Blunder Down Under Fingers on buzzers

TV REVIEW: The Oz FactorRTÉ2, Sunday; Torchwood: Children of EarthBBC1, All week; You Have Been WatchingChannel 4, Tuesday; University ChallengeBBC2, Monday

WHAT DOES

The Oz Factor

believe itself to be? A glance at the scenario and a consideration of the title (are you reminded of a durable ITV smash?) suggests that the RTÉ series might be another queasy blend of reality television and talent show. We are invited to watch as a number of the country’s most talented Gaelic footballers seek to impress an Australian man with wire-wool hair and caravan-enthusiast’s jeans. Those whose bobs and weaves pass muster will be invited to cross many time zones and earn thousands playing the class of organised thuggery that goes by the name of Australian rules football.

Watch as an animated oval ball hurtles towards Derry, Dublin and Kerry. Listen as unthreatening music by the likes of Arctic Monkeys, The Cranberries, U2 and Battles accompanies the candidates’ physical jerks. Fret as the Antipodean Alan Sugar paces the touchline and tries to decide which player will shortly be stuffed into a singlet and propelled before the beer-swilling burghers of Brisbane.

Who will hear the happy words: “You’re hoired, mate!“? Now, it hardly needs to be said that there is something dubious about this enterprise. You don’t have to be grumpy Tom McGurk to regard Ricky Nixon, the Aussie rules agent in question, as the badly dressed embodiment of all that is vulgar in professional sport. Still, if you actually are grumpy Tom McGurk then you will probably express your anger in agreeably colourful terms.

"That Australian nonsense – the notion that money can solve anything," Tom sighed. "Australia must still be in its infancy if it thinks that." At this point the show's split personality fully revealed itself. It was as if The X-Factorhad, between acts, allowed Billy Bragg to sing a song comparing Simon Cowell to a slave trader. When The Oz Factorwasn't encouraging the Gaelic players to ponder a life eating prawns in the tropics, it was working hard at making a cartoon villain out of Mr Nixon (good name for a baddie, mind you).

To be fair, the bluff agent was more than willing to play the producers’ game. Every word and gesture seemed calculated to support the perception that he was a brash philistine with a cash register where other men have hearts.

After revealing the hostility that the GAA press felt towards Nixon, the film-makers showed him in conference with a senior colleague.

“We’re not the Pied Piper coming to take away their children,” his pal said.

"Aren't we?" Nixon said, faintly disappointed, before going on explain how much he enjoyed being compared to the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. You got the impression that, had the makers asked, he would willingly have pulled on a cape, placed artificial fangs in his mouth and pretended to suck the blood of a passing virgin.

The show is, so far, simultaneously a triumph and a disaster. Both McGurk and Mickey Harte, successful manager of Tyrone, were so eloquent in their defence of the amateur ethos in GAA that you found yourself reddening with fury whenever Nixon began forwarding his materialistic philosophy.

"They're offering him 'a new life'," Tom said of one player. "What's wrong with the life he has?" Yet the programme-makers still felt the need to structure the show like, well, something called The Oz Factor. Escape from the GAA was, the voice-over occasionally suggested, something greatly to be desired.

There is a shorter, more serious documentary fighting to get out of this decidedly odd series.

MIND YOU, THE Oz Factordid deserve respect for managing to keep breathing beneath the waves of Torchwoodthat flooded across the schedules last week.

I have, to this point, been somewhat suspicious of the sexier, more grown-up spin-off from Doctor Who. (“Torchwood” is an anagram of that series’ title, don’t you know) The idea of placing an alien-observation agency in Cardiff is, it can’t be denied, an attractively eccentric one, and the combination of Whovian whimsy and post-Buffy raunch is welcome. My problem is with John Barrowman. Do we really need a tall, gay version of Tom Cruise on our televisions? If I want to admire myself in an American’s gleaming teeth, I’ll make do with those attached to the short, straight incarnation, thank you very much.

