly mincing from destination to destination. She visited a war cemetery, and commented on the youth of the men who lie there. Maybe it was as a posthumous treat that she paraded past the headstones while wearing micro-top, bare midriff and a denim mini-skirt that clung weakly to her hip-bone. She didn't, lest you expected it, mention politics. That would be like bringing some Pilger or Chomsky in your suitcase instead of a Binchy or a Clancy. "Don't come to Tunisia just for sun and beaches," Middlemiss encouraged. "It's really a fascinating place." If only she knew how much.
They had a pub quiz in the Phoenix Club in this week's episode of Phoenix Nights. It was to launch a new Japanese beer, Kamikaze, so the quizmaster took to the occasion with great delicacy, donning a Fu Manchu moustache and played Turning Japanese at every opportunity. He began the quiz with a bow and a "Ah-so".
It was like most pub quizzes you've ever been at. Those who know it all mixed with those who thought they knew it all. (Quizmaster: "I suffer from pyrophobia. What am I afraid of?" Max the bouncer: "Pirates!")
Peter Kay's comedy has been an oasis in the summer desert, an original to cling on to when the repeats have been repeated once too often. Kay plays Brian Potter, the wheelchair-bound, two-bit entrepreneur with plans to conquer the North. It is a strange brew of Northern humour, affection for the working man's club and pop culture obsession. There are references in almost every line, and sight gags abound.
The club's resident lounge singer, Jerry "The Saint" St Clair, has released his own CD. Potter glanced at the track listing. Nirvana's Lithium was followed by Simple Minds's Belfast Child and Rock Me Amadeus (German Version). It was a joke you needed the pause button to get, but all the better for it.
Unfortunately, the comedy may have peaked with the opening episode of this second series. At the end of the last, the Phoenix Club was burnt to the ground, and things resumed with Potter gathering up the old team to rebuild the joint. DJ Ray Von had a job at a funfair.
"Shabba," he would yell, before pressing the button that would start the giant teapots. Jerry and his backing band, Les Alanos, were putting special offers to music down at the local supermarket. "Come get your black bin bags," Gerry sang to the Men In Black chorus. "Now in packs of 20!"
Since then, the plots have begun to run away a little, and the cast grows exponentially. Each week a new character attached himself, and it's getting to the point at which there isn't enough script to go around. It remains, though, a highlight of the week.
Meanwhile, back at the quiz and the results are coming in, with the Phoenix team comparing their answers.
Quizmaster: "The answer was the Shroud of Turin." "What did we have?" "Lisa Stansfield."
I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here ITV, all week Paradise Exposed BBC2, Sunday Holiday On A Shoestring BBC1, Wednesday Phoenix Nights Channel 4, Thursday