Variety has no right to life

TV Review:'Variety is back!" Oh no, please, please no, it has taken me three decades to overcome the mental trauma of Sunday Night at the London Palladium or, even worse, The Good Old Days. I still wake up in a cold sweat trembling at the memory of Sunday nights in our suburban living room, Nana Nora angrily sucking on a Sweet Afton butt, while on the telly that disconcerting bloke in the top hat roared "ladies and gentlemen, for your delectation . . . your appreciation . . . " as some 16-stone soprano tottered on stage and belted out My Old Man Said Follow the Van.

And whatever about the mawkish comedians and the misbegotten minstrels, I couldn't sleep for worrying about what those dour red-veined magicians were doing with their sawn-in-half glittery ladies.

Now our own lovely Graham Norton, having sold his acerbic little soul to the BBC (in order to finance a herd of Labradoodles, or whatever he's doing with his money), has dragged the dusty corpse of variety up the cellar stair, dusted off its prosthetics, stuck its false teeth in and slapped it bang in the middle of the Saturday-evening family entertainment slot.

I approached the first show of When Will I Be Famous? with the delicacy of an alcoholic circling a sherry trifle, and it made me want to throw up (the show, not the trifle).

The inaugural programme opened with the audience on its feet cheering the set - or maybe they were cheering the panel of judges, three middle-aged men with glasses, white hair and a golf handicap, one, if not all, of whom was publicist Max Clifford. No prizes for guessing the heights of rapture from the studio audience when Norton, having made some child-friendly gags about Jade Goody in an Indian restaurant (stop, you're killing me!), introduced the first in a cornucopia of talent culled from a world of wannabes.

First up was the American ventriloquist with the two birdie puppets. "I call this controlled schizophrenia," he grinned through his clenched "boccle o' beer" teeth. Personally, I'd call it mind-numbing tedium, and it didn't get much better: injured Romanian unicyclist, warbling Liverpudlian adolescent in the throes of Celine Dion (or something equally bruising), and Bruce Airhead, a balding chap who declared himself "the housewife's choice" and whose act entailed entering a large balloon and putting on a Velcro-ed Elvis Presley suit. No, I don't know how he did it either - and I DON'T CARE.

What in the name of tambourine-banging, toilet-seat-juggling, canine- impersonating bejaysus is Norton doing? Much like the chirpy old dancing mongrel (with his decorous lady trainer) who finally beat off the competition to go through to the second round next week (oh no, there's more of it), Norton has obviously been well and truly neutered by Auntie.

AFTER A COUPLE of years on the TV review beat, I really should know better than to be seduced into staying up past my bedtime to entertain Channel 4's psychological insights.

But Egomania beckoned so, clutching my camomile tea (New Year's resolution), I dug deep and learned the catechism of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). There are nine traits associated with NPD, apparently: arrogance, grandiosity, envy, preoccupation with success, lack of empathy, a desire to have an abdomen tight enough to tap-dance on (I'm making that bit up) . . . and, er, well, that's enough to be going on with.

Having informed us that possessing more than five of the nine traits signified a bona-fide personality disorder, the programme included a little quiz to help viewers ascertain their position on the narcissism scale.

Answer yes to more than five questions along the lines of "do you think you're unique?" (no, I met 10 people just like me in the dry cleaner's this morning) and you're well on the way to being an abusive, psychopathic leader of a religious sect that has sex with hamsters. Excuse my flippancy - and trust me, I'm not underestimating the seriousness of the condition - but as the programme progressed towards the sensationalist reconstruction (including knife-wielding walk-on frenziedly stabbing a leaky dummy) of the gruesome murders of Sydney and Jacqueline Blackwell by their son, Brian, in 1984 (the first time that NPD was used as a defence against murder), one felt that the programme-makers had about as much interest in a sober investigation of the disorder as Graham Norton has in family entertainment.

It is very difficult, apparently, to interview someone with all nine NPD traits, as most of them are either dead or incarcerated. However, the programme, with the fluency of a grim jester, brought us on a short hop to a Macedonian playground to interview Dr Sam Vaknin PhD, author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited (whose web page, by the way, has a disclaimer reading "I am not a health professional"), and bingo, nine out of nine.

