TV Review: A spectral Dickie Rock hopped on to the stage of an empty Ierne Ballroom in a pair of high-heeled cowboy boots and a long black coat, his hairpiece dividing and multiplying in the reflective glass of the mirror ball.
True Lives: Spit On Me, Dickie was a nostalgic exploration of the life and times of the boy from Cabra West who, when fronting the Miami Showband in the early 1960s, tenderly gyrated his skinny hips to rapt audiences that packed the Ierne and other ballrooms of romance across the country.
Rock was an unlikely front man, with big dark eyes nervously illuminating a gaunt face and ears the likes of which haven't been seen since 1963. He was though, we were told, an "instant smash" when he joined the Miami, and catapulted the band to "the top of the hit parade".
From the archive came footage of the nun-like devotion of his female fans, who swarmed the stage with their beehive hairdos and solid frocks, their suited dancing partners hot under the collar waiting for three minutes of body contact while Rock crooned Galway Bay. And from his wife Judy, candid memories of a bag of iced caramels and a chaste goodnight after their first date (rock'n'roll lifestyle, how are you?).
From Britain's gift of "nul points" in the 1966 Eurovision through to the demise of the showband era, and the fatal gunning-down in the 1970s of three of his former band members by the UVF, the story of Rock's 40 years in the Irish music industry was a record of a changing country. Throughout most of his career, this tenacious whippet of a pop idol has worked six gruelling nights a week, 50 weeks a year, and "saved every penny".
Having faced personal tragedy, including the accidental death of his little brother, Joseph, in 1966 and the more recent death of his eldest son, also called Joseph, and despite tabloid revelations of a "love-child" ("thirty seconds of sex that changed my life - I slipped up badly") and supporting his son Richard through drug addiction, he's still Georgie Porgie-ing away for glamorous grannies and diehard fans. Dickie Rock's not ready to hang up the hairpiece just yet.
TO MAKE THE disturbing Cutting Edge: Being Pamela, documentary-maker David Modell spent two years filming Pamela Edwards, who suffers from dissociative identity disorder. It was a painful and moving account of a complex and terrifying condition. Pamela, who is in her early 30s, shares her body with four separate and distinct personalities: Margaret, Sandra, Susan and Edward. Pamela's characters are related to one another, and together they make a family, a violent and unpredictable family much like Pamela's own.
Pamela wasn't born with multiple personalities - she developed them to cope with chronic and severe abuse at the hands of her parents. In a devastating interview, Pamela's older sister described how she and her six siblings, locked into their rooms with nothing to eat or drink, resorted to drinking their own urine.
"A child under five can't run from their parent," we were told. "These characters [that Pamela created] were people to run away to, inside the mind." Though social workers in St Helens on Merseyside were aware of the horrific treatment endured by Pamela, it was years before she was taken into care. It was there, as a 10-year-old, that she met occupational therapist Judy Williams, who fostered Pamela ("a beautiful baby-like little girl, obsessed with food and drink") and first recognised her condition.
Over the years Judy has become Pamela's lifeline, and the documentary subtly exposed the co-dependency that has grown between the two women, with Judy's powerful and controlling personality scarily echoed by Sandra, Pamela's most dominant alter ego.
Pamela, whose distress can lead to violent outbursts and self-harm, spent a further 10 years in a care home before Judy was able to organise her current living arrangements. At a cost to the state of £500,000 a year (twice the amount of her being in care), Pamela now lives independently, albeit with the assistance of 20 full- and part-time carers.
It is Judy, however, who orchestrates Pamela's life, Judy who reads the signs and predicts when Pamela's other personalities are likely to become violently explosive, Judy who demands that Pamela return Sandra or Edward to their bedroom, Judy who listens to the sound that Pamela makes of a door shutting as, one by one, Pamela's alter egos return to their "rooms" inside her mind.
On Pamela's birthday, she and Judy let 31 pink balloons float freely into the sky, one to mark each year of Pamela's arduous and tragic life. There was little room for further sentiment: the damage inflicted on the Edwards children is irreparable, the price of such wanton cruelty higher than any balloon could float.
JERRY SPRINGER HAS been casting his shadow over otherwise sunny mornings all week. He has imported his vipers' nest of impoverished lives, stunted imaginations and volatile dysfunction for a four-week stint on British breakfast TV. Watching The Springer Show before you've had a chance to acclimatise to the day should carry a health warning ("this programme causes catastrophic depression" would be appropriate).
Each confrontational show consists of three segments, such as a family at war, a couple who don't have sex, a transsexual goat who wants to be an opera singer (I'm making that one up), and each section is appropriately titled ("goat without a note" could be a runner).
Somewhere in the morass of Springer's fetid week we got "I Hate My Daughter" (or was that "I Ate My Daughter"), a gargantuan tale of misery, neglect and lousy diets that desperately needed to be dealt with professionally. A macabre Springer, however, in his purple tie and well-cut charcoal suit, "exposing the most sensational stories in the UK", was as clinical as it was going to get.
Carole (the mother) and two of her daughters, Rachel and Jade, shook out their miserable sack, while a self-conscious audience cooed and oohed and glanced at themselves in the monitors, and bouncers danced around the participants in case there was a fight. It was too sad to be funny.
Carole, a depressive, had made four plates of sandwiches each afternoon for her daughters when they returned from school, allowed them to use the bathroom, then locked them into their rooms until the following day. Rachel came home from school one day to find her clothes in a bin-bag and a car waiting to drive her 50 miles up the motorway, where she was taken into care. She had never been anywhere before, and her panic when she recalled the childhood journey was palpable.
This is despicable, cruelly manipulative and shameless television. Springer is probably no worse than Ricki Lake or Robert Kilroy-Silk or any of the other TV agony strippers, but there is something profoundly cynical about the participants he chooses. Wound up, then set free from their traps in a booth next to the studio, they shout and hiss at estranged fathers or ex-partners.
"I gave you my milk tokens," one young mother screamed at another as their lives were unravelled for our delectation and their exhausted faces crumpled faster than Springer's bespoke suit.
LAST YEAR JULIE Burchill (who should be offered Springer lightly grilled on a platter for her breakfast) wrote a novel about a teenage lesbian romance, and Sugar Rush has now been flipped sunny-side-up for television. Kim (Olivia Hallinan) is 15 and lives in Brighton with a stock TV family: brittle, sexually adventurous mother; floppy intellectual father who makes toad in the hole and gives good foot massages; and little brother in astronaut helmet. Kim, however, has a crush on her best friend, the beautiful, street-smart Sugar (Lenora Crichlow).
Made in 10 bite-sized and palatable pieces, the witty and well-acted Sugar Rush is full of dressing-up and pouting and interesting things to do with an electric toothbrush. There are also some funny one-liners, such as Kim on Darren, a would-be boyfriend ("the blood destined for his brain had been diverted to greedier organs"), or Kim's concerned dad, carrying a tray into her room and tentatively trying to negotiate his way through her adolescent angst: "There's no toad, just hole - thought you might be on a meat thing . . ."