Many ways to test your mettle

It was one of those weeks in which you found yourself watching television through your fingers. Or rather, you watched through your fingers as somebody else watched things through their fingers, if you get my drift. On Treasure Island, there was much offscreen squealing as the pig got dispatched, and the group proved that most Irish people can only take so much healthy food plucked form the bosom of nature before the urge for a dirty fry-up finally overwhelms.

In The Heat Is On, they threatened to go through a whole zoo. Just in case we haven't had enough, The Heat Is On is yet another one of these programmes in which a group of spoiled urbanites travel to some foreign paradise to prove just how soft-boiled we have become.

Actually, somebody had turned the heat off in the first episode, so the group spent a couple of days in the Scottish highlands wrapped in every item of clothing they've ever owned. Some of them will later get to further prove their uselessness in the wilds of Peru. How they do this, though, involves a system of rules so complicated that any attempt to figure it out would have your brain ordering you to turn over to something better.

This week their guide, Lofty, taught them how to best turn an animal from cute to dinner. "Just quickly separate the neck from the head," said Lofty snapping the neck of a chicken as if he was shelling peas. Lofty used to be in the SAS. It sent shivers up the spine.

Next up, a rat. "Quickly separate the head form the neck," repeated Lofty. Snapping necks, he was hinting, is not a complicated business.

Then he produced a bunny. @This is Fluffy. Say hello Fluffy." Lofty demonstrated the best point at which to break Fluffy's neck, and gave it a squeeze. And for a moment, as Fluffy's brief, but let's hope promiscuous, life flashed before this eyes, it did look as if Lofty was going to do it. "But, we've no need to eat Fluffy today," he finally decided. There was such a collective sigh of relief that the rabbit's ears swept back with the resulting breeze.

In Nurses, only half-an-hour later, a Spanish fisherman turned up in University College Hospital, Galway with his severed thumb in a pack of frozen peas. A doctor lifted the separated digit up for a look and explained that the long stringy thing dangling from it was a tendon, which had been yanked from all the way up the length of his arm. It was about that moment I pushed away my spaghetti bolognese. Next week, you should be warned, features a pregnant woman determined to eat the placenta.

Actually, it would be unfair to concentrate on the bloodier bits of Nurses, which is not a series that exploits the gory side of the A&E just to keep things tense. There are plenty of these medical fly-on-the-walls all over the schedules, and they are by and large more exploitative as they parachute Gabby Roslin or Carol; Vordeman in to wring every last drop of pathos out of the children's ward.

At the beginning of this week's Nurses, the only thing which greeted the A&E nurses when they arrived to work where the 19 patients sleeping on trolleys in the corridor because there was no room for them anywhere else. A patient, Bridie, woke up after having a breast removed to find herself on a trolley and relayed the story with a stuttering disbelief. The nursing gets squeezed in when they're not having to explain to elderly patients that there is a five-hour wait to be seen.

Nurses us honest but delicate in its approach, illustrating the genuine dedication the job requires and the sort of conditions under which it has to be done. It is also admirably straightforward in handling illness, which, presumably, is how nurses themselves must approach it too.

A sequence in which Phil, a woman who had had a mastectomy four years ago, was fitted for a prosthesis was especially unflinching and honest-rare for prime-time television. Of course, the camera can't go far enough. There are the daily, prosaic chores which nurses do for the patients, the washing and toilet jobs from which most of us would recoil but which act as a safety net for a patient's dignity. Prime-time television isn't ready to show that yet. What it can do, though, Nurses does very well indeed.

Robson Green fell for a nurse in Take Me, a drama that ran on Sunday and Monday night before ending on a cliffhanger that frustratingly won't be resolved until this Monday. I say it's frustrating not because it could have all been wrapped itself up within the hour on the first night and given us a little light music for the remaining five-and-a-half hours it'll scoop out of our television lives.

Green's nurse was part of a whole high-class wife-swapping thing he'd somehow got himself involved in, but for which he and his acting were unprepared. His range stretches form cheeky to confused to - as long as he gets a breather every so often-sometimes cheeky but confused.

He is also bafflingly popular, which is why his dramas tend to be written with him, rather than a decent story, in mind. In Take Me, the high-class wife-swapping plot soon became a "is there a murderer living next door?" thing and then a father-son bonding thing.

This is a latest of the "dark-by-numbers" dramas that have been churning out ever since Fitz stubbed out his last cigarette in Cracker. No line is trivial, every word spoken has to be pregnant with meaning. How you'd love someone to interrupt and say, "I'm just popping down the road for fags. Anybody need anything?" Every scene is leaden with atmosphere, which must explain why the actors move so slowly. The possible murderer, Doug Patton, so often indulges in the old bad-guy trick of appearing suddenly and without a sound that you would like t o check his feet for wheels. On Monday night, the plot creaked its way to a halt and tried to figure where to go next. I've got a feeling it will still be sitting there long after the credits roll again this Monday night.

Even if I spend the rest of my life sat in front of the TV(and I've got this far so, I figure, why stop now?) I don't think I'll ever see a piece of footage as unique as the season finale of Opportunity Knocks 1976, replayed on THE Real Hughie Green. The documentary itself was necessarily salacious and highly entertaining. But only for those not involved. People were not queuing up to praise him.

"The only thing that kept my father going was that one day he would be able to piss on Hughie Green's grave," said a daughter of Jess Yates. Green you'll recall, was the biological father of Jess's daughter Paula Yates. It was Green's parting shot to have a journalist drop the bombshell during the funeral oratory. In retrospect, he was holding back.

"I know I'm rotten father, but I never wanted the job," he told his daughter Linda. It didn't stop him applying. We also met illegitimate son Barry, a Hughie Green clone with a Brummie accent. "We know there are at least three others, brother and sisters, out there," said Linda. "The phone could ring at any minute." Green's ego was matched only by his paranoia and he spent his dying years convinced that the axing of the talent contest show Opportunity Knocks had been the result of a left-wing conspiracy.

Considering what he did in 1976, though, a conspiracy was hardly necessary. In the depths of the mid-1970s depression, he held the season's finale in a submarine base, deciding that what the nation needed after a night of whistling miners and kids on unicycles was a speech and a song which would get Britain of its arse and out looking for work. The studio filled with military bands, uniformed children and young women in miniskirts. The drums struck up a march. There wasn't much in the way of a tune, but the warchorus, a rousing crescendo to inspire a nation. "Freedom," they sang. "Freedom. Freedom in victory. Victory!" It made the Nurembourg Rallies look like a weaker episode of Bullseye.

tvreview@irish-times.ie