Torchwood: Children of Earth, which ran all week on BBC1, totally won me over. Reservations about the bouncy Mr Barrowman remain. He is many times more self-aware than Cruise, but that mile-wide smile still screams “Like me! Like me!” a little too loudly. It is not altogether surprising that Captain Jack Harkness, the eternal character he inhabits, gets murdered about three times an hour. If he brought that grin into my living-room, I too might be tempted to clobber him on the head with the nearest standard lamp.

The new series was, however, a gripping piece of work that managed to nod towards various British science fiction classics – Village of the Damnedand the final Quatermassseries in particular – while still mapping out some unexplored territory.

Russell T Davis, the versatile writer who rejuvenated Doctor Who, imagined large numbers of the world's children freezing at a particular time of the morning and solemnly intoning the words "We are coming" into empty space. As the week progressed, government conspiracies revealed themselves, relationships were teased out and folk kept murdering the stubbornly indestructible Captain Jack.

Though brighter and zippier than the Quatermassseries, Torchwoodmanaged to emulate Nigel Kneale's classics by winding some complex, chilling ideas into the thrills and intrigue. In Doctor Who, a collective amnesia appears to descend on the planet after every alien invasion. By way of contrast, Children of Earthpondered what effect repeated extra-terrestrial visitation might have on the Earth's population.

“Suicide rates have doubled,” a handsome doctor mused, before going on to discuss one particular Christian who had killed herself. “Science has won, she realised. She suddenly saw her place in the universe.” Then the doctor murdered Captain Jack.

OFFERING US THE sort of smooth segue beloved of television professionals, Torchwoodwas one of the shows sneered at by the divinely intolerant Charlie Brooker in Channel 4's new You Have Been Watching. Brooker, a former games journalist who now writes for the Guardian, bows to nobody in his revulsion at the moronic excesses of contemporary television. On his untouchable BBC4 series Screenwipe, he has devoted hours to the merciless demolition of game shows, rolling news, reality television and any other class of programme that dares to slither its fetid way on to his telly. Charlie does occasionally pause to celebrate classics such as The Ascent of Manor Civilisation– usually while juxtaposing images of Lord Clark and a Botticelli beside shots of Justin Lee Collins and a donkey – but he is at his best when firing broad fusillades at broader barn doors.

You Have Been Watchingdoes, therefore, constitute something of a risk. Bringing together minor celebrities for a quiz about the week's telly, the show sounds worryingly like the sort of lazy filler that Brooker has such fun satirising. He needn't fret. The new series is rubbish, but, energised by the host's sincere disgust, it's very funny rubbish. The most blackly hilarious segment on television this month came from an American show that attempts to analyse the relative strength of various "warriors". Charlie's spleen may be engorged with putrid TV, but even he seemed genuinely aghast at the sequence that simulated a skirmish between "The Taliban" and "The Irish Republican Army".

Who won? Shame on you for caring.

No prizes for naming the best quiz show on television

What's the best quiz show on television? Come on, come on. I'll have to hurry you. No conferring! Fifteen-to-One?That hasn't been on for years, you moron. I'll have to throw it over to the other team. The Weakest Link?Oh dear, oh dear. I really do despair of today's youth.

The correct answer is, of course, University Challenge. Following last season's scandal, which saw Corpus Christi, Oxford stripped of its title because one team member wasn't a proper student, the series returned for another season this week. The rules for the viewer remain unchanged. Always support the red-brick folk rather than the Oxbridge snoots. Weep tears of pride when an Irish person (there were three Hibernian geniuses on the St John's, Cambridge team last year) correctly identifies the capital of Burkina Faso or the atomic number of barium.

Most importantly, feign outrage when you finally answer a question that these “so-called geniuses” get wrong. It took a long time for such an event to occur in (hooray!) Warwick’s defeat of (boo!) Christ’s College, Cambridge last week, but, sure enough, after showing a knowledge of Wagner’s operas and a grasp of ancient languages, the less ancient university managed to mistake Harold Pinter and Lady Antonia Fraser for Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Ha! So-called geniuses.

Hilary Fannin is on leave