TV Review: Richard Curtis is a comfortable and convivial writer with an enviable ability to draw in and hook his audience. The writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral has over the last decade given us Hugh Grant boiled, mashed and scrambled, and is responsible for a clutch of popular and inoffensive tales of west London life where lots of thirtysomethings get anxious in linen casuals.
His televisual contribution to G8/Live 8 week, The Girl in the Cafe, eschewed the leafy enclave of W11 and took to the mean streets of Reykjavik and an imaginary G8 summit.
Bill Nighy played Lawrence, a senior civil servant and adviser to the British chancellor of the exchequer, who happens upon a young girl, Gina (Kelly MacDonald), in a London cafe. After some self-conscious dialogue about sugary tea and Gina's ex-boyfriend, a kind of romance blossoms. The painfully shy Lawrence (whose halting speech and palsied tics became deeply irritating after the first reel) eventually manages to stutter an invitation to the principled and enigmatic Gina to accompany him to the G8, and so the stage is set for a barely disguised educational video on the merits of aid, fair trade and debt relief.
At the summit Gina heats up a chalky Lawrence in an icy bed. She also gets up everybody's schnozzle by asking awkward questions about the Millennium Development Goals and by goading the essentially PC chancellor and the damn fine snowy-haired and avuncular prime minister into action by asking them what it is they want to be remembered for.
By the time Gina has been thrown out of their minimalist Reykjavik hotel and banished to a chalet with a skylight, however, her simple message has won the hearts and minds of the British contingent. On the final day of the summit, it is the British who stand up to be counted, the British who uphold the millennium goals, the British who refuse to compromise, who stand foursquare against the rest of the parsimonious first world.
In this crucial week, when G8 leaders prepare to meet and discuss the future of Africa, Curtis's oversimplified story let us off the hook very easily. While many would agree wholeheartedly with his aims, there was a degree of reassurance here that did not convince when compared with this week's other - non-fictitious - stories about Africa, which allowed us no comfort zone or flight from reality.
Half a million women worldwide die each year in childbirth. Millennium goal number five, to reduce the mortality of expectant mothers in the world's poorest countries by three-quarters by 2015, is far from being realised.
Obsterician Grace Kodindo works in a hospital in Ndjamena, the capital of Chad, one of the poorest countries in Africa. Kodindo's hospital, where a baby is born every 45 minutes, is described as a sanctuary, which sounds like another fiction, but, for many women whose alternative is an unassisted birth on the floor of a hut, it probably is. Among the endless difficulties that Kodindo and her staff face on a daily basis is an acute shortage of drugs and sterile equipment.
Dead Mums Don't Cry from the Panorama team showed one young woman, in labour and desperately ill, waiting for five hours while her family ran around searching out relatives who could donate the 15 bags of blood necessary before the surgical procedure needed to save her life could be performed. They had already bought the antiseptic, which cost them €1.50, and a bag of saline water, which cost them €2.20. In what was described as "a macabre reality show, the prize [being] the life of the woman they love", the family gathered at the hospital, clutching the bags of blood. They had done well, and the mother was saved, but despite their desperate efforts, it was too late for her unborn baby.
In Chad, one in every 11 women dies in pregnancy and childbirth. One-fifth of that number are women (many as young as 12 and 13) who die from septic abortions, crudely performed by untrained "doctors". One 12-year-old arrived at the hospital accompanied by her mother and aunt. They had travelled from their village in a packed taxi, where none of the other occupants showed compassion - they were the last passengers to be dropped off. After leaving the hospital to raise money for antibiotics, the mother and aunt returned too late; the 12-year-old girl had already died of septicaemia.
In a society where a woman's life seems almost expendable - "You buy [ her], you keep, she produce, she die, you buy another" - Kodindo's extraordinary perseverance over the years is nothing short of miraculous, but she is losing heart.
The film-makers flew her to Honduras, which has seen a 40 per cent drop in mortality among expectant women in the last seven years, largely due to a more stable political environment, good relationships with NGOs and a higher cultural regard for women's lives. Kodindo, looking out the window of a Jeep as she left a Honduran hospital which had oxygen tanks in the labour ward and a well-stocked pharmacy, said: "I would love to work in that environment." Instead, she was returning to Chad and the daughter she had adopted, having found her as an infant abandoned on the hospital steps.
Chad has recently exported one billion barrels of oil. Panorama producer Steve Bradshaw asked the newly appointed minister of health, who was visiting Kodindo's hospital, whether the newly acquired wealth would have an impact on the lives of its patients. But the minister wasn't in the mood for such probing; she wasn't in the business of making promises - not to Kodindo, nor to the hundreds of women who will die entirely preventable deaths in the hospital this year. This was not about corruption, the minister insisted in response to Bradshaw's questions, and then, as he cited examples of how other countries were dealing with similar problems, she thanked him stonily for his "lesson" before decisively turning her finely saronged back.
A second sobering documentary, Living With Aids, followed award-winning journalist Sorius Samura during a month he spent working as a ward orderly in a 237-bed hospital in Mongu in Zambia's western province.
To date, 16 million Africans have died of Aids, another 26 million are infected, and there are 11 million Aids orphans. The statistics pound on: the life expectancy of Zambians is in the mid-30s; the population has been decimated; towns and villages have been destroyed; teachers and doctors have died; and social structures have disintegrated as a lost generation fails to cope with a seemingly insatiable epidemic.
Aids, Samura concluded, has found fertile ground in Africa, with poverty, stigma and sexual taboo continuously feeding the voracious disease.
During his time at the hospital, and living locally with an Aids-affected family, Samura grew visibly angrier and more despairing. Once again, there was the dearth of medicines and equipment, the empty pharmacies, the absence of running water, the cracked and broken toilets, the patients dying on the floor of over-crowded wards, the smell of shit and death.
There was the young girl who worked in the hospital laundry, sluicing sheets covered in blood and faeces, droplets spraying into her mouth, her eyes, her nose - no gloves, no gowns, no mask. No one really knows how many die of Aids, as death certificates read "unknown" - the stigma that leaves families isolated in their communities cannot speak its name even in death. And meanwhile, families queue to wash down their dead in the hospital mortuary before carrying their emaciated corpses back to their village.
At one point, Samura stopped the filming and asked the crew to take a young mother home. The previous day she had walked to the hospital with her critically ill small son; now she was preparing to journey home with his corpse. Impoverished and alone, she couldn't afford a blanket to wrap him in. Samura, who had wrapped the child's body for her, carried him to the car, tears streaking his eloquently expressive face.
Samura questioned whether Africans had it in their power to stop the spread of the disease. He spoke to young Africanmen, many of them HIV positive, about their sexual attitudes, and time and again they insisted on their right to "the real thing", "flesh to flesh". How would you feel, Samura asked one feisty young Zambian as he sat drinking with his friends on the streets, if someone who knew himself to be HIV-positive slept with your sister, deliberately infecting her?
"I would feel nothing," the boy said. "Nothing." But his face, reckless and angry, fuelled by whatever he was drinking from an improvised glass in the midst of a smoky, roaring crowd, was speckled with fear.
Whatever we choose to watch - whether it's Curtis's simplistic film, Geldof's powerful travelogue or the testimonies of people on the front line of the war on disease and poverty - we should be grateful that the devastation of Africa is being made visible. Suddenly we are saturated with images of the continent, many of them almost too difficult to watch.
It is hard to know what to do with our own feelings of outrage and despair, but as the roar from Africa gets louder, a response is being demanded.