Playing doctors and nuns

TV Review: 'A medieval monarch in Charvet shirts"; "an Irish nationalist who lived like an English squire"; "a populist, a pragmatist, a rogue" - television schedules hastily reordered themselves this week in response to the death of Charlie Haughey.

And, with deference to a bereaved family, and in keeping with a collective sense of an era passing, the punditry was dignified and reserved. As Seamus Brennan concluded (with a slight rippling of his wavy locks) on Tuesday's Prime Time Special, whether you liked him or not, Haughey "made one hell of a contribution to modern Ireland".

"Suction!" Prior to the media saturation on the Charlie years, modern Ireland was being treated to some brand-new Sunday night fodder to squirm at while it applied the aftersun.

Grey's Anatomy, yet another American medical drama, chose to adhere rigidly to the easy-viewing formulaic lunacy beloved of the Ally McBeal school: loves and life of kooky girl narrator with cheekbones and a citation from Harvard. This time, our heroine is Meredith Grey, a squinty-dreamy-skinny-boffinish first-year surgical intern with an enthusiastic ponytail and an IQ higher than her annual lip-gloss spend.

It's episode one. "All right, everybody, it's a beautiful night to save lives. Let's have some fun," says the twinkling, well-moisturised and hirsute (in all the right places) Dr Shepherd, his scalpels blazing, to the bunch of breathless assembled interns who've all spent far too much time in make-up to look even remotely like a bunch of student doctors.

Now Meredith, besides visiting her psychologically impaired, formerly brilliant surgeon mother and doing 48-hour shifts in the surprisingly empty Seattle Grace Hospital and gazing wistfully at newborn babies (it's a long story), found the time, as you do, to have casual sex with the recently appointed Dr Shepherd before she knew he was her boss! Oh no! Undeterred, plucky Meredith endured some really squeaky dialogue with him ("Stop looking at me like you've seen me naked"; "I have" - twinkle, twinkle) before launching herself on him in the lift and giving him some mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Well, series one is obviously going to get complicated as well as mind-crushingly tedious.

If "hey-I'm-a-little-bit-crazy" girls who wave their heads around, suck their pencils and pretend to eat hot dogs while a bland rock-chick score dawdles along in the background is your thing, Sunday nights have never looked brighter. Alternatively, you could knit yourself a bikini.

WHEN WEST END theatre producer Sonia Friedman got together with Channel 4 last year and evolved The Play's the Thing, a reality-TV experiment that went in search of a first-time playwright whose work would bypass grubby pub theatres, shoebox-sized venues or the ignominy of an empty auditorium to be fast-tracked to the glitz of the West End stage, she could have had no idea that her project would yield more than 2,000 play scripts from novice writers.

Friedman is a successful and tenacious producer, currently producing Brian Friel's Faith Healer on Broadway. However, given that theatre is a notoriously difficult business and that, as she said, of 16 new plays by recognised writers produced on the West End stage last year, just two made money, one wonders at the wisdom of looking for a theatrical gem in a haystack of scripts that were largely imitating TV soap operas.

The Play's the Thing can't be accused of being elitist: while the overwhelming majority (75 per cent) of the competition entrants were men, they were a varied bunch, including train drivers, shelf-stackers and plumbers, dealing with subjects from Jesus and terrorism to fat clubs and the hereafter. Maybe Freedman's ploy is in fact very clever: with what is apparently a diminishing audience for theatre, she is bringing the theatrical process to television, inviting us to watch a play as it develops. Moving, in fact, the mountain of cautious indifference right to Muhammad's leather sofa.

Helping out Freedman in the selection process are literary agent Mel Kenyon and actor Neil Pearson. Maybe I'm biased because Kenyon, the impassioned presence on the corner of the couch (the one who said "I'd rather stick hot needles in my eyes than watch that play"), is my own agent, but, as a playwright, this is as fascinating as reality TV gets for me.

PLUMBERS AND BUILDERS don't just enter literary competitions, you know. Six of them, from Weston-super-Mare in the west of England, for reasons known only to themselves and their gods, agreed to participate in For One Night Only: From Guys to Dolls and to spend a week at Funny Girls, a transvestite cabaret club on the boardwalk in Blackpool, where they shed their jackboots and Kango hammers to trip the light fantastic in yellow high heels, spangled body-suits and wigs that looked like giant hairy trifles.

The six men, largely with single-syllable monikers, including Mark ("other than pole-dancing I can't think of anything worse"), Nick ("I've got nothing to lose apart from my self-respect"), Dave and Lee, were plucked from their building site by playful choreographer and accomplished drag queen Simon Green, who certainly didn't choose his troupe for their looks. The usual "backs to the walls, lads" guff which one may have expected in this potentially raucous juxtaposition was noticeable for its rarity in what became a strangely moving documentary. The men, separated from their communities and families for a week to learn their dance routine, had a bit of "bloke topiary" (legs, shoulders and backs waxed) and became closely bonded (as Meredith Grey would say). On day two, perspiring over their shuffle step astride Blackpool Tower after throwing 11 pints into themselves the night before, the men decided to clean up their act and their chins and throw themselves into the task of becoming ladies.

On the last night, after some nervous giggling in the wings, they tap-danced their smooth, huge-stockinged thighs on to the stage, eclipsing the footlights as they performed to the cheers and tears of a busload of weeping wives and squealing girlfriends, who packed out the club along with good-humoured lesbians and dozens of blokes they would previously have crossed the street to avoid. It was enough to bring a lump to your Adam's apple (if you have one).

"You can't buy feelings like that - it's absolutely fantastic," said Nick or Dave or Lee or Mark (difficult to tell under the falsies). "If I speak too long I'm going to cry my eyes out." Ey up, lads!

IN A FOLLOW-UP to the intriguing series The Monastery, the BBC has addressed the gender balance with The Convent, a new series following four women who left their busy and complicated lives behind for 40 days to join the Poor Clares, a contemplative order in rural Arundel.

Predictably, the women, each attempting to trace their muddled spirituality, were anything but predictable. Victoria, the most disengaged of the group, was an atheist poet in an open marriage, currently obsessed with a chap in a cravat called Simon. Unable for the strict routine of convent life (including seven calls to prayer a day, the first at 5.45am), she spent her mornings dancing around the fields with her headphones on.

There was also Iona, a bubbly ex-alcoholic, evangelical Christian, reluctant virgin and soul singer, whose vision of God, as one of the nuns rather solemnly proffered, was "a little hoo-hey hooray". The others were Angela, whose dog-eat-dog work ethic was exhausting and demoralising her despite the material rewards, and Debi, the most sympathetic of the group, whose self-esteem was so critically low (having been abandoned by her mother as a young child) that she felt unworthy of love.

The series is a challenging experiment, a kind of blessed Big Brother without the noise. The most interesting personalities were, of course, the nuns who had opened their home to the women and the cameras, and whose measured tolerance and humour inthe face of a torrent of neuroses was seemingly inexhaustible.

"You have come to us," the abbess serenely told the camera. For the nuns, she gently offered, this was "a mission to explain their calling". There's no diary room and no evictions, just, as Sister Gabriel said, "adventure and great joy".

For those of you who, like me, saw the convent as something merely to lean against for a smoke, this should be educational.