Shooting the Past: Sunday, BBC 2, 10.10 p.m.
Monica Lewinsky: Behind the Myth, Monday, RTE 1, 8 p.m.
Paddington Green, Monday and Tuesday, BBC 1, 9.30 p.m.
O'Gorman's People, Wednesday, RTE 1, 8 p.m.
Mersey Blues, Wednesday, BBC 1, 9 p.m.
Garages from Hell, Wednesday, UTV, 9 p.m.
Holby City, Tuesday, BBC 1, 8.10 p.m.
Docu-reality is a world unto itself, a kind of virtual reality that the viewer inhabits without having to wear the unwieldy vision-helmet and the sensory gloves. It can be a substitute for experience, for engagement, for friendship. It gives the illusion of communication with other human beings. Docu-reality starts in the morning with the orchestrated confessionals of Oprah, Vanessa, Jerry Springer and the like, and continues through the evening with the current influx of reality-based programmes.
Traditional TV drama, music and comedy appear as stilted as an old vaudeville act in comparison with docu-soaps such as Paddington Green and Mersey Blues. Docu-reality easily upstages most TV drama for the simple reason that truth is stranger than fiction.
The exposure of the hearts and minds of real people justifying noble, irrational, brave or desperate actions through their own words can, when cleverly edited, be riveting, as in O'Gorman's People.
It can also be hilarious in a pathetic kind of way. The latest in UTV's "from hell" series is Garages from Hell. For sheer comic value, you can't beat an earnest young man running after a fleet-footed rogue garage mechanic and shouting, "You've had my car for two years. Can I have my money back?" The humour is all the better for being unintentional.
Docu-reality can be genuine and tender or spurious and mocking. O'Gorman's People is for the reality purist and proves that, when done well, nothing compares with an interesting subject speaking to camera. "Here you are inviting us in and making us tea. I can't believe you were ever violent," O'Gorman says to an attractive single mother with a difficult past.
Pregnant, a mother of two, and in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction, the woman displayed wrists that were thickly scarred. She had begun injuring herself while in Mountjoy Jail, where she served a 15-month sentence for assault and other violent attacks. She blandly explained how to do it: "You take the cereal bowl, wrap it in a tea towel, break it against the pipes, then use the sharpest bit to cut yourself". She didn't think she'd ever know why she had violent tendencies, now under control, or why she abused drugs.
Since the publication of his own book, O'Gorman has been revealed as a judgmental man, although his agenda never intrudes into his interviewing technique. O'Gorman specialises in drawing out the marginalised for the delectation of the middle classes. The whole exercise is reminiscent of the Victorian tours of insane asylums by the gentry.
But there is some value. It felt humbling to witness, as we did last Wednesday, the weeping face of a man who was unemployed for seven years as he tried to describe what it was like to finally have found a job as a kitchen porter. "It's like winning the Lotto," he said, as he tried to share his happiness at being able to buy clothes, shoes, food and a holiday for the family.
The man's wife had patiently put up with him departing the family home, leaving her and three children. But she forgave him, because she understood that his pain at being unable to provide for his family was so intense that he had no choice but to run away from it. The wife kept urging the husband to get a job and eventually he did and the couple reconciled. It was a real, noble love story, all lived out in Maryfield.
There is a fine, dangerous line between being the subject of a once-off interview and being trapped in docureality hell forever. The intern from hell, as some might see her, knows first-hand what it is like to have the media destroy your life. Monica Lewinsky has become a fully Web-sited 25-year-old icon without uttering a word to anyone but the Starr investigation. We all think we know who she is; in truth, we have little idea.
In Monica Lewinsky: Behind the Myth, a sympathetic and insightful documentary, Monica was defended as a warm, loyal and intelligent, if naive, young woman by people who knew her well. This was surprising, since until now we have heard mostly from mere acquaintances who have sold her out. We heard from her childhood best friend, from a Washington reporter whom she dated and from a psychotherapist, who described Monica's craving for fatherly affection and approval. We saw a home video of her performance in a school play at the age of 10, when her womanly body stood out awkwardly beside the still childish forms of her classmates.
Most memorably, her childhood best friend, Michelle Glazov, told her TV interviewers that "I still can't believe that it happened. I feel scared for her, I feel confused by the whole situation, and it's just so odd to think that the President of the United States is somewhat of an ex-boyfriend of a friend of mine. It doesn't seem right. It doesn't seem normal."
The irony is that Monica's life, from infancy, was all about appearing rich, right and normal within the Hollywood 90210 zip code that was her parents' nirvana. She was a media child who craved social status and was conditioned, like many such girls, to believe that she existed only as long as she could capture the attention of a powerful man. And even Freud couldn't have picked a better candidate than the US President, Bill Clinton who, inevitably, betrayed her.
