Filling an empty space

TV REVIEW: XposéTV3, weekdays

Total Xposure: The FinalTV3, Tuesday

Look of the Irish: Fergus Bourke: In His Own WordsRTÉ1, Sunday

Look of the Irish: David Farrell: Elusive MomentsRTÉ1, Monday

Jam and JerusalemBBC1, Sunday

'YOUR LIFE is about to change forever. You have done amazing [sic] to get this far, and there's only so much crying you can do." TV3, birthplace of the celebrity lifestyle and gossip programme, Xposé, has made a brave attempt to turn adversity into opportunity this summer. Having lost the brittlely efficient Lorraine Keane, a woman whose lip gloss has more ambition than your average starlet, to mothering, a month on the Costa and (presumably) a higher-profile gig elsewhere, the channel set about turning its search for a new presenter into a festival of reality TV. Over the past damp couple of months, 20 toothy young hopefuls drawled their consonants over a variety of tasks in the hope of being the one chosen to "infiltrate the sorority" and join the current cabal of presenters, Karen Koster, Aisling O'Loughlin, Glenda Gilson and Lisa Cannon – sterling examples of well-groomed womanhood and leaden repartee, one and all.

This quest more or less seemed to involve the participants chasing cold pedestrians around Dublin’s Grafton Street and asking them wildly inappropriate, if fiendishly topical, questions. For example, after rapper Chris Brown was charged with assaulting his then-girlfriend, singer Rihanna: “Hi, would you beat up your girlfriend?” This teaser was posed by one leggy young hopeful with all the sensitivity of battery acid in a baby’s bottle; indeed, the same contestant may actually have been the girl who asked a fire-breathing and deeply irritated Anne Doyle whether, as a “veteran broadcaster”, the newsreader had any advice for this particular wannabe. “Yes, never call a woman a veteran,” said Doyle, reducing the pretty young thang to smoke and ashes.

Eventually, the 20 became three, whittled down by a judging panel made up of huggable PR king Gerry Lundberg, publisher Michael O’Doherty (the animated “magazine mogul” seemingly relishing his role and barely managing to hide his excitement behind a cloak of derision) and Emma Ledden, who used to present all sorts of things on the telly, then swam under the radar for a time and has now emerged, eyeliner intact, to train young hopefuls who wannabe on the telly too.

With respect to Ms Ledden, having trawled through hours of repetitive claptrap on the night of the Xposéfinal (lovingly named Total Xposure), I'm beginning to think that training young hopefuls to become TV presenters should incur a fine similar to that imposed on dog-lovers who fail to bag their pooch's excrement. One is tempted to go further and postulate that filling a freezer bag with yesterday's well-digested Pal would be far preferable to watching another back-combed blonde or string-tied bloke under a varnished quiff alleging that Posh Spice lives on a diet of stocking seams and potato chips or that Jordan's implants contain the encoded secret to the meaning of life.

A heart-rending example of the programme’s intellectual prowess, nay relevance, was demonstrated in the viewers’ quiz: if you could correctly tell the histrionic hostess whether to put her deodorant on her a) hands, b) face or c) underarms, you too could be in with a chance to win a packet of Marietta biscuits and a colonoscopy (okay, I jest about the prize but not about the question).

"There's not much tension in the heated rollers," said the hairdresser grimly while demonstrating to one of the Xposettes how to achieve a just-got-out-of-bed look (there is one screamingly obvious way of doing this that doesn't involve a trip to the salon – but still . . .), and neither was there much tension backstage as the families and friends of the finalists waited with presenter Aisling for the producers to crack and reveal the result of the public vote which would determine who would land their "dream job". "We're biting our nails out here!" said Aisling on camera one, surrounded by the vaguely embarrassed-looking relatives, none of whom had their digits anywhere near their maws, to presenter Karen, on camera two, who was killed telling us that TV's most glamorousshow was about to become even more glamorous!

The desperately willing participants in this mawkish pantomime may have been mistaken in assuming that posing for publicity photos in director's chairs meant television stardom, but having sunk their acrylic nails into the putrefied corpse of celebrity, they weren't going down without a fight. There could only be one winner, though, and the victor, Sean Munsanje, looked extremely happy when he was chosen to receive the contract on offer. And what will Sean bring to Xposé'sabundant table? Fashion and movie news and male grooming, apparently. Goodness, my D cups runneth over.

RTÉ IS PICKINGup its stride as it heads towards a receptive autumn audience and, despite risking self-sabotage with inappropriate cartoon graphics and a terrible series title ( The Look of the Irish), has produced a fascinating and moving short series of documentaries celebrating Ireland and the Irish as seen through the eyes of photographers from 1893 to the present day.

Among the programmes were a number of hugely enjoyable portraits of modern photographers, including a repeat of Art O'Briain's humorous, evocative and delicately personal film, Fergus Bourke: In His Own Words, originally shown as part of the Arts Livesstrand. The documentary, completed just months before Bourke's untimely death in 2004, was a poignant reminder of Irish poverty in the 1960s, with its images of children collecting fallen coal from lorries on the Dublin docks and of soulful boys, in short pants and long socks, contemplating unscalable walls in derelict patches of a foggy city (with the same eyes that appraise you now from knee-high buggies in cut-price supermarkets).

Donald Taylor Black's documentary, David Farrell: Elusive Moments, was a beautifully shot and compelling look at the work of this largely unknown photographer who has quietly been building a forceful body of work over the last number of years.

Farrell, a seemingly gentle sprite, opened up his working life to Black, who travelled with the photographer along the marshy boglands of the Border, where Farrell continues to photograph the mysterious and unforgiving landscape that is believed to hold the remains of “the disappeared”, victims of IRA punishment shootings. Farrell described the bog as a memory bank, a witness of history and trauma, and the images he has captured, with their fleeting, elusive light, have a haunting, disquieting quality that seems to bear out his vision.

“The line between postcard and genius is very thin,” said Farrell, laughing, as he and an Italian colleague contemplated a copse of aristocratic trees perched on an Italianate landscape, where Farrell’s camera eventually sought out a rutted path which ended as bafflingly as it had begun.

Both of these dedicated and energetic documentary subjects, Bourke and Farrell, spoke of imposing or assembling a narrative, telling the story of a face, an interior, a landscape. Bourke, looking around the wild, untrammelled glory of Connemara, asked what right he had to decide where to begin and where to end a picture. Photography is a continuous process of looking, explained Farrell, of shifting the inner psyche to outer form.

That’s all well and good, but unfortunately there’s still no tension in the heated rollers!

Preserving a simple life West Country women becoming a comedy institute

It's appliqué jumper and apricot chutney time as the BBC unfurls another short season of its gentle and astutely scripted comedy, Jam and Jerusalem. The series, which falls somewhere between Ballykissangeland Absolutely Fabulous, revolves around an unlikely tribe of Women's Institute devotees in Britain's West Country and has a terrific cast, including the superb Sue Johnston as a humorously belligerent Chardonnay quaffer and practice nurse, and Pauline McLynn as her gleefully wicked and unrepentant best mate and sidekick

Social anarchy in the vegetable steamer, the series, written by the sparkily brilliant Jennifer Saunders, has lost some of its more irritating tics (such as Joanna Lumley under a gargantuan pair of false teeth) and has settled into a wittily amusing hour, one to happily pickle your peaches for.