TV REVIEW: Sheane Hegarty reviews ER, A Place In The Sun, I'm Alan Partridge and The Great Reality TV Swindle.
ER returned on Sunday, with Chicago County General Hospital quarantined for two weeks thanks to an outbreak of Monkey Pox. Try that one next time you want to call in sick. "It sounds like a computer game," said Dr Carter, one of those staff confined until the pustules ebbed and the sexual tension flowed.
The evacuation of the hospital went perfectly if you ignore Dr Romano having his left arm sliced off by the rotors of a helicopter. Showing a marked lack of faith in the show's make-up department, swift work by his colleagues made sure the limb was sewn back on again. Dr Romano, though, is not known for his gratitude.
"Your colleagues rallied around a friend in need," Dr Weaver told him.
Dr Romano used his one good arm to mimic the waving of a little flag, woo-hoo.
His injury at least gave doctors Pratt and Carter an interesting conundrum while they killed time in quarantine.
Pratt: "Would you rather lose an arm or leg?" Carter: "Definitely a leg." Pratt: "Both your arms or your penis?" Dr Pratt, please desist from giving the writers any further plot ideas.
Meanwhile, that nice Dr Elizabeth Corday was far, far away, working in London. We know it was London, because she ate lunch beneath Tower Bridge, everyone was rude in accents clipped to within an inch of their tonsils, and all the nurses in the hospital walked as if they'd been freshly ironed. The words "Tunbridge" and "Wells" were bandied about with impunity.
A word of advice: do not watch A Place In The Sun. It is a programme in which people are helped to move from a part of the world now permanently under flood waters to some spot of paradise where your money will do very nicely, thank you very much. Last week, it was the improbably utopian world of Australian real estate. A couple from Birmigham wanted to move to the Sunshine Coast. You may not recognise the first word of that title, but you will find it in a dictionary.
This week, we learned that your three-bed semi-detached four miles from the nearest Spar is worth several villas in the "Spanish Algarve". It made for half-an-hour of involuntarily drooling.
Watching it will throw your mind into a cocktail of depression and rampant daydreaming. Other people will catch you staring blankly at your computer. You will be working out the logistics. Of moving the lock, followed by the stock and then the barrels. Of the finances. Of how it will affect the children. Of how to break the news to their grandparents. Dreaming of a place where you can have three meals a day on a thing called a "veranda". Where beers come cold for good reason. Where the water laps at your toes, thanks to the warm currents pushing it, not because the council never sorted out your storm drain.
I'm Alan Partridge is going nowhere, but it's still worth staying with him.
Having hauled his career up by the Velcro straps on his driving gloves, he's now living in an immobile home beside his house-in-progress. Only you'll have noticed after four episodes, that the house has not progressed at all.
Neither has his career. Nor has his character. He's the wheels of a car, stuck in mud and revving away without getting anywhere.
The writing, though, is still brilliant. Steve Coogan has made Alan the master of the petty, a man whose small mindedness knows no lows. He clings to trivia as if they're his only possessions.
This week, he was planning a Bank Holiday weekend with all the Bond movies, making a schedule that was tighter than his pale blue jeans. "1.15 p.m.: From Russia With Love. Strawberry Nesquik. Fishcakes." He was planning this with his Romanian girlfriend Sonia, a woman even Alan can see is culturally and socially out of sync. The exact circumstances of their relationship have yet to be clarified. "I love you," he sighed on Monday. "In a way."
In between, he managed a devastating critique of Walt Disney ("animals never wore clothes!"), kept up his catchphrase-a-week quota with the proclamation "oh, butter my arse!", and uttered the line "I've just cracked open a bottle of Sunny Delight" without a hint of irony.
Anyway, two litres of the stuff tipped into his box of Bond videos and undid a whole weekend's plans, but Alan made do by performing the entire opening stunts and credit sequence of The Spy Who Loved Me, complete with impersonation of naked model strutting on the barrel of a Luger. "Ooh, what's that? Bit of nipple." If he is in a rut, just be glad we're stuck there with him.
In The Great Reality TV Swindle, reality intruded in a way that was not stipulated in the contract. Thirty people had answered an ad in The Stage for participants in a new Channel 4 game show. It promised excitement and the chance to win £100,000. Guess which half of that promise came through.
The show was conceived, produced, directed and presented by a guy with the unlikely name of Nikita Russian. It was unlikely because it wasn't real. He had previously been Jack Lister. And before that Keith Hilliard. The name changes were to come in handy when it came to avoiding 30 people who had quit their jobs, their homes and divulged bank account details to a man with a name like a cocktail who had promised they would be royally looked after for a full year.
The victims were each the sort who believed television presenting to be the pinnacle of the human evolutionary path. Thirty people for whom the sight of a camera induced an instant, self-conscious giddiness. Surrounded by these people for too long, you too would be tempted to tread on their dreams.
Promised adventure, when they met in a rainy park in Surrey they watched the planes take off from Heathrow and dreamt of where they would be taken. The answer? Down to earth. The suspicions began to nag when Nikita outlined the rules of the show. You will be split into three teams of 10. You have one year to raise £1 million. If you do, you split it between you as prize money. In other words: raise your own prize money. Hoist your own noose.
Then he sent them off on their first task. To find somewhere to live.
Giddiness got them some of the way.
"We'll all be back here in one year with £1 million," declared one cheerleading contestant.
"This has all gone pants up," said Tim the work-experience cameraman.
Tim, in his own delightful way, was right, of course, and despite their reluctance to believe that the camera could ever lie it steadily dawned on the others that Nik had no money and no commission from Channel 4. It was around now that post-modernism waded in. Having grown up in front of the television, they realised that people being swindled out of an appearance on television was something which should itself be on television. So they rang the local TV station, which sent a news crew around to interview them.
Seeing themselves on the small screen that evening gave them the kind of buzz most people experience upon the birth of their first child.
"We was, like, famous in Dalston!" After that, a production company appeared and offered to make for Channel 4 a documentary on the reality of the reality show not being made for Channel 4. Buddhists, I imagine, have a theory for this sort of thing.
It took them five days to realise that their alternate reality was a lot less interesting than the reality that had already come crashing down around them, and they went their separate ways. They were back home before the balloons from their going-away parties had had time to deflate.
Having given up everything, many, like Debbie, ended up back in their parents' houses. She had sold all her furniture and her guitar amps. "I was going away for a year, so I had no need for them." The last we saw of her, she was hunched on the bright pink duvet of the single bed she grew up in, plucking at a dumb guitar.
As for Nikita Russian, he was finally tracked down and confronted in the street by one of his victims, who told him: "You know, I am really, really resisting the urge to just punch you right now."
Sometimes it's good to give in to temptation. It usually makes for better television.
ER RTÉ1, Sunday, A Place In The Sun C4, Wednesday, I'm Alan Partridge BBC2, Monday, The Great Reality TV Swindle C4, Tuesday