Ruby (BBC 2, Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday)
Everyman (BBC 1, Sunday)
Leviathan (BBC 2, Wednesday)
The South Bank Show (ITV, Sunday)
To the sounds of popping corks, tinkling glasses and clinking cutlery, Ruby Wax and guests gorged themselves on depression, oral sex and Leonardo DiCaprio's "love handles". The starter course finished, the following evening's conversation switched to ugly jewellery, female breasts and more oral sex. This latest serving of dinner-party TV, a form already used by Network 2, with Clare McKeown in the eponymous Ruby role, is presumably intended to replicate the reality of a genuine dinner party.
It's not that dinner parties - often quite constipated affairs, at least until the plonk kicks-in - are characterised by realism. Indeed, such gatherings are regularly pockmarked by understood, if unspoken, social duels. Frequently, there is a kind of artifice surrounding dinner parties - a mix of performance and powwow. Add the artifice of television to such inherent artifice and the taste of reality, never mind realism, is heavily disguised by a confection of ego and an onus to entertain.
When the ego involved is Ruby Wax's ego, then dinner-party TV may have bitten off more than it can chew. A few years back, Wax told Hunter Davies that she wanted "to show" she has "an inner life". Tired of being perceived as just a brash motormouth, Wax told Davies that she was "fed up with that persona". Perhaps, to her credit, she recognised that the public was also fed up with that persona. Whatever the reason, the Reborn Ruby Mark 2 went on show three times this week.
The Reborn Ruby Mark 1 (chatshow hostess complete with background audience) has given way to the Mark 2 dinner-party hostess. Mark 2's first guests were Boy George, Joanna Lumley and Jeanne Moreau. Boy George, who remains a most unusual mixture of blokeishness and gayness, would be some boy if it weren't for the fact that time has made him look more like Man George, albeit a heavily made-up man, by-George. Still, whatever about his deepening facial wrinkles, George still has more than a few good lines.
It was he who spoke about the "love handles" of Leonardo DiCaprio, the baby-faced Titanic hero/lover/class-warrior. This contribution came in the middle of guff about how Lumley and Moreau felt about being involved in love scenes on camera. Ruby explained that a Moreau sex scene, which clearly indicated (without being graphic about it) oral sex, signified that the great actress, widely regarded as being a French Bette Davis, "was giving it to the world". Well, yes . . . although I hadn't realised that she starred in Jaws.
Anyway, the show developed into a combination of ladies-who-lunch plam as ("But you look marvellous, darling. I don't know what you're worrying about") and confessional angst from the hostess. Time and again, Ruby's anxieties about her career and her life punctuated the menu. Presumably, these are the promised/threatened concerns of the "inner Ruby". But can viewers reasonably be expected to share Ruby's concerns about Ruby being imprisoned in a persona of her own making?
Perhaps Ruby Wax is not just a brash motormouth. Maybe she really is a more contemplative, introspective motormouth instead. But such concerns are essentially for Ruby herself. Watching punters will happily take the persona, whatever the artifice, so long as it entertains them - and often even if it irritates them. Therein is a central problem of dinner-party TV: its hosts/hostesses are, by definition, likely to be, like most TV presenters, extrovert egotists with big, white teeth, which they bare far too often.
It may well be a conceit shared by many groups of people that their own conversations deserve a wider audience. Well, fair enough. Boy George's frankness about sex and drugs, Joanna Lumley's honesty about depression and 70-year-old Jeanne Moreau's attitude to ageing were engaging. But Ruby Wax, waxing and waning between public persona and inner-life, fell between her usual trick of trying to sound shockingly and provocatively frank and her new project of using her TV show as a kind of personal therapy.
When she gathered together Frances Barber, Michelle Collins and Gerald Ratner for her second programme, she continued to prompt for intimacies. What do men say about women's breasts? What do women feel about having "a bit on the side"? Really, it was like the conversations of undergraduates and bedsit sensitives after too much drink. Maybe, to some, it sounds like refreshing honesty in the late 1990s, when ad agencies, spin doctors and an army of professional, smoothie dissemblers rule the airwaves. But if this sort of television isn't very tiresome, then I am very tired indeed.
There was little that sounded refreshingly honest from the mouth of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who gave a rare interview to Everyman. Without question, Louis and his supporters are right to highlight the racism of America (it thrives here and in Britain too, of course, where Louis's lads are gaining ground). But he seemed suspiciously composed and trenchantly serene as he cooed a kind of guru-guff through made-for-TV, smiling teeth which did not tally with the coldness of his gaze.