The success of docu-reality is due not just to the Monicas, but also to the extraordinary array of inconsequential people who achieve momentary consequence by agreeing to become real-life characters in a docu-soap. Some embarrass themselves and others resist exposure. The prostitute of Paddington Green, saving for her life-transforming plastic surgery, was an ideal subject for docu-reality. All surface, she was such an actress that the camera could not intrude on her emotional life - which was hidden away in some dark recess where even the plastic surgeon could not go.
The experience of watching her was an empty one, leaving you feeling cheap. I didn't like watching one of the docu-soap's "stars", an 85-year-old wig-maker, make a fool of himself. In Tuesday's "episode", he had among his clients a balding Pakistani grandfather who was travelling back to Pakistan to pick up a second wife and wanted to look young. The wig-maker gave him a thick, wavy hairdo with a curly quiff that screamed "wig". But the wig-maker, full of self-deception, said to camera: "You see? You would never know it was a wig!"
The wig-maker's passion for transforming age into youth cannot earn him a living. He runs a cheap and basic hotel upstairs where he doesn't mind what his poor, young guests get up to, although he grumbles about being a "chambermaid" at his age as he struggles up and down the stairs with duvets. You couldn't think it up if you tried.
Docu-soap is immoral and cold, offering all of the drama and none of the moral context. In the first instalment of Mersey Blues, we saw a drug baron's mistress being arrested in her home in the early hours, and we saw her confused young children being awakened by policemen who, presumably (although we never saw it) had them taken into care. The small blond boy who sat looking dazed on his bed, surrounded by the drug squad, surely had his life destroyed that day - but in docu-reality, there is no explanation. It is merely a fleeting image served up for our delectation. Later in the police station, we saw the mistress's composed expression, which she had been keeping tough against the policemen, collapse in tears as she sits alone in her cell. It was voyeurism at its sweetest - and most uncomfortable.
The interaction between drama and reality was intriguing in Mersey Blues. The opening scene, of the drugs unit preparing for a series of dawn raids, was shot from the same angle as Hill Street Blues's briefing scenes. The "boss" even said to his troops, "be careful out there". So what we had was a docu-soap trying to look like a TV series which was trying to look like a documentary. The hidden agenda was to show how stringent budget cuts are tying the hands of the drugs squad and giving the drugs barons a field day.
A drama such as Holby City - a spin-off of Casualty - looks clumsy in comparison with the intensity of docureality. The first episode wrung emotional drama from a situation in which dying patients competed for a donor heart. As in Mersey Blues, the strongest images were the briefest: such as the very realistic view of the face of a handsome young accident victim as his heart was being harvested. The superreal theatre scenes used what appeared to be actual video footage of heart surgery within a staged context that was painfully accurate, right down to the sound of the saw slicing through the heart patient's chest and a description of the burning-flesh odour of diathermy.
But while the operating theatre scenes were technically realistic, the emotional context was completely false and the characters were stock: the unbelievably arrogant and paternalistic senior heart surgeon, the sexy young male surgeon, his ambitious and seductive young female registrar and the feisty ward sister. It was weird to see a drama work so hard at not looking like drama, while failing utterly to create convincing dramatic characters and situations.
Maybe we are losing our ability to create or to believe in any art form that is not "real" down to the last detail. It's the death of drama, if that is so.
But leave it to a drama to comment on what a century of perceiving the world through the lenses of others has done to our collective sensibilities. Shooting the Past, an engrossing three-part story by Stephen Poliakoff with a great cast (including Billie Whitelaw as an eccentric secretary) is a drama of ideas about the power of the photographic image. Its central theme is to ask whether without a photographic record, we exist at all. Poliakoff's drama also conveys the sense that the power of an image is contained not in itself, but in the context in which the viewer places it. The sum total of humanity is, in many ways, like a box of meaningless family photographs, found in an auctioned wardrobe. Without a curator, there is no meaning.
As a backdrop for these ideas, Poliakoff has created a fictional photographic library containing many of the most memorable images of the 20th century. The curator, played by Lindsay Duncan, has to convince - or blackmail - an American property developer (Irish actor, Liam Cunningham) to keep the collection, rather than destroying it. Narrating the story is a madman (Timothy Spall), who will do anything to keep the pictures together, having obsessively catalogued the hundreds of thousands of images in his head.
When our most meaningful images/collective memories of love, sex, war and holocaust are destroyed, so is civilisation, Poliakoff seems to be saying. The images we create - whether through docu-reality TV, or cave paintings, or Egyptian pottery - are essential to our understanding of our existence. But when those images are starved of moral context - as they are in the current trend for docu-reality - we risk losing our humanity, even as we are entertained.