WHITE TRASH TV

STARING longingly into the eyes of each contestant, crooning compere Tim Whitner took them by the hands and serenaded them

STARING longingly into the eyes of each contestant, crooning compere Tim Whitner took them by the hands and serenaded them. I Can't Help Falling In Love With You, sang thirtysomething Tim to Ms Brooke Breedwell. Even by beauty contest standards, this was seriously smarmy. When you consider that Ms Breedwell was five years old, surely somebody should have called the police.

With back bombed hair, mascara slicked eyes and cheeks coloured by a $300 make up session, Brooke Breedwell had pouted and puckered, shimmied and sashayed like a miniature Hollywood vamp in heat. She was made to look like some sort of profane paedophile honeytrap. Now, a sleazeball, old enough to be her father, was on his hunkers and singing into her lipsticked mouth. She twinkled and ogled back as her mother, Pam, had taught her. "Tim's just wonderful. He makes the pageant more classy," said Pam.

When you hear the word "classy" spoken in a southern US drawl, it's almost certain that "vulgar" is the word that tells it as it is. Painted Babies, produced and directed by Jane Treays for the Under the Sun series, was an alarming documentary. Like Hollywood Men, it was in the jaded America as freak show genre. But it was not just more voyeuristic sleaze. It was far too sad for that. Whatever about making jokes about dickheads and their unnecessary "male enhancement surgery", child abuse is another matter altogether.

Not that there is any law against showering infant daughters in cosmetics, dressing them up in dubious outfits and entering them in beauty contests. (Well, no criminal law; the laws of human decency are, perhaps, another story.) There's money in this racket, you see. Brooke and her main rival, Ms Asia Mansur (5), have won $15,000 and $10,000 respectively in the last year. Brooke has also won a car, a bedroom suite and a cruise in the Bahamas.

READ MORE

Ms Treays's film cleverly set up dramatic tension by introducing us to the competing Asia and Brooke camps (scrutinising videos of each other) and then following them to the Southern Charm Pageant in Atlanta, Georgia. The Southern Charm, though it pays only $5,000 to the winner, is the oldest and most prestigious of these paedophile fantasy competitions. In fact, it's so prestigious that it hires Tim to sing and is held in a cheap hotel that looks like a giant concrete cube.

"The only thang we want is that nothin' is, lahk, indeeecent," said one of the Southern Charm judges. Of course not. This, after all, was a "classy" show. So classy in fact that it had a commentator, Randy Foggett - a female person - who provided a fashion show voice over when the contestants were modelling. Brooke's strongest section in the competition was "Western Wear" and to maximise her chances, Pam had bought her a $1,000 cowgirl outfit. Good marks in this part of the show could clinch her the title of Supreme Queen.

Brooke strutted onto the stage and Randy did the commentary. "As Brooke removes her jacket, she wears a one piece mini skirt, which has a halter top trimmed in stars. And to covey her blonde curls, she wears a black hat trimmed with gold and silver." Beneath the black hat and blonde curls, Brooke was wearing false teeth and a false smile. But Pam, literally twitching from competitive instinct, was overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of it all: Tim, Randy, the cowgirl gear, the mascara, make up, the smile, the swagger... wouldn't any mama be reduced to tears of joy?

Years back, Graham Greene provoked outrage when he wrote about the "dimpled depravity" of Shirley Temple. What would he have written about Painted Babies? That it, at least, seemed more honest in its eroticising of little girls? Hardly, because the adults involved genuinely seemed to think their painted children were beautiful. Oh they were in it for the money and the thrill of competition, alright. But wasn't it in itself, beautiful?

There is something about the southern states of America - from Elvis Presley jumpsuits to back combed country and western hairdos - that bespeaks trash culture out of control. Somewhere along the line (perhaps all along the line) American propaganda was too potent and horrors like the Southern Charm Pageant are the result. They are abuses of American freedoms, which show that, in the South, the deeper you go, the more shallow it gets. Brooke, by the way, became Supreme Queen. Asia was third and is working on making her rendition of Hey Big Spender a bit more sassy.

PROMISING to be the sassiest show of the season, Channel 4's The Girlie Show proved that the southern US states have no monopoly on bad taste. There was a lot of guff about "ladettes" - female blokes - in the run up to this series. This would be an "in your face" show for "babes with brains". The tough women presenters Sara Cox, Clare Gorham and Rachel Williams - would pick a male Wanker of the Week and include Viewers' Husbands (naughty photos) and Toilet Talk (naughty words) sections.

Fair enough . . . in principle. In practice, the hard case presenters turned out to be nervous and boring. Ms Gorham's Blue Peter accent sounds more suitable for advising nice Home Counties children on how to build lunar probes from mummy's empty yoghurt cartons. She's obviously been to the wrong school and can't back the rough stuff at all. Ms Cox sounds like she hasn't been to any school and model Ms Williams seemed to strut her stuff principally for the delight of the mostly male audience.

