TV Review/Shane Hegarty: Reviews today include Miss World, Bodyshock: The Boy Who Gave Birth To His Twin, Spain: A Journey from Dictatorship to Democracy and Fair City
Miss World
Sky One, Saturday
Bodyshock: The Boy Who Gave Birth To His Twin
Channel 4, Monday
Spain: A Journey from Dictatorship to Democracy
RTÉ1, Thursday
Fair City
RTÉ1, all week
As we all know, it has been a bad time for TV3; the most obvious news being that, now that it has dropped its coverage of the Miss World contest, Miss Ireland Rosanna Davison has only gone and won the thing.
I watched Sky One's broadcast of this year's Miss World. Such a dignified event. There were 106 women, each individually introduced during a section of the show that went on longer than Miss Georgia's legs. Beauty pummelled the eyes, the introductions going on for so long that they eventually numbed the senses until all you could make out was the flaring of phosphorous teeth and hair that bounced like a kangaroo on a trampoline. It could, at the very least, have constituted a geography lesson that no young boy would ever forget. Let's welcome Miss Northern Mariana Islands! Now, to see her in her swimwear, first find her country on a map.
In the bikini contest, each contestant strode towards the camera, catwalking though shallow water with the gait of a mermaid enjoying new legs. Miss Ireland bounced biggest and best, gaining at least a foot in height at the top of her stride. The judge explained: "The winner must look very secure about wearing a bathing suit." Secure? She looked positively intimidating.
In the evening wear section, Miss Lithuania had LITHUANIA written large across her dress, so that she resembled a national airline as much as a beauty contestant. Miss Georgia wore a fetching Moulin Rouge-type outfit and it looked rather as if she had tucked her skirt into the front of her knickers. Such diversions were rare blips in an otherwise flat affair. For those of you who always presumed that changing social attitudes forced Miss World from terrestrial television, it will have been a surprise to find that it was instead because it makes for the worst entertainment possible from the raw materials of a tropical Chinese location and the most beautiful, half-naked women on Earth. At least Jackie Chan looked happy. He was a judge at the Miss World contest and sported the indelible delight of a man . . . well, of a man asked to judge a Miss World contest.
To get to know the contestants a little bit, but not much more, the five finalists were each asked a question. "I must say that the questions are in no particular order," explained the hostess to Miss Canada. "Now, for your first question: who won the FA Cup in 1985?"
No she didn't. Instead, she teed up their little spiels about helping charity, kids, the elderly. Each had 30 seconds to gush, which is hardly enough time to bat an eyelid. Pressed for time, the hostess interrupted each abruptly, so that each contestant's tale of personal altruism was left dangling before they could finish telling us just how humble they are.
When Miss Ireland won, she reacted with stolid composure, as if she had been sprayed on to the throne. Perhaps this was because she realised that it only confirmed Irish women to be the world's most attractive. It is something never once doubted by the men who are married to them, of course. We always knew that those who claimed that the Vikings took all the good ones and left us with the leftovers needed to rewrite their pub arguments. That those chaps who returned from such beauty wastelands as Spain and Italy prattling of "the glamour, the chic, the everything!" of foreign women were drooling up the wrong tree.
Despite its attempt to drum up a little suspense, The Boy Who Gave Birth To His Twin was a diverting bit of pop science. In Khazakstan earlier this year, surgeons removed a giant cyst from the stomach of seven-year-old Alamjan Nematilaev. Inside the cyst was a ball of rudimentary limbs, hair and something resembling a face.
"What was it?" wondered the narrator. "Why did it look so human?" The clue is in the title. Say what you see.
Apparently, research now indicates that one in eight of us are twins, but that in most cases only one child eventually develops. Very rarely, in the early days of pregnancy one foetus is enveloped by the other, only for the "twin" to live and grow inside the surviving child during and beyond the time in the womb and dying only when removed. They call it foetus in foetu and it is what occurred inside Alamjan.
This fitfully fascinating documentary featured an operation on a mother to separate an unborn boy from his external and under-developed twin, attached to his blood supply and living as only legs and lower torso. Continually referred to as a "parasite" with no brain and no heart, the attached foetus is barely human. It posed, then, some troubling questions about what constitutes a human being, although these were crowded out by the programme's insistence on teasing us with glimpses of the "twin" removed from Alamjan's body. It peeked at it from around corners and behind lab-trays, the camera wobbly and unfocused, until, after the final ad-break, ta-dah, it revealed the seven-year-old foetus. It resembled a deflated basketball with thick black hair, like a baby as if constructed by blindfold; and you thought that even this deserved a little more dignity than to be used as a gruesome punchline.
In Spain: A Journey from Dictatorship to Democracy, Nick Coffey delivered a crash course in 25 years of Spanish democracy, reminding us that the beaches we crowd upon in summer were the execution grounds of that country's long winter. It is a jolt to be reminded that there was an attempted coup in Spain as recently as 1981, that Spain was a fascist backwater, sinking deep in poverty and ignominy only years before it bobbed with tourists.
In the form of a travelogue, Coffey tried to fathom how two Spains have become one. How a nation in which the coup had become as traditional as the town fiesta has developed into a wealthy, modern, stable nation; one in which, as one gentleman explained, the security forces now drink tea with the civilians. The dictator's remains might be housed in an enormous mausoleum, but the remnants of the Falangist party now rent a small side-street office, dreaming big but living small.
"If Franco opened his eye he would die all over again," Coffey concluded.
That Coffey introduced us to people that we did not then see interviewed left the sense that his passion for the subject may have slightly overloaded the programme's capacity. Nevertheless, it was an interesting lesson for those of us among the 800,000 Irish who visit Spain every year but do not necessarily see it.
Fair City ran yet another of its "specials" this week, the latest of those episodes during which normal traffic is temporarily suspended so as to allow the passage of a weighty social issue. This week it was the Catholic Church and sexual abuse. Before this it was suicide. There have also been a couple of episodes set in a hospital, in which the poverty of the health service is cleverly mirrored by the poverty of the drama.
During these, most of the regular characters are pushed aside, replaced by new ones hastily introduced before being thrown into the storyline. The presence of T.P. McKenna as a priest with a secret and Anna Manahan returning to the parish house parlour could not distract from the general shoddiness of this week's episodes. They featured a storyline involving drugs, homelessness and teenage delinquency that were there only to act as a loose scaffolding to prop up the issue of the Church and its cover-up of abuse. It was an awkward graft made worse by poor direction and over-burdened scripts. The dialogue became a distillation of every phone-in radio show of the past five years, with those words punctuated only by much hamming. Clench the jaw. Now stare into the middle distance. Cut!
It would seem that, given RTÉ's limited roster of drama, it is now using Fair City as a catch-all, a place into which it siphons the issues it lacks the budget to address anywhere else. On each occasion, the soap creaks and strains under the weight. Too often it collapses altogether.