Musings on a painting life

TV Review: Lunch with Chagall and Miro, coffee and sympathetic conversation with Beckett, beautiful young sons lolling on the indolent backs of large dogs, a loving marriage that has lasted more than 50 years, and all under an azure Mediterranean sky - Anne Madden: Painter and Muse was an engaging, if somewhat uncritical, look at the career of one of the country's best-known contemporary artists.

Depending on which side of the bed you got out of, it may have left you with a warm glow of admiration or got you flicking through the dictionary to look up the precise definition of hagiography. Madden has shared a studio, perched on a terrace in the south of France, with her husband, painter Louis le Brocquy, since shortly after they met in London in the late 1950s and, while continuing to produce her own work, has been, as painter Francis Bacon observed, le Brocquy's "third eye".

Her life, however, hasn't simply been a creative idyll. A seductively lovely woman in black poloneck and paint-splattered jeans, with a crisp and evocative turn of phrase, she recalled having been "frozen and halted" by the tragic deaths of her father, sister and brother, and, in her youth, having to overcome a life-threatening spinal injury.

Given the spirit and passion of his subject, Bill Hughes can be forgiven for making a film that felt like a paean to her life rather than a critical assessment of her work.

Although at times looking menacingly beautiful, the paintings in Hughes's film seemed overshadowed by Madden's story, an imbalance that would be difficult to imagine in a study of her male contemporaries.

And Painter and Muse seemed a confusing, vaguely damning choice of title, "muse" surely being too passive a word to describe Madden's role in her relationship with le Brocquy (one would assume that, over so many years, each has inspired the other).

The "muse" label was also an unhelpful one in a documentary that at its best focused on Madden's dogged pursuit of creativity and her "stalking" of work that comes, as she said, "from the empty floor of her being".

"Muse," Madden said, politely examining the baubled word. "I never thought of myself as that."

WRAPPING UP YOUR faeces up in newspaper and building a neat little faecal pyramid in your bedroom is probably about as far removed from painterly cocktails under the vine leaves with Matisse's nephew as you are going to get - but hey, Cutting Edge is back, bringing us up close and personal to a range of lives that are certainly no picnic.

Cutting Edge: The Dead Body Squad was not one to watch while eating your dinner. The squad in question was a bunch of imperturbable blokes, tattoos secreted beneath disposable body-suits. At the helm was mordant Matt Brooks, a burly geezer who makes Grant Mitchell look like Nureyev. Body-squadding is not everybody's ideal job, Brooks conceded, what with the stench and the maggots and the bits of skin reminiscent of crispy duck stubbornly adhering to the floorboards, but Brooks is a philosophical chap with a thriving "extreme cleaning" business.

"It's like Elton John says in The Lion King - it's the circle of life, innit?" (and what's more, you can charge four times more for mopping up blood than faeces).

According to the programme's statistics, more than 12,000 people died alone and undetected in Britain last year. Found in London tower-blocks, by neighbours alerted to their demise by the incessant buzz of flies swarming against the window-panes, or behind lifeless curtains on anonymous roads, these bodies will have started to decompose by the time the squad is called in to clean up (though the corpse is removed before they go in).

"No, it's not everybody's ideal job," agreed Clint, Brooks's foreman, "but it's better than sod-all." "Our recruitment drive in Eton was poor this year," Brooks admitted sardonically as some of his 30 employees bagged up the detritus of neglected lives and chucked them into the back of a van (brothel mattresses burnt by cigarette ends shimmering with grease and scum, cider flagons brimming with urine, bubbling body fluids from around a refrigerator door, a bicycle belonging to a suicide). There was only one conclusion to draw: poverty, deep, unassailable poverty, poverty of care, poverty of hope and the grinding poverty of loneliness.

AS WE GLUMLY straggle back from our annual holidays, tans fading and bank balances shivering, it's vaguely cheery to watch the lucid, efficient Mary Nightingale deliver potted stories about horrible holidays and occasional reimbursements to the travel-weary public.

Holidays Undercover: Cruises, however, was a bit more indigestible than the familiar "the apartment was a building site" cherry. From a cheapish Egyptian cruise on a filthy, old ship that rattled down the Nile like an incontinent warthog, to the cloyingly plush interior of the super cruiser ships, all was not shipshape on the highly priced high seas. Essentially, when you roll your wheelie-bag up the gang-plank to be plied with unrecognisable cocktails and entertained by frothy has-beens, you're entering a lawless state.

There have been, Nightingale reported, some horrific incidents on board cruise ships, including rapes, assaults, and the tragic death of 15-year-old Dublin girl Lynsey O'Brien. Lynsey, having reportedly drunk 10 cocktails in 90 minutes, fell over a waist-high guard-rail outside her cabin to her death. Her body has never been recovered.

On the lighter end of things, the programme offered lots of fun things to look at: a computerised arc of projectile vomit, acres of eat-all-you-want buffets, soupy swimming pools awash with squishy bacteria, and vigorous sunburns clashing with cerise-pink halter-necks.

Personally I'd rather walk barefoot over Mt Vesuvius than have to float around the ocean with a lot of overfed, jolly people tripping the light fantastic to an Abba soundtrack. But for those who embrace the prospect of 24-hour karaoke or on-board rock-scaling (I'm not making it up), cruising, despite the dire incidents that the programme examined, is still, according to travel industry publicity, as safe as houses.

I'M CURRENTLY BEING haunted by Anneka Rice. There are cardboard cutouts of her smiling face all over the local chemist (advertising some chewable elixir or wrinkle-vanishing cream) and now the wide-eyed former helicopter lover turns up in the middle of the afternoon (swathed in her old all- action Lycra jumpsuit) offering a dish of dodgy paella to a bevy of tired celebrity dinner-party contestants.

Come Dine With Me is as unpalatable as yesterday's pavlova fished out of Aggie How Clean Is Your House MacKenzie's vacuum cleaner. The idea is that five celebs, including McKenzie and Rice, make each other dinner in their homes and then, squiffy and bloated on their way home in the back of a cab, mark their host's culinary efforts out of 10. The winning celeb, at the end of this indigestible week, scoops the £1,000 (€1,465) prize for his or her nominated charity.

That is mean. That is so mean. The charity prize is worth less than the combined food and drink spend for the whole tedious affair.

Anyway, Rice lives in a great big house on the Thames and, as she doesn't get many telly jobs any more, she has taken up painting, oil painting it looked like, dabbling with a certain muscularity (if over-confidence) at the male nude. Her home was full to the brim of original Annekas, one for every camera angle.

Anneka's not the worst, though - I even quite liked her when she lost her paella recipe and went searching in the bin before accidentally turning her bag of raw squid rings upside-down all over the carpet, only to open up the oven and hurl the fluffy fish into the pot. "I won't care after a few glasses of champagne, will I?" asked Anneka brightly. No, Anneka, you won't, and let's face it, neither will we.