TV REVIEW: Am I Normal?BBC2, Monday; The Doctor Who Hears VoicesChannel 4, Monday; Heather Mills: What Really Happened?Channel 4, Tuesday; The Ultimate Guide to EverythingRTÉ2, Tuesday.
Battered by the intractable questions of our age - well, the ones posed by this week's viewing (did Macca deny Mills a bedpan? Should one have one's little toe surgically removed in order to fit into one's new Manolos?) - I was brought down to earth (to coin a phrase) by a news item on RTÉ that made these tortuous musings pale into insignificance. With barely a flicker of astonishment, the nicely groomed newscaster told us the tale of poor Fr Adelir Antonio de Carli, who, in an attempt to raise money for a spiritual rest stop for truckers, had tethered himself to a big bunch of helium balloons and disappeared off the coast of Brazil. It is, obviously, desperately sad, for this uniquely adventurous man, his parishioners and his family (not to mention the spiritually challenged Brazilian truckers), but one wonders why. What drives us to do the things we do, and when does one man's normality become another man's absurdity?
This week, the series Am I Normal?continued with another of those programmes where an intensely rational British psychologist, with delicate ankles and a vaguely colonialist air of distaste, sits on the window-sill of an LA doctor's office, talking to hyperbolic American plastic surgery enthusiasts. The psychologist in question was Dr Tanya Byron, who was speaking to two Botox-dazed thirtysomething sisters about their latest surgical foray, vaginal rejuvenation.
The sisters, between bouts of grateful weeping over the goodness of their godly surgeon, explained that they had both bought themselves 16-year-old vaginas (no, I don't know how either - something to do with "trimming"). The gals also revealed that their mother had bought herself an 18-year-old vagina, although had she known her daughters were going "younger", she would have opted for something entirely pre-pubescent (presumably to get one over on her narcissistic progeny). Bananas. Totally bananas.
In this predictably astounding rehash of look-at-the-crazy-ladies TV, Byron distastefully unleashed her stereotypes like an entomologist releasing a meaty moth. One of her more absurd specimens was Little Ms Vacuous 2008, who was having the bones in her feet broken and "redesigned" so that she could fit into her designer shoes. To hell with free enterprise and consumer choice, as long as there are children in this world having their legs blown off by landmines, the damn woman should be fined for offending humanity. (That was a rant, by the way.) In the end, Byron flew east and, in search of a little perspective, interviewed a bearded Greenwich Village lesbian who, entirely rationally, stated that thousands of children sleeping on the streets of Manhattan every night was of far more concern to her than the activity on her chin. She's right, of course, and I still think the Barbie in the foot plaster should be made hop across the Gobi, but none of us are impervious to the dulcet strains of the worldwide media, which saturates us with skewed perfectionism and which will eventually have us all hewn out of plastic with one of those corkscrews on our backs that make our hair grow. She was eminently balanced, the hirsute Villager, but one was itching to tell her that she had been reduced to nothing more than another freak in Byron's tent.
'HI LEO, PHILOSOPHICAL question: who am I?" Psychology was firmly berthed in the TV dock this week, with The Doctor Who Hears Voices, a dramatised documentary from the Bafta-winning London-based Irish film-maker, Leo Regan, turning an unflinching eye on the unconventional practice of Dr Rufus May, a psychologist working with Bradford District Care Trust. Dr May, who was diagnosed as an incurable schizophrenic at the age of 18, appears to have successfully battled his demons. Living, parenting and practising, he advocates a drug-free talk therapy for the diagnosed schizophrenics with whom he works. Dr May's approach involves "radical dialogue", whereby he talks to his clients' "voices", a process we saw in action as this intense and provocative film followed his year's work with a bipolar junior doctor, temporarily suspended from her London hospital, who, unknown to her employers, had begun hearing voices.
"We live in a risk-averse society," said Dr May when questioned about the wisdom of allowing this potentially suicidal young woman (who at one stage believed that a tankful of goldfish in a care home, where she was temporarily employed, were dictating patients' heart rhythms) to ditch the drugs and lie to her employers about the extent of her illness. Questioning not just the efficacy of Dr May's work, but also the apparent brutality of an uncompromising mental health system which would probably have sectioned "Ruth" (not her real name) and stymied her chances of continuing her chosen career, the film also raised uncomfortable questions for the viewer. With more than 1,000 suicides and 50 murders a year in Britain attributed to schizophrenics, the issue of whether one should entrust one's life to a junior doctor blighted by mental ill-health remained unresolved.
With actress Ruth Wilson impersonating the young woman at the centre of this powerful true story (a wholly necessary, although at times disorientating, experience), this was a potent and original film. Regan's documentary ended with Ruth being allowed back to work, though apparently Channel 4 is refusing to comment on her current employment status.
NO QUESTION AS to what Heather Mills is at, however: with a hefty couple of dozen million of Macca's dosh in her trough, the woman is in clover (I think that may qualify as a mixed metaphor). In Heather Mills: What Really Happened?, journalist Jacques Peretti, who appeared reassuringly slothful, set off on an unhurried journey to discover the Mills behind the dollar bills. You know the kind of thing: the woman behind the prosthetic, the schemer behind the teary rage, the little girl behind the steely gold-digger, the simple Tyneside lass behind the grasping Beatle-bagger. "She was a plump girl in white high heels who would just groom, groom, groom," we learned from her former sister-in-law, a woman who obviously decided to give charm school a miss.
It took Peretti a vaguely entertaining hour to illuminate nowt. The juiciest bits were his extended chats with Mills's mate from her early days in London, Denize Hewitt. Now upholstered in Chanel and ensconced in a Belgravia-esque pad, Denize-with-a-Z was an entertaining raconteur, speaking with a kind of oh-shag-it honesty about the friends' former work as high-class prostitutes, providing girlie twosomes for Adnan Khashoggi and Kerry Packer, among others, and generally hanging around big swimming pools with big hair and even bigger ambitions. (Given the physical state of the two aforementioned "sugar daddies", it seemed a touch ungallant when Mills apparently described future husband Macca as an old bloke "with bigger tits than me".) There were some serious financial benefits to being in "a high-class hooking kind of life", confessed Hewitt, shrugging off any implications of dubious morality with "they do it for free in Newcastle car parks".
Peretti may have been attempting balance and he certainly ignited the interest of Sir Macca's legal team, but really Paulie (described by one of his biographers as "a penny-pinching Prince Charming") needn't have worried his pretty little pudding bowl: Mills didn't have a leg to stand on (oh sorry!, but after all, the woman did call her autobiography Out on a Limb).
AND SO, ON to another of the burning issues of the day: does displaying one's "open wrist" while pouting and flicking one's tresses guarantee a hot night in the scratcher with some eejit one spotted across a smoke-free bar? This, and other questions of such tedium as to elevate the issue of vaginal rejuvenation to the philosophical pantheon, were the stuff of The Ultimate Guide to Everything, which began its catch-all journey with a cheap scout around the world of the self-help manuals.
Pitching a couple of wannabe-on-the-TVs into the maelstrom of paperback inanity (tomes written by flawed suburban gurus with sweaty deadlines and necks like a jockey's unrejuvenated bollocks), the opening programme of this entirely forgettable new series featured Superdate, by Tracey Cox (you might think that's a pseudonym, but it's not). But, after a couple of tips from the Cox box of cliches, I found myself asking an existential question all of my own: oh God, why am I here?