Vaknin, whose authoritative contributions had padded out the programme thus far, giving it a faint air of central European psychoanalytical authenticity, suddenly described himself as "a superior sub-species deserving of subservience and availability". Living in self-imposed exile and describing himself as "a self-aware narcissist", Vaknin was obviously deeply unwell.

Ultimately, this was nothing more than "let's trawl the net for a couple of serious wackos" TV. And you'd better believe it because, as Vaknin said, "I am the supreme authority and you are challenging me by your mere existence".

DOCUMENTARY FILM-MAKER Donal MacIntyre's reputation as a fearless undercover investigative reporter was further enhanced this week by Mad Dog, his engrossing, fantastically buoyant and muscular portrait of loyalist paramilitary Johnny "Mad Dog" Adair.

MacIntyre's seemingly unprecedented access to Adair (who, like the queen, refers to himself in the third person) resulted in him taking the former "C Company" boss from his then home in Troon, Scotland, on an audacious and extremely dangerous (though apparently pointless) journey back to the Shankill estate in Belfast, which he had controlled for 20 years as brigadier of the militant wing of the UDA. (Adair was ousted from his fiefdom during a murderous loyalist feud following his release from prison, having served more than half of a 16-year sentence for "directing terrorism".)

Adair is a fascinating and terrifying subject. Alleged to have been associated with dozens of killings, he was, it is also claimed, responsible for ordering the punishment shooting of his own son, "Mad Pup", for, reputedly, dealing class-A drugs. While his father sat next to him, Pup showed MacIntyre the bullet wounds in his calves and expressed his gratitude that he hadn't been kneecapped. Adair himself took a break from a steroid-fuelled iron- pumping session to reveal the mementoes of a career he still seems to pine for: bullet wounds, knife holes, hurley bashes and hammer dents.

MacIntyre's conversations with Adair - in tattoo parlour, gym, car and cafe - were grimly illuminating: even at a face-to-face meeting in Bolton with the policeman who had put him behind bars, Det Sgt "Jonty" Brown, Adair's longing for his former life seemed untrammelled by regret. He spoke nostalgically about his years of incarceration in the Maze Prison, of the raves, the booze, the porn, the camaraderie.

Of his halcyon days as lord of the Shankill, he said he was "married to the life . . . I dreamed, slept, breathed that organisation".

Ultimately, what set MacIntyre's documentary apart and made it so terrifying was its exposure of the cartoonish theatricality of Adair, a man steeped in his own grandiose notions of his invincibility and importance.

Unfortunately, as the programme showed, his inflated view of himself is supported by, among others, a bunch of young German neo-Nazis who idolise him. His visit to meet them in Dresden raised the question of his contradictory ideology: interestingly, he admitted without hesitation that if he had been born further down the road in Belfast, he would more than likely have wanted to be a commander for the other side.

"Johnny Adair will go home soon," he told MacIntyre, his thunderous great head filling the frame. Terrific, there's something to look forward to.

FILM-MAKER ALAN Gilsenan, who recently brought us The Asylum, this week gave us the first in a sedate but thought-provoking four-part documentary series, The Hospice. Gilsenan's gently persuasive and non-intrusive presence is ideally suited to such sensitive and compelling subject matter. Revealing an unexpectedly serene universe, in which the committed staff of the St Francis Hospice in Dublin's Raheny strive to take care of the physical, psychological, social and spiritual needs of their terminally ill patients, Gilsenan demystified the day-to-day lives of the clients and gave a voice to a hitherto silent population, whose experience it would benefit us all to hear.

From the patients, who we saw painting, talking and praying, as well as having manicures, massages, hairdos and holistic therapies, there were stories of courage, despair, fear and acceptance. These ranged from a mother in her thirties filled with anger at being taken away from her "beautiful children" to the pragmatism and honesty of a man who described his terminal illness as being "not as bad as the depths of clinical depression". With the hospice affording him dignity and a sense of peace, he was able to say: "I don't think I've been happier at any other stage in my life." Elucidating and unexpectedly reassuring viewing that shouldn't be missed.