Overdosing on reality

Masters And Servants is almost identical to Wife Swap, only this time it is Wife, Husband And Skiving Teenagers Swap.

Masters And Servants Channel 4, Thursday

That'll Teach 'Em, Channel 4, Tuesday

Heaven On Earth, Network 2, Sunday

God Bless Ibiza, Channel 4, Saturday

Here, one family become the indentured servants of another for a week, with the roles reversed the next. Somewhere along the way they turn on each other. Penelope Keith, but of course, is the narrator. It works a treat.

The Nutley family ("We're common as anything," said mammy Mandy) became domestics to the Alan- Stevenses ("I do like accents," said mamma Cheryl). The husbands took the role of butler, complete with white gloves and an inclination to walk upright and address everybody as sir. The wives became the chambermaid and treated their house with the distaste of one asked to feather another's nest and clean its toilet too.

It has little of the pretension of an experiment, only the expectation of a good scrap. Yet it might be considered an addendum to the Stanford University experiment in which civilians became prisoners and guards, adopting the roles to a frightening degree. Once the uniform went on in Masters And Servants status was instantly defined. Masters rang bells and servants came running. The masters began to speak in a deliberate, no-nonsense way about how, exactly, they would like their floors polished. The servants adopted a grudging deference and did what they were told. That it might have had anything to say about class was down to Cheryl Alan-Stevens, a woman who genuinely believed she was the Nutleys' social better and had perfected her tone of condescension in case nobody believed her. "Don't ever put yourself down," she comforted Mandy, having just berated her for producing a smelly, dirty, lazy family.

When it was Cheryl's turn to don the pinny she added the attitude. "I'm not putting myself in some fancy station," she said, signalling that she was about to do just that, "but I can't be so subservient." She cleaned the Nutleys' ornaments as if she were handling dirty nappies. "Horrible. Horrible. Horrible."

As in Wife Swap, the tension came not between the men but between the women. The men took orders with an immediate sense of duty and loyalty. Kevin Nutley took to the role so well that he could see himself giving up his job at Tesco and taking up the good livery. During his stint as servant Tom Alan-Stevens referred to Kevin as sir, no matter the provocation, and was genuinely upset when things fell apart. "Why did you have to go and ruin everything?" he asked Kevin as if there had been an unspoken understanding to get through this with as little fuss as possible - and maybe even enjoy it.

The women crossed their arms and plotted their revenge. Heads down, eyes fixed, they took authority as an insult, a judgment of them. Mandy Nutley had the knowledge of a week as boss to get her through her week as underling, and when Cheryl and Tom arrived at her house she had extended her name in anticipation. "I can't decide on whether they should address me as Mrs Hillier-Nutley or madam."

Cheryl, though, robbed her of the satisfaction by walking out halfway through the week in protest at having been asked to get off at the wrong station. Tom pushed her out the door as she yelled petty insults at Mandy. He drove her 150 miles home, but then he returned to carry on his duties for a little longer. Nothing to see here. It's just a domestic argument.

Masters And Servants is part of a burgeoning genre of life-swap programmes. Channel 4's That'll Teach 'Em has dumped 30 modern teens into a replica of a 1950s school to see how they fare. It identifies the 1950s as the antithesis of the modern age, a time of discipline and decorum, an era when not learning the difference between a qualitative and quantitative adjective could severely damage your chances of joining the golf club. The modern kids have difficulty spelling "grammar".

The boys drill militarily while the girls are schooled in deportment. Less predictably, they are beginning to enjoy the experience, although not quite as much as the teachers, revelling in freedom from those wishy-washy liberal values that allowed the kids' hair to grow long and skirts to go short. They wield their canes with menace, although modern standards prohibit physical punishment, which vetoes the chance of an Irish version.

God made a couple of appearances on the telly this week. You don't see so much of him these days, what with Jimmy Nesbitt having become so all-consuming. Perhaps God has been busy elsewhere. For all his omnipotence, you feel that the people of Branson, Missouri, could prove quite distracting. The town, we learnt in Heaven On Earth, is dedicated to Him and to America, in that order. It is a sort of Las Vegas of patriotism. The Stars and Stripes is everywhere: lampposts, street corners, children. God Bless America is the local anthem. When they sang it with fundamentalist pizzazz it occurred to you that you would happily hand back all the great things Irving Berlin gave the world if it was the only way to junk that song too.

Branson has a permanent population of 4,000, each one of them with teeth you could carve sculptures from and hair you could build houses on. People here really say things like "she's real purdy". Some of the women are real purdy. Six million tourists come here every year to see shows featuring preaching country singers and kids in sequinned Stars and Stripes costumes.

The Promise, the story of the Passion, is a particular hit. The man who plays Jesus insists he does not have a Jesus complex. "I'm just randy," he said in a moment of touching humility. Sorry: he's just Randy. Randy Brooks, dying, resurrecting and ascending to heaven twice a day since 1981. The audience meets the cast afterwards. One said: "It gave me a little impression of what it will be like when I first meet Jesus for real." So strobe lighting and minimum-wage chorus girls await us.

Next stop Ibiza. Here are some young clubbers going through their itinerary for two and a half months on the party island: "No smoking, no drinking, obviously no drugs, no sexual activity." How the word no had crept into an otherwise standard checklist was cleared up pretty quickly. In God Bless Ibiza we met the group from 24-7 Prayer, whose mission was to convert the deluded youth. Such is the youth's delusion that they have reached a point where they no longer even appear deluded but have taken on a look that an innocent might even mistake for one of concentrated enjoyment.

"When God comes to town," said James, a 24-7 leader, "it's just going to explode." Trying to detect an explosion in Ibiza, though, is like trying to spot someone lighting a match on the sun. People gather on the beach as the sun goes down and in each other's beds as it comes back up again. By 3 a.m. everybody walks as if the world is at a tilt.

Through this moved the 24-7 crew, attempting to engage clubbers in idle conversation about, oh, you know, the meaning of life and the end of the world. As it happens, drink makes a theologian of everyone. "No, I don't believe in God," explained one gentleman, "but I believe in beer, kebabs, women and shagging." In what order will be revealed in his next encyclical.

God seems to have abandoned Ibiza to its own devices. The group converted nobody and attracted only two people to even look at the prayer room they had so painstakingly constructed. "Wow," said one of those visitors, "a low-cost ambient environment." He was curious, although he hadn't visited a church - sorry, a high-cost, low-comfort spiritual conduit - for some time.

The group's fluctuating optimism was epitomised by Vicky. She had seen an angel in a nightclub and the devil in her bedroom. She began each night by hugging the group and gabbling in tongues and ended it quiet and sober - essentially, the reverse of everybody else on the island.

She may have been on to something. During the group's last week its house was burgled. "The only thing we didn't prayfor was the house," said Vicky once she had thought through the spiritual loopholes that may have allowed God to permit this to happen. Everything went: passports, cash, travellers' cheques, clothes, electronic gear. Not only has the devil all the best tunes. He now has a stolen set of record decks on which to play them.

[ tvreview@irish-times.ie ]