TV REVIEW: The SilenceBBC1, Monday-Thursday; The Ugly Face of BeautyChannel 4, Tuesday; Dragons' DenBBC2, Wednesday; SeahorsemanRTÉ1, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday; Take on the TakeawayRTÉ1, Wednesday
A VULNERABLE PERSON witnesses a murder and must be protected; it's a common device in crime drama, because it cracks open so many plot possibilities. In
The Silence
, a tense BBC four-parter, shown over consecutive nights, that was the drama of the week, the witness is 18-year-old Amelia. Born deaf, she's spending her gap year learning to adapt to living in the hearing world after an operation to fit a cochlear implant.
With four hours of screen time to play with, director Dearbhla Walsh and writer Fiona Seres had time on their side, so, by the time Amelia witnesses the brutal murder of a policewoman she's not just a deaf-girl plot device. Instead, as played by newcomer Genevieve Barr in a storming debut, she's a brilliantly realised, typical 18-year-old, who is both stroppy and intensely vulnerable, desperate to get away from her overprotective parents and prone to making bad choices about alcohol and relationships.
To be nearer her speech therapist she goes to stay with her homicide-cop uncle, Jim (a strangely aggressive performance by Douglas Henshall), and aunt Maggie (Dervla Kirwan) and her three teenage cousins in their loud and chaotic Bristol home. (The Silence was filmed in Dublin, but the cameras stayed so tight on the characters you'd never know.) For Amelia, who is struggling to understand where she belongs in the hearing world, it's a contrast to the smothering concern in her own quiet home, where her mother (played with beautiful restraint by Gina McKee) is permanently anxious and her father (Hugh Bonneville) is having difficulty adapting to the idea of a hearing daughter - and one who isn't a child any more.
Each episode ended in a carefully crafted cliffhanger, with the increasingly desperate Jim getting closer to uncovering the nest of corrupt cops in his station. Alongside the pacy momentum of the criminal investigation, with all the police-procedural stuff that TV-thriller fans can't get enough of, was a quieter, more subtle exploration of how a young person with a disability is treated within a family.
Although surrounded by a cast of TV heavyweights, it was Barr, who was born deaf, whose performance stood out.
HOW THE TV-MAKEOVERtide has turned. Just a couple of years ago there were several scalpel-wielding body-beautiful makeover programmes preaching the not-exactly-subtle message that a nip and tuck here and there could turn even the plainest Jane into a pneumatic man-magnet. It was all framed in pseudo-psychotherapy, in which bigger boobs equalled greater self-esteem and sucking the fat from your backside might also remove all the bad things from your life - and, hey, you could get it done in your lunch hour, so what's not to love? Plenty, according to Dr Christian Jessen in The Ugly Face of Beauty, a new four-part series where he explores all that can go wrong with cosmetic surgery. It wasn't pretty.
Beginning with breast augmentation, the most popular cosmetic surgery, he showed, with the help of an undercover reporter, the hard sell employed by some cosmetic surgeons. It wasn't quite buy one, get one free, but, as the reporter said, "it was like being sold a timeshare". Jessen set up a fake cosmetic-surgery clinic on a high street to prove how mainstream the surgery has become and how clueless people are when it comes to asking the right, or even any, questions. A surprising number of women signed up for surgery there and then. The statistics - and this was a programme with plenty of on-screen statistics - let Jessen down a bit. One in 50 women, he said, is unhappy with the results of their cosmetic surgery - but doesn't that mean 49 are happy afterwards? As odds go it doesn't seem too bad.
One young woman revealed the results of her botched boob job, and her breasts filled the screen a little more often than was perhaps entirely necessary to get the point across. She did get her disfigurement put right in an on-screen operation (presumably her trade-off for revealing all), and her advice post-surgery was that if she was to do it again she'd pay a couple of grand more to get a better surgeon. The message of the programme was getting more confusing.
More worrying was Jessen's interview with a group of 16- and 17-year-old schoolgirls who were all keen to get plastic surgery and thought it was as normal as getting your ears pierced. "I'd get liposuction," said one, her silhouette revealing a skinny girl with a flat tummy. "Bigger breasts, obviously," said another. When presented with two photos of bikini-clad women the teens said they preferred the breasts that looked like two bald heads straining against a bit of fabric. "But these are obviously surgically enhanced," said Jessen as the girls looked at him, mystified by his stupidity.
BBC'S DRAGONS' DENreturned for a new series, its eighth, looking tired and predictable in its "hey look, a mad person with a stupid idea we can ridicule" sort of way. We got our voyeuristic fix in the first candidate, watery-eyed Derek, an inventor who has spent his savings devising a flashing light to hang on street signs for reasons that are too boring to retell here. As irritating and deluded as poor Derek was, the smug, smirking dragons were even worse. The second candidate faltered so badly in his presentation the only decent thing to do was to look away or turn off.
WHAT THE DRAGONSwould have made of marine biologist Kealan Doyle and his friend Ken Maher had they come along to pitch their idea of a sea-horse farm is anybody's guess. They'd certainly have been bowled over by Doyle's charisma and salesmanship. Ten years ago, while travelling in Asia, he saw the multimillion-pound market for these strange creatures, which are eaten as aphrodisiacs and are a key ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine. There's also a huge international market among tropical-fish fans who are willing to pay big bucks for a pair of sea horses for their home tanks. Doyle persuaded his friend Maher to join him in a damp house in Connemara where they attempted to do what they knew was very difficult: breed sea horses. Aside from the money, for biologists, the possibility that they would also be doing something to save an endangered species was a powerful incentive.
What was so unusual about Seahorseman, a four-part series, was that it followed the two (who by the end of episode one had become one) over such a long period, from 2001 until today, showing all the struggles and setbacks, both financial and emotional, that Doyle in particular endured as a would-be entrepreneur. Despite the extraordinary reverses he endured in the long, poor years he spent setting up in business - and it did look miserable - the series was a lesson in entrepreneurship you won't get in the Dragons' Den. He triumphed in the end, building a successful sea-horse business, albeit a different one from what he first envisioned.
Chips with everything TV chef slips up in the greasy spoon challenge
What is the point of Take on the Takeaway? Answers on the back of a grease-stained menu, please. In the new series, a well-known chef arrives in the home of a person with an expensive takeaway addiction. In the first episode it was a bubbly young woman from Balbriggan who eats fish and chips from her local takeaway up to three times a week at more than a tenner a go. The "challenge" is to see if the award-winning chef Kevin Dundon can cook the same dish for the same money, faster, and make it taste better. For heaven's sake, I could do that - and I'm a rubbish cook, and I bet I wouldn't look as hassled and sweaty as Dundon did.
TV regular Eva Orsmond is on hand to keep the whole thing rolling, and she's lovely and engaging, but is she really the only nutritionist in the country? And, anyway, her professional skills weren't actually called on unless you count forking fish and chips into a blindfolded woman's mouth as the job of food specialist.
Copying programme ideas is fine: this looks inspired by a BBC series of the same name, but in that series - or what little I saw of it - the chefs cooked real alternatives to a takeaway, not same-priced copies, which is what Dundon dished up.
This vehicle for our well-known chefs doesn't make sense, and, anyway, it's the sort of programme that belongs firmly in a daytime schedule, not at prime time.
