Disappearing manners

TV Review: George Bernard Shaw once said (apparently) that "a lady is one who never inflicts pain"; his wife's very substantial bequest, however, to "polish the manners of the Irish", at a time when a world war was raging, incensed some of GBS's fellow countrymen and must surely have raised incredulous eyebrows elsewhere.

Specifically, Mrs GBS wanted to encourage self-control, good deportment, elocution and social intercourse. Since the 1960s and the foundation of a trust to implement Constance Shaw's wishes, her imprimatur has been carried by Margo Bellew, whose life's mission, she told us in Townlands: Miss Etiquette, has been to promote good manners around Ireland.

Bellew, with her carefully maintained bodywave, snug court shoes and matching handbag, waded purposefully through a sea of pierced navels, casual expletives, combat-like teenage French kissing (tongue studs clashing) and the persistent musicality of mobile phones to bring her simple message to the masses: "Good manners are essential for anyone who wishes to succeed."

From boardrooms to wedding breakfasts, trainee jockeys to slouching debutantes, Bellew scatters her pearls of wisdom. Belching, body odour and flowers on a first date (too presumptuous) are a no-no. Holding your red wine by the bowl of the glass and your white by the stem is in.

In the mating-and-dating stakes, a woman (who should, according to Bellew, be attractive and entertaining) might profitably consider jotting down a few conversational openers in case the chat dries up or her date is under the table clutching a pint and struggling with his social skills. Men, Bellew went on to inform us, without batting a discreetly powdered eyelid, "have a sexual urge".

This mumsy portrait was desperately nostalgic; Bellew's well-elocuted voice is whispering at a screaming wind. Manners, though, are apparently big business, which, like every other bit of flesh hanging off the corporate skeleton, are being picked clean by wire-free consultants. Apparently, in our shiny new century, we even have professionals to verse businessmen in the art of "men's urinal etiquette". Somehow, I think even Miss Bellew would balk.

PERHAPS THE OCCASIONALLY virginal Britney Spears should give Miss Bellew a call - according to the assembled punditry on Britney's Redneck Roots, the "vixen virgin" is on a "spectacular downward spiral". The programme charted Spears's meteoric rise and semi-fall, from her Bible Belt roots in Kentwood, Louisiana, a desultory town with a wig shop and a population of 2,000 tobacco-spitting good ol' boys, to multi-million-selling pop icon, and on to dyed-blonde, pink-velour-suited, mansion-owning, marriage-annulling millionairess.

Spears's string of number-one singles and her Lolita-like videos of lollipops and pleated school mini-skirts (which any self-respecting nun would have pinned the brown paper around) catapulted her to stardom. She had been in training for celebrity (with the help of her vicarious mother, Lynn) since the age of five, belting out the Dolly Parton numbers at every car-wash opening or high-school football game going. Her big break came when she was chosen from 40,000 children to be a regular presenter/performer on Disney's Mickey Mouse Club show, where her colleagues included Christina Aguilera and Justin Timberlake. The demise of the show coincided with yet another boom in formulaic pop, and next thing Spears was on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine wearing a push-up bra and holding a Teletubby. A nation salivated and a star was born.

"You can take the girl outta Kentwood, but you can't take Kentwood outta the girl," said one of Spears's neighbours. It was possible to come away from this light-hearted documentary actually liking Britney. This manufactured teen idol, with scripted soundbites about "saving yourself for marriage" dripping from her glossy lips (whenever she could get her tongue back in) and with an image of hyper-sexuality that was as cleverly manipulated as her supposed virginity, came across in quite a sympathetic light.

Inevitably the image began to fall apart. In 2004 she went to Las Vegas with a childhood sweetheart, proposed to him, and married him with a garter-belt over her jeans. The marriage lasted 55 hours before her management swatted it. Later the same year she married a backing dancer who had left his pregnant partner and their previous child. At the wedding the men wore tracksuits sporting the word "Pimp", while the women's said "Maid".

The media turned on Kentwood's princess, but the locals don't mind. Spears, now pregnant, is back in Serenity, her $4-million (€3.3 million) home-town mansion, with her collection of dolls, and her best friend, Cortney (and Cortney's doll collection), and the diner is still grilling her favourite burgers.

Meanwhile, the town's newest prodigy, 12-year-old Taylor Horn, with her indelible eyeliner and pout and peroxide locks and a granny with dollar signs in her eyes and Britney's old voice coach, is doing her hours of mirror work and nightly singing Fever to a dully lascivious crowd in the local bar. Life in Kentwood goes on.

TREVOR DEELY DISAPPEARED on December 8th, 2000. He was 22 years old, and it was the night of his office Christmas party. He was a happy, healthy, fit and educated young man with a loving family, a good social life and career prospects. He disappeared into thin air. Five years on, Cracking Crime spoke to Deely's family and work colleagues in the hope, presumably, of triggering memories and uncovering any piece of evidence, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, that might give a hint of what happened to him.

This well-intentioned programme was not helped, however, by its amateurish reconstructions of Deely's office party, which looked like a dreadful parody of Yuletide on Craggy Island.

Deely's brother Mark recalled retracing Deely's last-known movements, gleaned from the evidence of CCTV footage. Passing the US embassy, Mark spoke to a garda who had been on duty on the night of the disappearance. The streets, the garda said, had been "hoovered" that day, the manhole covers shut, the skips emptied - Bill Clinton was in town. Along these uncharacteristically clean streets, no clues about Deely's disappearance had been found. And despite a massive and well-organised campaign of leafleting and searching by Deely's friends and family, absolutely nothing more has come to light.

Journalist Michael O'Toole speculated in the programme that Deely, walking home, tired and having had a few drinks, may have tripped and fallen into the Dodder River, which, given the heavy rain, was high - and that he had been swept out to sea. Despite the dearth of information, Trevor's father, who spoke of trying to "grab moments of sanity among the terror and panic", remains hopeful that somehow his son will be returned. And a warm and emotional Mark Deely asked simply that his brother should not be forgotten.

THE FIRST 48 hours in a search for a missing person are crucial, we learned from Cracking Crime, a statistic reinforced by a double-whammy of the missing-person drama, Without A Trace, which returned to Channel 4 for a third series. The two episodes were linked by a pretty unsubtle lash at right-wing American family values. In the first, the investigation team, now being led by Vivienne (but not for long), who is black and female, were searching for a blind girl and her helper, who had been kidnapped by a nasty short-order chef and a nerdy young waiter called Trent. When the team turned up at Trent's home to speak to his mother, they stumbled on a central-casting religious freak, complete with greasy hair, scary housecoat and a voluble crucifix on the wall.

In the second episode, a nurse disappeared while changing a flat tyre on a torrentially wet unlit road in the dead of night ("I'd be scared and I'm an FBI agent," said Samantha Spade, played by Poppy Montgomery, who looks like an actor called Poppy Montgomery and not like an FBI agent at all). Turns out Lillian the nurse had been picked up by a fundamentalistanti-abortionist with whom she used to be involved, who had dumped her in a laundry basket with a bomb strapped to her back and had wheeled her into an abortion clinic to decimate the staff and clients.

Four hours missing . . . six hours missing . . . nine hours missing . . . this is a thriller without page numbers. The team, who ended up getting Jack, their old boss, back, were housed in a high-spec atrium full of computers and telephones and chairs that swivel, and twinkling maps and great hairdos. With that kind of technology, it would be deeply embarrassing if the guest stars stayed missing.