Inside a lost child's world

TV REVIEW: The UnlovedChannel 4, Sunday I Can Make You ThinLiving TV, daily

A Little Bit FunnyRTÉ1, Sunday

Muintir Na MaraTG4, Friday

BRITISH ACTOR Samantha Morton made her directorial debut this week with The Unloved, a powerful and arresting story of a child in care. Over the last few years there have been a handful of other similarly affecting dramas depicting young people who have been failed by the tangled bureaucracy of the care system, Mark O'Rowe's Boy A and Mark O'Halloran's Prosperitybeing examples of how a taut, unsentimental script can shift our perceptions and engage our empathy. The Unloved, however, confronts its audience on such a potent emotional and intellectual level that there is room to hope this superb film might go further, and become the catalyst for changing a system that appears to be failing children so cataclysmically.

Morton, who grew up largely in children's homes and who was herself abused both at home and in care, gave an interview to BBC's Newsnight Reviewlast week, in which she spoke of beginning to storyboard this film when she was just 16, and of how moving it has been to see her long-cherished project come to fruition.

It is an immensely moving and beautifully paced piece of work, with a startling central performance from Molly Windsor as Lucy, the young girl who, after a traumatic beating from her hopelessly unstable father, enters the chaotic environment of a children’s home. Morton’s skill is to bring the viewer visually and emotionally right into and right down to Lucy’s world and how she perceives it. Adults loom, decisions made about her life and care seem arbitrary and unpredictable, an indifferent social worker (in dispute with the health authority over petrol money) fails to materialise, and the single question Lucy asks – “Can I live with my Mummy?” – remains unanswered.

But within Lucy there is a profound, almost monastic, stillness. While the outside world rages, and shoddy disorganisation and gross incompetence constantly threaten, she retreats to an inner world of order and beauty, often invoked by the religious iconography of her Catholic upbringing. Where, in a lesser film-maker’s hands, this device could be a platform for sentimentality, Morton maintains a strong directorial grip, so that the sequences of silence are a welcome relief from the cacophonous outside world.

The Unlovedis a stunning achievement, and the madness of which it apprises the viewer is out there still. Morton, who is adamant that, despite the system's shortcomings, she would not be where she is today had she not been taken into care, is vehemently opposed to the at-risk register, which can allow children to be left with their potentially dangerous families for far too long. As she asked in her BBC interview, if children are being beaten, neglected or raped in the family home, why leave them there? She chose to end her film with statistics that had the chill of an epitaph: there are more than 71,000 children in care in the UK and a further 36,000 on the at-risk register.

This is a riveting, important film, and it would be wonderful to see its power released from rolls of celluloid to have a real impact on its subject matter.

'I CAN MAKEyou thin, through your television!"Paul McKenna, hypnotist and self-help guru (try getting a personal loan with that job description), is appearing nightly on Living TV in a series of VERY LOUD PROGRAMMES called, unsurprisingly, I Can Make You Thin. Designed to reduce the body-mass of his television viewers and his American studio audience (the latter having a combined weight of 42,000lbs), this is one of those summer's-coming-and-my-bottom-looks-like-uncooked-pastry programmes that are as ubiquitous as a zealous bikini-wax in the run-up to beach-baring time.

Now, Mr McKenna doesn’t need a personal loan; he is a rich man, having sold zillions of copies of “I can make you rich/thin/blonde” or whatever his immensely popular books are called. Not content with proselytising in print, however, he is now offering his wisdom on the box, so, clearly, he’s not closing down his I-want-I-want-I-want chakras. His promise is that if you are prepared to watch Living TV every evening for the next five weeks (I think I’d rather have the doorways widened) and to follow rigorously his “four simple rules”, you too will be a little sprite in a polka-dot bikini.

Right, the following crucial information was disseminated over 55 long minutes, but I’m going to give it to you in 20 seconds. Number one: when you are hungry, eat. Number two: eat what you want. Number three: eat “consciously”. Number four: when you think you are full, stop eating. Okay?

However, the McKenna system also requires one or two basic adjustments for the average slurp-eater: chew your food 40 times, put your knife and fork down between mouthfuls, and eat dinner at a table without a TV blaring or a computer screen flickering. Lights, mirrors, fairy dust and dread familiarity aside, McKenna’s recipe sounds really very sensible.

I have to admit to zoning out a bit when episode two popped up on my screen. This little gem was addressing “emotional eating”, and I think I stayed awake long enough to glean the basics. If you are feeling upset and find yourself sitting on the floor at midnight with a Tupperware bowl of leftover chicken dippers or a family pack of Maltesers, thinking of all the things you could have said to your ex-lover/boss/bank manager, you’ve simply got to tap yourself. Little taps all over your face and wrists, tap-tap, tap-tap, until your desire for the junk is so confused that it gives up bothering you (well, it worked for the robust lady on the programme).

Having endured a purgatory of McKenna’s imprimaturs on your behalf, I want you to look deep into my eyes and repeat after me: “I do not need this dross.”

DESPITE THE MONSOONcurrently threatening to annihilate my cabbages, RTÉ is deep into the arid plains of cut-price summer programming. The new Sunday-night filler is a damp little cat's cradle of archive and interview called A Little Bit Funny, a title with all the confidence of an acne-ravaged teen under a spotlight. The publicity threatens "a new autobiographical series looking back over the careers of old-school entertainers", and yes, it truly is as crucifyingly dull as it sounds.

A Little Bit Funnybegan with Twink at full throttle, telling it like it is from the vantage point of 50 years in Irish showbiz. I have a degree of respect for this omnipresent and hardworking entertainer (probably because she terrifies me), but, despite her giving it welly for the anonymous interviewer (even going so far as to introduce her "uber-pooch", a pretty little terrier with tear-proof eyeliner), and despite more clips of Twink in Lycra than could reasonably be said to be decent, this was a hoary old load of horse manure. I dread to think who they'll shake out of the mothballs next week.

One man and his currach A simply spectacular journey along the Clare coast

So, I was going to write about erectile dysfunction and man-boobs, the staples of Channel 4's Embarrassing Bodies, a series that purports to relieve the suffering of people with "humiliating" illnesses by placing a camera lens six inches away while gloved medics investigate the various apertures and dangly bits that people generally prefer to keep under wraps.

That’s what I was going to write about, but it’s been raining all day and the news on the radio is pretty grim and the rolling thunder out there seems appropriately disgruntled.

So, instead, I am going to open a window on to the column and remind you that Muintir na Marais continuing for a third series on TG4. It follows the progress of the gentle, rugged and altogether laid-back Pádraig Ó Duinnín (right), who this week rowed his currach along the coast of Co Clare from Quilty to Doolin, where he and local rower Michael Guerin viewed the extraordinary, wild, mad Cliffs of Moher from the bowels of their sturdy traditional craft.

With stops along the way to talk to people about music, language, fishing and boating, this is a refreshingly lovely-looking series, simple but spectacular, and singularly lacking in artifice or surgical gloves – just what the doctor ordered for these stormy days.