Too nice to be a model citizen? It's more interesting to be a Rose

TV REVIEW:POOR GORGEOUS, smart Hannah. The Dublin girl was "just nice", sniffed one of the judges in Britain and Ireland's Next Top Model(Sky Living, Monday) in the sort of tone you might say someone smelled of feral cats. "Nice", we are learning in this competition, is not a good thing.

It’s down to the last 10, and the judges particularly loved the model wannabes who looked “fierce”. But UCD graduate Hannah, who was first spotted for the show by glamazon Elle MacPherson, the programme’s lead judge, as she wandered around the shops in Dublin without a thought in her head of becoming a model, was fired this week – which was a particular pity as she was back on home turf.

For the fashion-shoot element of the show, the girls – and no letters please: on planet fashion they're always girls, never women – were brought to Carton House in Co Kildare for a session with our top fashion photographer, Barry McCall, with Yvonne Keating on hand to calm nerves and give advice. Actually, they were very nice too, and encouraging, and calmly professional. The girls were photographed in luscious-looking evening dresses, with birds of prey perched on their arms. (Now they'refierce: a falconer was on hand at all times in case things went wrong.)

“I’m not sure who is the best bird,” said one of the judges, the designer Julian McDonald, using a line he most surely had prepared earlier. “Nice is okay, but it’s not really fashion,” said another judge, sealing Hannah’s fate.

NICE, HOWEVER, does go a long way towards winning the Rose of Tralee – brace yourself: it's on this Monday and Tuesday. In the meantime, the excellent documentary A Rose to India(RTÉ1, Tuesday) showed something of what the winning Rose can expect to get up to in the coming year. The charity Voluntary Service Overseas is one of the competition's sponsors, and the 2010 winner, Clare Kambamettu (Irish mother, Breda; Indian dad, Ravi), spent nearly three weeks in India visiting some of the projects it supports in Hyderabad, Berhampur and Delhi.

Single-issue documentaries showing the work of an aid agency can be dry and worthy, but its director, Rossa Ó Sioradáin, cleverly broadened the scope of this one by giving equal focus to Clare and her family. It made for an absorbing hour of TV.

Clare’s poised presence helped too – she’s a born TV presenter, totally at ease in front of the cameras. We saw and got a good feel for the charity’s inventive and effective projects, so on that level it worked, but as Clare travelled to India with her parents it was also an interesting family story. Thirty-seven years ago Ravi, a young doctor, took a job in Merlin Park hospital in Galway while waiting for his green card to enter the US. He met Breda (her mother wasn’t pleased) and they were later married in London.

The film was as much about Ravi visiting his home town and seeing, maybe for the first time, how his privileged upbringing kept him far from the poverty still endemic in his country. The trip was also an opportunity for father and daughter to get to know each other better. He missed her teenage years in Ireland because he stayed in London working, returning to the family’s home in Athy when work allowed.

The film also touched on religious and social aspects of that huge, diverse continent. Ravi is a Hindu and, because he is a higher-caste Indian, the family have their own guru, whom he visited while in India. Hyderabad, where Ravi was born, is now nicknamed Cyberabad because of the enormous technology parks springing up there to service the needs of multinationals. If at times the voice-over was a little too intrusive and a bit Tourism India, it didn’t matter. A Rose to India was several stories, all well told.

AT THE END of Ireland's Bogus Beggars(TV3, Monday) it was hard not to feel mugged, that an hour had been stolen from me under false pretences. Presented by the reporter Paul Connolly, whose most recent documentary on welfare fraud, Fiddling the System, was strong and revealing, this film promised "an inside look at the sinister world of organised begging in Ireland". It did nothing of the sort.

In the first segment, tabloid headlines were flashed on screen that claimed that the many and very visible Roma beggars on our streets were in fact members of organised begging gangs, feeding back big bucks to a “crime boss”. Several talking heads, some more random than others, filled time (as is the norm in TV3 documentaries), including the former lord mayor of Dublin Gerry Breen. It had all the ingredients of a muscular investigative documentary – hidden cameras, stake-outs, months of research – plus a topping of scaremongering and a fair sprinkling of breathy sensationalism.

Connolly, we were told, would “infiltrate the gangs” and “come face to face with extremists” – which meant interviewing a couple of Roma beggars, standing in a manky-looking alley (oh, the urban grittiness of it) and giving a member of the Irish Solidarity Party the opportunity to use deeply offensive language about the Roma.

What we learned at the end of Ireland's Bogus Beggarswas what anyone whose bus stop is on O'Connell Street in Dublin knows: that there are Roma beggars in the city, they can be aggressive (aggressive begging is now illegal), they live together in very poor housing and they keep regular hours. The "foot soldiers", as Connolly for some reason called the mostly female beggars, were seen leaving their house in groups early in the morning and coming home at roughly the same time every day – not exactly startlingly unusual for people who live and work together. Some are on social welfare, some aren't. The people he focused on were not, after all, bogus beggars: it was their job. Begging, as Peter McVerry pointed out, is, among the Roma community, "almost a tradition, a way of life".

Despite the “round-the-clock surveillance” and “infiltration of the community”, there was no sense that this film got any sort of handle on who the Roma in this country are, why they chose to be here, how they see their future here and whether the small group profiled in this programme are actually representative of the Roma community. Connolly found no evidence of organised begging, and the four or five Romas he spoke to told him that it didn’t exist. So that’s that, then.

Get stuck into . . .

The X Factor(tonight, TV3 and UTV). Will it survive Simon Cowell's defection? And no Cheryl Cole? Will Louis Walsh get on with new judge Gary Barlow? And does anyone remember (or care) who won last year?

tvreview@irishtimes.com