Footage of Bull Connors' dogs being turned on 1960s civil rights protesters and of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X half-preaching, half-chanting unforgettable speeches contrasted starkly with Louis's oily and slick performance. A number of ageing black radicals from the period didn't endorse Farrakhan either. Still, the appeal of Louis is growing internationally and he constantly hammers home the message that "the press vilifies the Nation".
No doubt it sometimes does. But Farrakhan's anti-Semitism and his continued proselytising of a "creation theory", which insists that white people were created by a genius, black scientist to rule the world for 6,000 years, does not appear to be the most, eh, intellectually sound. The divine purpose in creating the white devils is, the Nation of Islam claims, to test whether evil is equal to good. As creation myths go, it's no more bizarre than many others. But, at heart, it's as racist as the poison it seeks to destroy.
Nation of Islam devotees wear natty suits and bow-ties. Louis Farrakhan's suit looked like the sort of too-perfect, $5,000 jobs worn by Mafia dons and mega-yuppies on Wall Street. It reeked of a kind of crass conservatism, hardly unexpected among stockbrokers, but strange among revolutionaries. Farrakhan has always denied any involvement in the murder of Malcolm X and, to be fair, recent evidence does point towards a white, establishment conspiracy. But even if he is the most moral man in America, Louis seems sleazy.
Many of the black activists interviewed by Everyman spoke about their demand for "respect" as being the fundamental, driving force behind their politics. (The same holds true, albeit not as starkly, for nationalists in the North.) Given the barbarism of slavery, lynchings and ghettoisation, this is understandable. "What I dislike is inordinate control over black life," said Louis. Again, this struck the right note. But on the evidence of this rare interview, it's hard to respect him, even if his influence ought to be taken quite seriously.
It's hard, very hard, not to make paltry puns and cheap gags about Viagra, the wonder drug, which, apparently, cures male impotence. It's harder still when the magazine programme, Le- viathan, chooses Edwina Currie to present its Viagra package. Edwina's past problems with eggs just seem perfectly hatched for impotence quips. It's not as if impotence shouldn't be taken at least as seriously as Louis Farrakhan. But Edwina Currie?
Anyway, Edwina, formerly known as an honourable member, gave us a brisk, if brief run down on the history of impotence cures. The Romans, it seems, favoured whipping the sluggish organ with stinging nettles. ("Excuse me while I slip out to the bottom of the garden for five minutes" - even worse than a slap in the face with a wet fish, if you ask me.) Spanish Fly and a peculiar object, known as an "energiser", which looked like a big belt buckle with the pin missing, were also discussed.
The item's best joke, however, was a visual one. As Edwina began her wrap-up on Viagra's implications for medicine, sexual history and the British economy, she did so with Tower Bridge in the background. Slowly but relentlessly the bridge began to open, its halved road parting and rising until each half passed grandiosely though 45 degrees and onwards to be almost vertical. You didn't need to be a movie director to decipher the symbolism. It was though, in every sense of the phrase, a magnificent micktake.
Will Self likes his symbolism to use "explosive metaphors". He said so to Melvyn Bragg on this week's The South Bank Show. Like Boy George, Will has got his kicks from, and been kicked by, drugs. He spoke of his use of heroin and marijuana, eulogising the latter for its ability to allow him "look at literature in terms of sculpture or some other medium". But, above all, he said, it was not drugs but his mother's death which allowed him to write. "I was delivered from her hyper-criticality."
In his time, Will has been misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic, has suffered emotional breakdowns and been suicidal. He has been prescribed anti-psychotic and tranquilising drugs. "But I still can't feel completely negative about it all," he says. You can understand his point of view even if the price he seems willing to pay for creativity and a (sometimes) piercingly perceptive perspective, may be well over the odds.
There was an understandable concentration on Will's "dark side". After all, he is best known to many people for the "scandal" of using heroin on John Major's campaign plane. He lost his gig as TV critic for the Observer on account of that one. Still, he remains observant enough to term the yarn "a broadsheet tabloid story", his point being that some newspapers are now using tabloid hysteria about serious writers in a way hitherto reserved for pop stars, footballers and TV performers.
"A literary style is, as it were, the fingerprint of the psyche," he argued. If the same holds true for speaking style, then Ruby Wax's psyche suggests that the deeper she tries to go, the more shallow she gets. Will Self is an intriguing man. The great irony about him is that, in spite of his name, his own self will always seem at the mercy of darker forces he either cannot contain or indulges too much. He appears to wear his unconscious on his sleeve.