The talent search party

TV REVIEW: The All-Ireland Talent Show, RTE 1, Sunday; No Frontiers, RTE 1, Sunday; Half Ton Son, Channel 4, Monday

SOME YEARS ago I tottered into a cabaret in Berlin. I couldn’t get over myself, as they say; there I was, poor fool, giddily staining the weighty tankards with too much lipstick and arching my Sally Bowles eyebrows (I’d coloured them in for the occasion) in anticipation of some Germanic whimsy. I was still holding my breath, waiting for some gamine little German girl to storm the stage in suspenders and a bowler hat and slink over the back of a bar chair, when I started turning blue.

Peeling the kilo of eyeliner off my blinkered lids, I looked around at stout ladies applauding shabby magicians, robust folk singers clutching rhythm-killing tambourines, comedians in toupees, and ringleted children breakdancing in Lycra – I could have been at Tops of the Towns (actually, I probably was).

The talent show is a sturdy perennial and, despite the cold winds of recession and the arid plains of cyberspace, it is, it seems, alive and kicking. Recently, region by region, county by county, parish by parish, we too have been shaking the all-singing, all-dancing fruit from the trees and turning up in our droves to audition for The All-Ireland Talent Show.

The show breaks the country up into five regions and appoints a judge to find five acts from each area, who will then be brought to Dublin for 11 weeks of caterwauling, cartwheeling and culling on the box. This is X Factor Irish-style, only instead of a couple of hundred thousand Mariah Carey impersonators weeping all over Simon Cowell, we’ve had, in the first two weeks of the show, Boyzone’s Shane Lynch (the Dublin judge) and weatherman Dáithí Ó Sé (the judge from the wild wesht) blinking back the tears as various despotic toddlers, primed to take on the public in their scarlet tap-dancing shoes, defy their adjudicators’ decisions to disgorge them from the competition.

Actually, the whole concert, introduced by the nation’s favourite glossy-locked good girl, Gráinne Seoige, is strangely compelling. Interestingly, in the two heats televised so far, there have been a couple of standout familial performances: two busking brothers from Kilbarrack, with guitars and hoodies, who are reminiscent of very small Gallaghers, and a family of well-scrubbed brothers from the Aran Islands, with neatly pressed shirts and polished dancing shoes.

Despite some egregious acts, such as a bloke purposely dislocating his shoulder to get out of a straitjacket, this rather sweet entertainment is gently reminiscent of the days when we unfurled dusty fold-away chairs in the parish hall and paid sixpence for a Mi-Wadi and a Marietta biscuit, while Mrs Button-up-the-Cardigan played an apologetic piano.

ANYWAY, LEST WEget caught up in nostalgia for the earthy days of yore, before our knee-socked, castor-oil asceticism was blighted by Scandinavian furniture, Italian knitwear and French prophylactics, before we all (well, at least some of us) turned into khaki-shorts-wearing, bandanna-flouting citizens of the global village, let us turn our weary January heads towards No Frontiers, a tincture of travel porn for a wet and sullen month.

No Frontiers presenter Kathryn Thomas is a popular girl with the viewing public, apparently; to be perfectly honest, I’m not terribly sure why, other than that she exudes a kind of reception-desk pleasantness.

Thomas has a job I’d like, though: filing weekly travel reports from around the world to mildly curious Irish families full of Sunday roasts.

This week, Thomas (like most of our manufacturing industry) was in Poland. Poland not only has a fair proportion of our jobs now but, like us, it too has windy beaches with big, doughy people shivering on them, who look like they’d rather be in the Caribbean.

Lucy Kennedy, more often these days seen marooned on the raft of her ill-advised talk-show, was out and about in the Ecuadorean city of Quito, eating deep-fried green bananas. I was pleased to see her; I like the boisterous Kennedy, I just can’t stand the format RTÉ have boxed her in recently.

Despite a fear of heights (and a gut full of plantains), she swung through the rainforest on a slipwire to meet the ubiquitous clear-skinned, sustainable-tourism, eco-friendly couple whose ponytails once met over a placard (I’m making that up) and are now keeping our world turning by renting wooden treehouses to those who still have a few quid in their Fairtrade cotton pockets. (I’m a great admirer of eco-tourism, it’s just that I once spent a week or so on an organic vegetarian farm in Umbria – we got the bus there and stubbed out our fags at the gate – wishing that one of the farm’s venerated old sheep would hoof the bucket so that we’d have something to eat that hadn’t been strained through muslin.)

SPEAKING OF WHICH(food, that is), I kind of couldn't resist Half Ton Son, although in the interest of transparency I have to admit that I fast-forwarded through all the bits that made me want to throw up (a good 40 minutes of the hour-long documentary).

The documentary told the story of 19-year-old Texan Billy Robbins, the world’s heaviest teenager. After three years playing video games in his bedroom because he felt too fat to go to school, the poor child was reduced to rolling from reinforced bed to mouldering easy chair, eating the 8,000 calories a day that his psychologically needy mother was pumping into him via hamburgers, turkey dogs and soda. He was reminiscent of a bowl of proved pizza dough decorated with two dead eyes and a petulant swollen mouth (the only part of his physiognomy that got any exercise).

Eventually, surgeons were able to operate, lopping off five stone of flesh from his belly and adorning his inflated stomach with a gastric band. It was a deeply depressing, spiritually reductive story.

Although Billy lost half his body weight (he went from 60 stone to 30) and can now wipe his own bottom and stagger around a car park, the years of being made so grossly dependent on his terrifyingly sentimental mother have taken their toll.

At present, after an enforced separation from her, his “best friend”, he is in rehab, learning to live without her hand-feeding him to death.

“I always look for family trauma,” said the psychologist appointed to work with Billy’s grieving mother, who, before almost killing her second son with attention, had lost her first to a brain tumour at the age of 18 months. I really should have had more self-discipline than to gorge on this junk: like its companion pieces, Half Ton Dad and (surprise, surprise) Half Ton Mum, the programme was a blatant ruse, a chunk of jaw-dropping voyeurism masquerading as concern. Having since spent a restive night dreaming that I was suffocating in fungus-rife folds of torrential skin (and at the risk of sounding like an 18-year-old after a gap year in the Urals), I am soooo not going there again.

Money To Burn: How to lose a million
Last summer, with truly lousy timing, just as the credit crunch hit, a bloke with a name like a cartoon baddie, hedge fund manager Lex Van Dam (pictured), came up with a concept: Million Dollar Traders(BBC2, Monday). His idea was to give one million dollars of his own money to a bunch of novice traders to dabble with in the stock market, to see whether "ordinary people" could compete with the professionals (incurring a reality TV series along the way).

In the process of selecting his extraordinary ordinary people, Van Damnation asked eight disparate folk – including a vet, an army major and an ethical fellow on a bicycle – if they could multiply 32 by 32 (apparently, if you can answer that brainteaser, you too can bring the financial system to it knees).

Given these unprecedented times, Herr Van Dam-all would probably have been better off investing his money in a clutch of topiary elephants, or maybe a nice antique jelly mould.

His virgin traders, almost stupefied with terror, began their assault on the stock market bolstered by the "highly complex technical analysis" they had learned at the knee of Van Dam-it-the-man's-a-genius, only to find their nervy exploits overwhelmed by "the global market's plunge into the abyss" (as Mr Vim Dim's assistant, the man in the wilting shirt, described it).

This side-splitting financial farce continues over the next couple of months.

Watching Lex's lieutenants trying to limit the Van Damage should be far more amusing than looking at your bank balance.