Big brains on the box

TV REVIEW: BERNICE HARRISONreviews a selection of TV programmes

The Limits of LibertyRTÉ1, Tuesday

Genius of BritainChannel 4, Sunday-Thursday

The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne ListerBBC2, Monday

Revealing Anne ListerBBC2, Monday

Bodyshock: I'm Turning into a GiantChannel 4, Tuesday

Child of our Time: The Big Personality Test BBC1, Sunday and Monday

WELL, THAT'S another stereotype shot to pieces. "History professor" used to be handy shorthand for a tweedy old bloke with a distracted air, a light dusting of dandruff and a worn set of leather elbow patches – and then along comes Diarmaid Ferriter. UCD's new professor of modern history was on TV this week with the first of The Limits of Liberty, his three-part series exploring the early years of the State and, more particularly, arguing that the ideals of the revolution, especially those based on social justice and child welfare as subsequently written in the Constitution, were quickly and deliberately sidelined once the first government came into being. It was all about power and maintaining the status quo (sounds familiar) and, argued Ferriter, both new parties, Cumann Na nGael and Fianna Fáil, considered that "the Irish were incapable of governing themselves" – hardly a promising foundation for a democratic republic.

Ferriter is young and intense, with a nice line in pink shirts and sharp suits, and when he says something he does so with such full-on intensity you're obliged to listen – and it's not just because his Prison Breakhaircut makes him look a little scary. It's a big challenge to turn what is basically a well-argued history lecture – and one in which the lecturer is keen to show archival documents – into interesting-to-look-at TV, but, credit to Ferriter, his co-writer Nuala O'Connor and director Maurice Linnane, they did it.

It was mostly through the skilful and extensive use of archive footage, the most unforgettable sequence being the contrast between the scenes of Dublin tenement life and the obvious and abject poverty of the people with the footage of the first taoiseach, WT Cosgrave, arriving home from work to his period mansion where his children were riding their ponies on the manicured lawn. Contemporary shots of Dublin streets scenes – the Luas whizzing by, the IFSC, Ferriter doing a lot of walking, as is the way in modern documentaries – underlined the idea that the history talked of in the programme has implications for how we are governed today. That old saw that the reason why we study history is so we won’t repeat mistakes is shown for the empty rhetoric it is. Sitting in the National Library of Ireland, shoving his giant hands into those cotton gloves curators use to protect precious documents, Ferriter leafed through letters written in the 1950s by Peter Tyrrell, a survivor of dire abuse in Letterfrack whose search for answers about what happened to him were ignored at the time. Such scenes bolstered the historian’s argument that the greatest failure of the new State was the abandonment of the promises in the Democratic Programme of the first Dáil to make the welfare of children the central priority of the new republic. The first programme was slow burn. It initially required some knowledge of the story of Irish independence, the names, the events and the ideologies, but if you stuck with it beyond the first five minutes or so the reward was a cogent, credible argument that’s depressingly relevant to the state we’re in.

MORE BIG BRAINS featured in Genius of Britain, an all-star four-part exploration of the work of great British scientists whose discoveries helped create the modern world. Stephen Hawking narrates. It doesn't get more boffinish than that. The idea is that well-known scientists, including David Attenborough, Robert Winston and Richard Dawkins, tell the story and relevance of their scientist heroes, and it has been fascinating to watch.

On Monday the inventor James Dyson enthused about Robert Boyle, one of the big five founders of modern science, stopping this reviewer in her tracks and prompting a double check of the programme’s title. Don’t we claim him and his groundbreaking law as our own? He was born in Lismore, Co Waterford, after all, and stayed there until he was shipped off to secondary school in Eton.

Boyle is regarded as the father of modern chemistry, and Dyson’s demonstration of the contraption he invented to explore the properties of air was fascinating and, crucially, easy to understand. And maybe the categorisation of Boyle as British might have been what he would have wanted. While Dyson quickly skipped over the birthplace bit, he had the grace not to mention Boyle’s famous quote that Ireland “is a barbarous country, where chemical spirits were so misunderstood, and chemical instruments so unprocurable, that it is hard to have any Hermetic thoughts in it”.