Certainly, this trio was a long way from being the oestrogen charged Amazons who were going to make men quake, it's understandable that women might want a TV show which would treat men as sex objects, but it sure helps if the show can be made entertaining. The first episode of The Girlie Show featured a lot of people in underwear and quite a number showing their behinds to the camera. Wow! How daring!

One item was brutally sexist. In the show's Knickers segment, a young man in the audience was accused (on the nod from his girlfriend) of not changing his underwear regularly. He tried to fob off the accusation but quickly became mortified. His shame was painful to witness. It may, or may not, have been true. That's not the point. Television was no place to level the accusation and if male presenters had done this to a woman on one of the laddish programmes, there would rightly have been an outcry.

The show's buzz words are "shag" and "willie". Women in a toilet ask each other the crucial question: "Would you shag him?" It's probably meant to sound all liberated - a playfully brazen parody of male toilet talk - but who cares? If you want to hear people's toilet conversations, no doubt The Girlie Show is enriching. But there's something adolescent about this nonsense, which, ironically, makes the entire effort seem utterly schoolgirlish.

The idea of making a risque, confident, post feminist TV programme in which women could just be themselves is fine. But if the presenters of this one are representative of 1990s young women, then feminism has been a failure. The right to be rude, crude and brash (if it is a right?) is hardly one of the great freedoms ever won. And worse, being nervously rude, crude and brash makes a nonsense out of the whole idea: the sleaze sisters aren't even properly sleazy. This is trash TV . . . brainless, unfunny and appallingly artificial.

FUNNIER by far was The Tourist: Meeting Others, a sort of Hi De Hi! - the History programme. It looked at the rise and fall of the holiday camp. The original Billy Butlin principle was that people should be offered "everything they need for the price of one week's pay". Though their heyday is long gone and they've become the butt of a range of deserved jokes, there is a certain nostalgia abroad for holiday camps - or, more accurately, the role of holiday camps.

It's not that anybody wishes to return to the days of Identify the Bottom Stuck Through the Hole competitions (recalled by Hi De Hi co writer Jimmy Perry). But the mass enthusiasm, innocence, gratitude, even wonder, displayed by working class people on a first ever holiday half a century ago is in sharp contrast with the sulking, so what attitudes of all classes today. There was, of course, an embarrassing herding of holidaymakers in and out of these garish gulags. But a lot of them actually were "happy campers".

They must have been or they wouldn't have gone in such numbers and over such a long period. Mind you, some of the happy campers took the joke a bit far. One couple interviewed were celebrating their 100th holiday in 40 years at Pontins. Summer holidays or weekend breaks - they always headed to Pontins. They calculated that, in all, they have spent more than three years "in camp". They had the photos to prove it. The best one showed them wearing Hawaiian garlands in a Pontins' ballroom.

A Butlins style camp - the Primrose Valley Holiday Centre in Scarborough - featured in the first episode of a new six part documentary Seasiders (Channel 4, Thursday). An engaging opener showed the staff learning to smile like Brooke Breedwell. This is Hi De Hi! - the documentary. It promises to continue a strong season of fly on the wall programmes on British TV. RTE could do with learning the techniques for, given the expense of drama, this is very much the age of the television documentary.

STRANGELY, along with trash and fly on the wall series, 1996 has also seen a revival of intellectuals on TV. BBC 2 screens The Brains Trust, hosted by Mary Ann Sieghart on Monday nights and The Big Idea, presented by Andrew Marr, on Wednesdays. Mary Ann's guests wrestle with problems such as the nature of evil or history without Hitler and usually manage to produce a magnificent fluency which means bugger all. Well, what do you expect when so many of the questions are unanswerable?

The Big Idea is more focused. This week's big thinker was Francis Fukuyama, who, you may remember, declared history to be at an end after the fall of communism. Well, Frank's having a rethink on that one. The global spread of "liberal democracy (Frank's a right winger, you understand) would, Frank said, prevent major political strife in the world. Clearly, the people of former Yugoslavia didn't read the book.

To be fair though, Fukuyama did make much sense. He suggested that one of the principal reasons for America's decline is because "people are too aggressive about their rights . . . too often selfishness is dressed up as a right". This is dangerous territory indeed, but the example he cited of middle aged people declaring "a need to grow" and then upping and offing in the middle of responsibilities, was convincing. "There must be moral reciprocity for liberal institutions to work," he said. Indeed, but it's doubtful if Brooke Breedwell's and Asia Mansur's parents will heed him. McCulture rules OK!