DoubleTake:The latest instalment of TV fakery is a row over the filming of the 'dying moments' of an Alzheimer's patient, writes Ann Marie Hourihane
There are 26 million depressed people in China. How do we know this? Because this week we heard it on the news. This extraordinary statistic led to a brief analysis of the problems brought by China's change to capitalism. There was an interview with a male Chinese executive who said - in Chinese, obviously, through an interpreter - that the pressure he was under was unbearable.
But what if there are not 26 million depressed people in China? What if the man speaking was not a depressed executive at all, and merely reading out his shopping list rather than sharing his despair?
It has been a bad week for the media. Malcolm and Barbara: Love's Farewell, a documentary about Malcolm Pointon, an Alzheimer's sufferer, was accused of misrepresenting - at the very least - its final shots of him falling into a coma, with a press release that implied - at the very least - that the poor man's actual death had been filmed.
We, the sophisticated, channel-hopping, 21st-century audience, are like medieval pilgrims who have been shown that the sacred relic is a dud. Even though we have always had our doubts, concrete evidence of television's trickery still shocks, and it has been coming thick and fast. While we might scoff at the newspapers (go on, knock yourself out) it is hard to disbelieve an event that you feel you have witnessed.
But, in the interests of television charity, we should sympathise a little with the people who work in television. Not the people who are ripping us off through dodgy phone lines, of course; they should be burned at the stake. But with your television foot soldier, in edit suites all over the world, grappling with the dilemmas presented by truth, responsibility and the constant spectre of litigation in a way that would make any Jesuit look like a girlie.
It's good to have doubts about a monster. Perhaps television-makers might be more careful now, as they sweat away in their edit suites.
For some reason I am thinking particularly of the makers of all those noble wildlife programmes that make us so misty-eyed. The sort of wildlife programmes that even people who despise television admit to watching. But the truth might be that those wildlife programmes are so dramatic because animals can't sue and have never been known to sell their stories to the tabloids.
This was the second film about Malcolm Pointon and his wife, Barbara. The first, shown more than 10 years ago, is remembered comparatively vividly by those of us who saw it: Barbara's recycling bin filling with gin bottles; Malcolm's urine-soaked slippers.
However, there has been so much television fakery revealed recently that it has undermined our faith in television history. When told that the programme-makers who produced the two documentaries about the Pointons had been criticised for misleading the public, one friend said: "What, he didn't have Alzheimer's at all?" Yet no other medium could have told their story.
Only television could manage to show both the bruises on Barbara's arms when Malcolm took to lashing out at her, and the extraordinary sight of Malcolm competently playing the piano when he had forgotten so much else. The man who directed the two films about Malcolm and Barbara, Paul Watson, has denied trying to mislead anyone about the filming of Malcolm's alleged passing, and has blamed ITV's publicity department.
However, as any transition-year student could have pointed out, Watson was in charge of putting the voice-over on the film, and critics who have seen previews say the voice-over itself was not exactly clear about what was actually on screen (voice-overs provide endless opportunities for fudge).
Furthermore, journalists at a press preview in London at which Watson was present say that he never made it clear he had not actually filmed Malcolm Pointon's death, even though they questioned him on the ethics of doing exactly that.
We are back to the Dutch gameshow in which contestants competed for a kidney transplant - slightly different, because it was conceived as hoax from start to finish. Nevertheless, in the real world, the number of kidney donors in the Netherlands rose significantly after the broadcast.
We are back to Gordon Ramsay pretending to have caught a substantial fish which he had not, apparently, caught at all. We are back to Richard and Judy and the competitions no one could win.
In Ireland we are back to Lambo, one of the few things that happened here - or perhaps did not happen here, depending on your point of view - during the 1980s.
It's not that television tells more lies than either newspapers (see Shane Hegarty on the shark story, on the back page) or radio (which was where I heard the Chinese depression story), it's just that it tells them better. Television is the most beautiful liar. It is no harm to be reminded of that every now and then.