THE BIG DRAMA of the week, The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, was a Regency romp all about things unspoken for propriety's sake. In 17th-century Yorkshire Anne Lister may have dressed just like Jane Austen's characters, but she wasn't remotely interested in "the truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife". She had the fortune and, as Yorkshire's most famous lesbian, she wanted a wife. In her diaries, which ran to four million words, she talked about it endlessly and so graphically that they were suppressed until the 1980s.

In this quite beautiful-looking drama, exactly what’d you’d expect from the BBC, a luminous Maxine Pike played Anne from her first passionate love affairs through her disregard for shocked 17th-century popular opinion to the end of her days noodling around the potting shed with her wife, the fabulously wealthy heiress Anne Walker. Lovely costumes, lots of stomping on the moors, perfectly pitched acting – Susan Lynch as one of Lister’s cruelly discarded exes was particularly good – plenty of steamy sex scenes: not your usual Monday-night fodder but entertaining all the same. And then, later the same evening, Sue Perkins, in her hilarious documentary Revealing Anne Lister, picked the whole thing apart. Wandering around Yorkshire, Lister’s diary in her hand, she went in search of the real Regency heroine by talking to local historians and Lister enthusiasts – of which there are a great deal.

Yes, she concluded, she admired Lister for being brave enough to go against the mores of the society she was born into, and it was sad that she was ditched by the great love of her life because she was starting to look a bit butch, but then, said Perkins, she was “a thrusting, blasting, sexual nuthouse”, a raving snob and a grasping gold-digger. Not quite what she seemed in the drama, then.

THERE IS NO hiding for 30-year-old Tanya Angus from Nevada, who was once a pretty and popular 5ft 8in, 10-stone teenager but is now an enormous woman standing 6ft 6in tall and weighing 34 stone. And she’s still growing and living in ever-increasing pain. “I’m like Godzilla,” she said in her ever-deepening voice as holiday snaps of her as a typical teen flashed across the screen. The cause of her acromegalic gigantism is a brain tumour on the pituitary gland, which leads to the overproduction of growth hormone. The average level of growth hormone measures between 50 and 100; hers is at 4,000.

The Bodyshock documentary I'm Turning into a Giantfollowed her and her fellow sufferers Igor, a giant of a young man at 7ft 11in, and Mary, who only developed the condition at 52, as their neurosurgeons attempted to find solutions to a condition that is difficult to control or even understand. What could have been an exploitative documentary wasn't, as the everyday bravery of the subjects shone through, and their determination to live ordinary lives was inspiring. All those sepia-toned pictures in the Guinness Book of Records of Robert Wadlow, at 8ft 11in the tallest man ever and, as the programme showed, an acromegaly sufferer, now take on a new meaning.

21st century boys and girls Tracking a nation's evolution since 2000

Robert Winston's Child Of Our Timehas been an annual treat for 10 years. In a big social experiment (that probably only the BBC has deep enough pockets to do) he is tracking the development of a group of British millennium babies from birth to adulthood. For anyone who has children, particularly a child born in 2000, it has been a fascinating journey.

This year's catch-up, The Big Personality Test, broadened the experiment out to test how the personalities have evolved not only of the group of children but also of the personalities of the great British public. There are – watch this programme and you too could become a pop psychologist – five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, and everyone exhibits all five to a lesser or greater degree. Only 40-50 per cent of your personality is inherited, according to Winston (whose luxurious black 'tache is one of the physical wonders of the series); the rest is down to environment. So stop blaming your parents if you are a nervous nelly or picky obsessive: it just might not be their fault.

The programme found that the people of Northern Ireland are the most agreeable in the UK, but Northern Ireland also has the highest number of worriers.