George and the dragon

TV ReviewAs the financial markets tumbled like squealing tots down a grassy knoll, and rain tattooed us with misery from soupy dawn to soupy dusk, Newsnight's Jeremy Paxman dusted off his sensitive side and gently interviewed a former Norwegian prime minister, Kjell Magne Bondevik, who in 1998 took a month off from the rigours of office to deal with a bout of depression.

Bondevik, a tender, baggy-eyed gentleman, was open and straightforward with the electorate about his illness, and subsequently found himself re-elected for a further term. "Von in four," he said, referring to the number of people who, at some stage in their lives, experience mental illness. You can count me in, baby.

My mental well-being is currently smothering in a pit of wet children and damp spirits. I am now a fully signed-up new year gloom merchant. I abhor January, especially this one. The only chink in my misery is that I like dour pessimism; in this chill, a sunny outlook is too much like hard work, and basically, if my cup is half full, well, it's probably strychnine. Which is probably why I so enjoyed melancholy old George Lee: In China.

The bespectacled, earnest journo's bleak jaunt through smoggy China involved following comfortable Chinese couples and their lone panting offspring (offsprung?) around Ikea as they dutifully spent their precious downtime trawling the Swedish superstore for lime-green plastic bath mats or a rainbow of incandescent fairy lights.

Lee was illustrating the emergence of a voracious new middle-class (estimated at 250 million) spawned by China's economic boom; a generation that grew up in relative poverty is now experiencing wealth for the first time and is determined to enjoy the best of everything, with little regard for the environment (sound familiar?).

It is the sheer size of China's population that made Lee's tentative critique, in the first programme of the series, so damn terrifying. Chongqing, home to 32 million people (its population is growing by half a million each year), is one of the world's 20 most-polluted cities, 18 of which are in China. In this belching metropolis, Lee attempted to interview some of the 150 million migrant workers from China's denuded countryside who are among the army of cheap labourers fuelling the boom.

The workers weren't allowed to talk, but Lee filmed inside one particular factory where workers live, eat and sleep, while earning 50 cent a day for manufacturing Christmas baubles. Their hands were like speedy mechanised tools, plucking hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of the gaudy fruit from metal trees, producing the seasonal dross that we can cluck over next December and chuck out next January.

China's rush to join the "worldwide culture of disposability" will, said Lee, "impact on our lives and change the face of the planet", and however welcome the new order may be for the Chinese population, his message was hard to hear without a sense of foreboding. And before some bloke with an Egyptian cotton shirt has his fibreglass-fingernailed PA (or indeed before a fibreglass-fingernailed exec has her Egyptian cotton-shirted PA) e-mail me to outline the benefits to Ireland's economy of exporting mobile-phone technology or sticks of Bunclody rock to the land behind the bamboo curtain, let me point out that my mental equilibrium is frayed and I find it difficult to get excited about such brave endeavours while weighing up the prospect of us all drowning in the molten fissure that was formerly known as the Phoenix Park and waving goodbye to chunks of our coastline.

This was an interesting opening programme from Lee, and from RTÉ's "diversity" strand, no less. Diversity, eh? Pity it couldn't apply its brief to the weather.

SO YOU WANT to get really depressed? China's pall of pollution pales to insignificance next to the bloated, fetid windbag that is the national broadcaster's horrid new entertainment show, So You Want to Be Famous?,a leaden concert of such conceit and banality that it almost redefines the word fatuous. In what can best be described as a hommage to Graham Norton (a man of originality and wit), presenter Brian Dowling, a former flight attendant and winner of Big Brother, brings us on a crash course in how to achieve celebrity, Irish-style (if the word "why" hasn't sprung to your lips, you should turn away now).

Dowling, who really does say things like "storting to get noticed" and "not for the faint-horted", spent the first show chiding us from a mausoleum of flock wallpaper and candelabra, and blowing his fringe around in mock-exasperation as he introduced well-worn clips of pre-celebrity celebrities (remember a mute Boyzone's first TV appearance in a frenzy of torsos and dungarees on The Late Late Show. Interspersed with these side-splitting rehashes were lots of pictures of former Miss World Rosanna Davidson and interviews with PR folk and journalists, one of whom excitedly praised actor Colm Meaney as "the punter, the guy who can act" (sorry, lost me).

Columnist and writer Fiona Looney and regular turner-upper-on-televisioner Amanda Brunker provided the programme's ballast, the former telling us that Van Morrison's talent is a millstone around his neck and also just how difficult it is to become a "VVIP" in Dublin these days. Fear not, all you aspiring A-listers, you will know you've achieved VVIP status when the inner sanctum of Krystle nightclub is revealed to you and you get to dig your heels into the embossed button-studded love-seat (ooh, the thought). In this "worldwide culture of disposability" George Lee spoke about, this is one pile of junk I'd happily prescribe for the incinerator.

MY ANODYNE SEASONAL gripes were pulled up sharpish, however, by the first of 15 new films commissioned by Channel 4's documentary strand, Cutting Edge. Director Stephen Walker's A Boy Called Alexopened the batting with a stirring account of two months in the exhilarating and difficult life of 16-year-old musical prodigy Alex Stobbs as he prepared to conduct 62 of his well-mannered fellow pupils in a performance of Bach's Magnificatin Eton's chapel. A pianist, organist, chorister and composer, Stobbs's extraordinary musicality won him a scholarship to Eton at 13, where, among the cobblestones and collar starch, the rugby balls and hallowed halls, he daily battles a life-threatening illness to fulfil his potential.

Alex has cystic fibrosis. Watching his gargantuan, bracing struggle to stay well in the face of this coruscating condition, in an environment that appears to offer him the kind of medical support Irish cystic fibrosis sufferers have craved for decades, made one realise how appallingly desperate it must be for Irish sufferers to have to battle not just their illness but a health service carelessly littered with hazard. Over the course of filming, Alex, who has an extreme form of the disease, was hospitalised on several occasions, but even when he is not incarcerated in his hospital room, frustratedly lobbing a tennis ball against the door, he has a nurse (provided by Eton) to inject his huge cocktail of drugs through a surgical implant in his stomach and to administer physiotherapy almost nightly so that he can function.

The film, although moving and gripping, found itself - almost accidentally, one felt - in danger of becoming a requiem. There is no avoiding pathos when a vivacious, magnificently gifted child is rushed into intensive care desperately ill, when, given the unpredictability of the condition, there is a strong possibility that he might not live to the end of filming. "In your private thoughts," his mother said, "you can realise that time is running out." Wonderfully, blessedly, Alex survived to unleash Bach's genius in the lofty chapel, and his intense determination saw him receive the further music scholarship to Cambridge that was his aim. Having listened on radio to many of the voices of cystic fibrosis sufferers over the last few weeks, it occurred to me that, while Alex's musical genius may be unique, his will, his focus and his unequivocal demand that he live every breath of his life to the full is something he shares with other young people with the disease.

"Fear?" he reflected. "You can't enjoy life with fear."

THERE WAS ONE rather sweet element to the TV week, and it came courtesy of TG4, which continues to push the clúdach of Irish drama.

Seacht, set in a sunny quadrangle in Belfast, focuses on the lives of a bunch of first-year drama students, all having a blast and a barbecue and all sleeping with each other and making a song and dance of their untrammelled lives. Absorbingly written, nicely acted, and directed with ease, Seachtis a pleasure (but we can forgive it for that).