The brass neck of reporters

News bulletin Monday

Reputations: Billie Holiday BBC2, Tuesday

Coronation Street TV3, all week

And the signed photo of Mary Whitehouse goes to. . . Newsnight, for a simple but impressive act of contortion on Monday night. The programme pointed out that the British junior minister Beverley Hughes hadn't actually seen last week's Brass Eye special on paedophilia. Then they allowed her to have her say anyway. "Unspeakably sick," she said. Next week, Hughes will give her opinion on James Joyce's Ulysses.

On its initial broadcast, Chris Morris largely eroded the satire in his programme by going to an unacceptable corner of the creative mind. By the following Monday, it was as if the news reports had gone out of their way to haul his legitimate points back into view.

There mightn't have been the same level of commotion as present in the print media, but television reports still allowed themselves to be led by the nose by politicians jumping late into the fray.

The story crept to the top of the headlines, after the British culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, wondered why the Independent Television Commission couldn't have stopped the broadcast of the repeat on the following Friday. Oddly, she waited until Saturday to do her wondering.

Maybe she hadn't seen Brass Eye either and wanted her chance. Only Channel 4 News really challenged her over the comments, which was to be expected. Unfortunately, the newsreader, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, attacked her with all the attitude of a rottweiler, but effectiveness of a Jack Russell. The two quickly reached an unspoken agreement to simply speak over each other for five minutes and leave it at that. Guru-Murthy used to present Newsround. How Newsround explained this controversy to its young audience I'd love to know.

Jowell's late interjection meant the BBC, Sky News and ITV recycling the same reports from some days earlier, only this time with extra, bumper footage from the programme. "This report contains scenes from Brass Eye," Kirsty Young warned viewers to the ITV News at Ten. People pulled their chairs closer to the telly to get a better look.

The News at Ten asked if this continued coverage was not just building the sort of hysteria that Morris parodies. In asking that, it first had to forget that it had made its lead story a row over a programme watched several days before by a small audience.

ITV, for the most part, is what Morris parodies. It used to have World In Action, now it has Tonight With Trevor McDonald, US-style reporting in which the journalists probably don't come out of their trailers until their interviewee is made look less glamorous than them. Stories seem to be interrupted for minutes at a time just so that we can see the reporter nodding sagely.

News At Ten is often no better. Following the accidental drowning of British schoolgirl Bunmi Shagaya while on a school tour in France last month, its reporter stood almost centre of the road as the funeral cortΦge loomed behind her. It was an unbelievably crass moment of television journalism. If she had fluffed her lines it didn't appear impossible that she would have stopped the procession and asked everyone to return to their positions for a second take. Of course, Bunmi's funeral made top billing, primarily because initial reports had feasted on the idea that she may have been abducted by what was reported to have been a naked van driver. The man arrested and quickly eliminated from inquiries was actually sitting in his vehicle semi-naked, said the police. It's an issue of semantics, maybe, but remember it if you take off your T-shirt in the summer sun this weekend.

By the way, relatively few people saw Brass Eye when it was first shown last week. On Tuesday alone, five people asked me where they could find a copy of the programme, because they'd missed it and now really wanted to see what all the fuss was about. That's the power of the media.

Channel 4 might have thought it was as quiet a time as any to broadcast Brass Eye, given that this is the time of year when even the most brittle-boned of couch athletes turn off the set and go blinking into the outside world to see what's been happening while they've been enjoying a season of Open House. Given that, it wasn't a bad week of television at all. Black Books is still making people gasp with joy on Monday nights. Nurses, a series I will return to at a later date, got off to a solid start. Treasure Island is as annoying as we had presumed it would be, but more addictively annoying than we could have hoped. There is also a programme on ITV at the moment called The People's Vets. It's an over-elaborate title, given that most simply call them "doctors".

On Tuesday night there were biographies of Billie Holiday and Shirley Bassey to choose from. If you plumped for Reputations: Billie Holiday, it was the correct decision.

This was a gorgeous, learned documentary, compared to the Bassey programme, which was a little too respectful of the fact that she's still alive and, more importantly, so are her lawyers. Like so many greats, Holiday lived her life as a succession of anecdotes punctuated with misery. A hopeless drug addict, she carried trouble around like it was her only real friend. She spent a year in jail for possession of drugs, and even managed the not inconsiderable feat of getting herself arrested on her death-bed.

She answered much of the prevalent racism with her fists, once beating up two white men who stubbed a cigarette out on her fur coat. "She'd fight like a man if necessary," remarked ex-manager Billy Tucker. "Even if it wasn't necessary, she would." She had a masochistic streak that meant a succession of violent boyfriends, but had an equal sexual appetite for women, which included an affair with Tallulah Bankhead. And in between, she sang. How good was she? Well, two of the men interviewed here cried simply at the memory of her performing.

By the time she recorded her last album, Lady In Satin, she was a shambling drunk, drinking straight gin like it was water. It was a horror to make, but ultimately her finest work. There is, a friend said, a whole life in that voice. She died at 44, with several whole lives written in her face. Her husband, Louis McKay, had been buying property in his name, but with her money. Scared of dying broke, she sold her story to a tabloid for $750. Collecting the pay in $50 bills, she carefully rolled them up and placed them, er . . . between her legs. "It was the only safety deposit box she ever had," said her biographer William Dufty. He was waiting in the hospital corridor when a nurse approached and placed the notes in his hand. "That was the signal that she was dead." A first for all concerned, I'd presume.

Julie Hesmondhalgh, the actress who plays Hayley in Coronation Street, is pregnant. Not a problem, you would think, just write it into the story. And then you remember that Hayley was born Harold, and that, anatomically speaking and all that, a baby is as plausible a plot development as is Bobby Ewing walking into the Rover's Return wearing only a towel.

They're trying to hide the truth, but the bump only gets bigger with each lie. Every time the camera came to her this week, she grabbed the closest prop to hand and waltzed.

She opened suitcase lids, sat hugged against tables and held a tea towel in front of her like a dish-washing bullfighter. But there are only so many things you can hide behind. So, the writers have given Hayley-the-woman-who-can't-have-a-baby-but-played-by-an-actress- who-is-having-one a storyline in which she and her husband Roy steal a child. Look behind the tea towel! The cops are closing in. "We're not going to be returning to Weatherfield," announced Roy on Wednesday.

"Oh," replied Hayley, pulling a camping stove in front of her belly and wondering how many jobs there are for actresses previously employed because the public could readily accept she was a man.

tvreview@irish-times.ie