TVReview: Ten minutes into In Search of the Pope's Children, and I want to get off. This fairground ride of a programme is moving with frightening speed, bombarding the viewer with a quickfire series of jump-cuts that whisk presenter David McWilliams from a society wedding to an upmarket restaurant to the canals of Venice in less time than it takes to squeal: "I think I'm going to be sick!".
Why the frenetic visual cacophony? It's because, underneath the glitz, this is really a programme about economics. And, as we all know, economics is such a hopelessly boring topic, it can send you to sleep in seconds. That's why the show's producers, in their desperation to prevent viewers reaching for the off button, have to keep us distracted and entertained. Our perceived inability to tolerate anything more intellectually challenging than Big Brother makes them act like anxious parents with a fractious, spoilt toddler, shaking a toy in front of our indifferent eyes, recklessly stuffing us with sticky sweets - all so we don't get bored and scream the place down.
McWilliams is quick to reassure us, though, in that characteristic style that hovers somewhere between boyishly endearing and smugly patronising. "You think this is going to be about heavy economics? Don't worry your head. Because economics is all about you." Based on McWilliams's best-selling book, the first episode of In Search of the Pope's Children takes viewers on a whistlestop tour of Ireland's new middle class - "young, sassy and successful". According to McWilliams, this youthful tribe of conspicuous consumers, born on either side of Pope John Paul II's visit to Ireland in 1979, have been "squeezed in the middle and lifted up by the Celtic Tiger", which allows them to display their luscious material cleavage. (Cue a great opportunity to see a pair of shapely breasts being squeezed by a Wonderbra, and of course the programme-makers don't miss it - that'll keep all the dads watching.)
The trouble is, you're left feeling distinctly over-stimulated but strangely unsatisfied. Enough already with the relentless barrage of quirky statistics and catchy slogans. What does it really tell us if the Irish spend more on Lynx deodorant than we donate to Trócaire? That, as a nation, we'd rather smell like a teenage boy on his first date than help starving children in Africa? And the parade of cartoon characters who populate the programme - DIY Declan and his quest for the perfect SUV; Low GI Jane, the woman who "pulls her Juicy Couture tracksuit down, not up, when she gets out of the car"; Yummy Mummy, aka "Countess Markiewicz meets Greenpeace" - may be diverting caricatures, but they never move beyond that. This telly-friendly shorthand can't account for the real people who don't slot neatly into a branded persona. It's television for an infantilised society, cultural analysis with a sugar coating.
BUT THERE WAS nothing fake about Krystie Maddox-Lue, the focus of this week's One Life: Our Big Decision programme on BBC1. Fifteen-year-old Krystie has Friedreich's ataxia, a rare genetic disorder that causes progressive damage to the nervous system. To give her a chance of a prolonged life, it's vital she has an operation to halt the curvature of her spine. That's a challenging enough scenario, but there's a further twist to the tale. Since Krystie and her mother, Molvia, are Jehovah's Witnesses, it's against their religious doctrine to receive blood. So even if Krystie needs a transfusion during the procedure, she won't get one, leaving the grisly possibility of her bleeding to death on the operating table.
You can't help feeling like a bit of an ambulance chaser with programmes like these, gawking voyeuristically at the wreckage a disability can inflict on a young life, raising your eyebrows incredulously at a mother who could refuse her daughter life-saving treatment. But the most poignant moments occur when we see footage of Krystie at nine years old, before her body began to stiffen, thicken and contort, and before the onset of self-conscious adolescence curbed and contained her exuberant personality. There is something especially heartbreaking about watching that lithe, supple body moving freely, that mobile, expressive little face chattering away confidently about the future.
Krystie's operation is a great success - she loses only a teacupful of blood. She celebrates by going with her friends to see the boy band McFly in concert, playing air-guitar and screaming away with her friends in the back of a white limo the way only teenage girls can. A blessedly blood-free ending, then - but you felt a fleeting sense of loss for that precociously wise, sparkly-eyed child, gone forever now.
THOUGH WE MAY still be picking burnt-out sparklers out of the bushes in the garden for weeks to come, most of us have put Halloween firmly behind us now. But Seanchaí, a new series of self-contained stories on BBC2 NI, aimed to pull us back to spooky mode with Oíche Shamhna (Halloween night). Set in Derry, this improbable little tale was about as fearsome - and almost as unwittingly funny - as your great aunt in a fright wig.
Through the unwavering lens of what seemed suspiciously like a camera set to auto mode, we were introduced to Raymond, "the wild man", a strapping great fella with a painfully pierced nose and indecently luxuriant sideburns.
Then up pops Niall, Raymond's weedy motherless cousin, "the shy innocent deaf boy from the country", released from the care of Uncle Mickey, who's just expired under a thick coating of sickly green face-powder, and with a volley of supposedly cancer-ridden coughs. Had enough clunky stereotypes yet? You will soon. "If ye don't look after him, I'll come back and haunt ye," wheezes the dying old git.
Ah, Raymond, if only you had listened. Sadly, the big guy's penchant for beer-drinking and paintballing leaves little time for the kind of care Uncle Mickey envisaged for fey and helpless Niall. And on Halloween night (of course) he returns to confront the errant Raymond, dressed - and this is where the giggles started for me - as an Irish-speaking St Patrick ("ye can speak any language ye want, when yer dead"), accompanied by Darth Vader, and a gum-chewing Jesse James. Suffice to say that Raymond gets his final comeuppance, his payback for failing to keep his unworldly cousin close to his heart. In a shocking denouement, the fun-lovin' lad turns out to have died - how else, but in a freak paint-balling accident.
Laugh? I nearly died.
WHAT SEANCHAÍ LACKS in scope and sophistication, Into the West has in bucketloads. After all, the six-part mini-series is produced by Steven Spielberg. It's a good old-fashioned Western, and it offers viewers endless sweeping shots of big skies and snowy peaks, herds of buffalo surging majestically across grassland, bare-chested and mystical Native American braves, sloe-eyed comely maidens by candelight. Need I go on?
It's obviously envisaged as the Western to end all Westerns: a vast, confident, sprawling tale, impeccably acted. So why do you long for the closing credits to roll? Well, the story itself would bore the pants off you. It's so eminently predictable: by the end of the first episode, the tough but tender-hearted white hero, Jacob Wheeler, has saved the sloe-eyed babe (named Thunder Heart Woman, and she would be, wouldn't she?) from slavery, and married her. That old universal theme of love across the barricades, you just can't beat it. And, it being a gun-toting, spear-slinging, testosterone-infused Western, there's plenty of blood and brutality too. Jacob gets the opportunity to become a real man when his trapping party captain, Jedediah Smith, has part of his head clawed off by a marauding bear. "Ah gave you an order boy", drawls Smyth, "thread the needle and sew ma scalp back on".
It's a glossy, slick, Disney-fied vision of history, made worse because it takes itself so seriously. All form and no substance - now where have I heard that before?