The Jerry Springer Show - ITV, Saturday
True Lives: Polygamy - RTE 1, Monday
Children of Divorce, - BBC 2, Monday
The Brit Awards, - ITV, Tuesday
Under the Sun: Painted Babies - BBC2, Wednesday
How desperate must you be to throw cold water over John Prescott? Chumbawamba did at this week's Brit Awards, in a gesture about as wicked as Dana's favourite pastry. Think about it - Elvis, Woodstock, the Isle of Wight, Live Aid, and the best establishment figure the late 1990s can produce is a Deputy Dawg who has had his day, but hasn't quite realised it yet. John Prescott is Labour with a limp, one of those metal-fatigued drumming bunnies who keep on going long after the battery should have run out. Why bother to drench him? Tony Blair got there first. Rock music is quintessentially respectable now. Even the language acknowledges it. Instead of sending good wishes to your fans, you offer "respect". Instead of cheering your heroes, you show some "respect". It's a Ken Maginnis word, if you insist on a local example. Tribal.
Respect at the Brits is tribal too, all about hierarchy, about acknowledging greater clout and authority. No matter that a kid in the Chicago ghettos means something very different, and follows through with a spray of Uzi metal if you don't fall into line. When you won't protest against anything important, you borrow the attitude of those who need to, but can't.
So this eminent, cross-generational gathering (where half the stars are knighted and the rest wear Versace with British Home Stores labels sewn on) says respect, but means record sales. Money is power. Sales win you awards. Hence, John Prescott, underdog, is the only enemy you recognise. Finley Quayle, Shola Ama, The Verve, even Tom Jones singing a medley from The Full Monty with Robbie Williams - and giving compere Ben Elton (who used to be smart) a chance to crack yet another lunchbox gag so stale you could smell the ham - made some good music.
But sentiment ruled the day. After two long hours in which the adverts became increasingly fascinating, the Brits imploded in a wash of nostalgia that almost tempted you to surf off to Prime Time's report on traffic jams. If anyone deserved a bucket of cold water, Fleetwood Mac's chiffon-stiff politics did, yet Cherie Blair cheered when they won the Lifetime Achievement Award. What matter that their romance-junkie music lacks the honest smarm of The Bee Gees, who took the equivalent prize in last week's Brat Awards. With album sales of 30-million plus, you're guaranteed respect.
Respect was everywhere - and nowhere - this week. The Jerry Springer Show devoted a whole segment to respecting the American Mom in a piece subtitled My Teen Loves Satan. The Mom in question was a seriously large woman who fostered out her son as a toddler, reclaimed him as a pre-teen, and is now aghast at his satanic allegiance. Son is possessed by a demonic refusal to have anything to do with her. A lynch mob reincarnates as the Jerry Springer audience, a growling, amoebic globule with a snot-green pea brain. These people would hang you on the basis of news stories published in the National Enquirer. They're children of Salem, devoted to a good witch-hunt no matter what the era. When they appeared on Roseanne the time she won the lottery, I thought the show was a put-on. But it patently is not. This is popular American television, determinedly confrontational and completely committed to confession alising the culture. With so promiscuous a democracy, scandals such as Gobblegate begin to seem rather everyday.
Ratings-healthy Jerry delivers a brief epistle whenever moral ambiguity threatens the show's black-or-white values. This week, he tells us that early childhood experiences can have a bad effect on how you turn out. He seems to assume we don't know this. Yet nothing, he insists, justifies being mean to Mom. Donny, aged 17, was a big lug in shades and white make-up, desperately trying to look scary. "How can you treat your Mom like this?" Springer accused him, urged on by the shrieking, heckling rabble who knew Moms sit by God's right hand. Donny was tongue-tied. Mom wept and shouted, her thunder thighs visibly shaking with emotion. "Donny, Donny, Donny, tell me you love me, say you love your Mom."
"Tell her, creep, tell her!" With every tear, the audience urged her on.
Apart from bad make-up and being almost wholly unappealing, not to mention a major lack of judgment in coming on this particular show, it isn't exactly clear what offence Donny has committed. He starts to say how Mom's boyfriend used to assault him, and how she used to lock him in her car during 102 temperatures so as to put manners on him. Hot as hell it was. Donny believes she was wrong. The audience goes wild. How dare he accuse a Mom of anything like that, and even if she did, he must have deserved it! Springer won't let him expand. This is one bad boy, and we all need to pray for him so that he can return to his Mom's bosoms. All three of them. Fleetwood Mac couldn't have put it better. Parents, of course, must come first. Western culture is founded almost entirely on that belief, and no matter what changes time brings, parents always get the juiciest rights. The romance of parenthood is one of the great contemporary myths, with generations of children destined to suffer in its wake. As the Daddy says in Matilda: "I'm big, you're small. I'm right, you're wrong." It's a question of respect.
Kids get left behind. Children Of Divorce started a three-week long process of listening to children talk about what happened to them when their parents' game of Happy Families went wrong. It was confessional television too, destined for a far smaller audience than Springer's Satanic Teen, but it tried to minimise the mediation, if that's possible, even when children were less than articulate. The children were usually aged well into double figures, with a few tots whose straight-talking words broke your heart. Only one, now almost fully grown, felt that she had emerged more or less unscarred by the experience. A boy of about 11 believed his main job was to look after mummy, who cried herself to sleep and worried about bills. A little girl tried to find traces of her father's aftershave lingering in the house, and knew he wasn't coming back when the smell was gone.
No matter how they had been told of their parents separation, the children felt personally abandoned. Many reckoned that their absent parent wasn't interested in them. "He doesn't like us any more," a sister and brother decided. Nine times out of 10, flashed the inevitable statistics, fathers leave families; relatively few fathers on this programme visited their children regularly. Fathers tended not to dispute custody, but if they did, their chances of being awarded care of their children were only 1 in 20. Do we need to know how marriage breakdown affects children? Absolutely, but in Ireland we neither discuss nor deal with it. This is the Problem With No Name for the next millennium - we're so busy hiding in the sand, rooting round for another referendum or two, that we leave many awkward discussions to British programme-makers. And Children Of Div- orce is not, as you might think, a programme for masochists. If I want pain, I'll switch to Prime Time on traffic jams.
Some people, of course, adore their children. You might say they love them to death. The repeat of Jane Treays's powerful Painted Babies gains currency with the still-unsolved murder of JonBenet Ramsay, the five-year-old beauty queen found strangled at home over a year ago. She didn't appear in this chilling documentary about the race to become Southern Charm Queen, but her ghost was everywhere.
Southern Charm Queen is just like Crufts Dog Show, except that chief contender, Brooke Breedwell, is a five-year-old child. Cutie culture costs. Brooke's annual clothes bill reaches $3,500 and she travels a three-hour round trip to take voice lessons in Nashville. She looks like a little Barbie, and her Mom says that is exactly what she is. Mom trains her cutie in how to play dumb. Problem is, she's too young to tell games from reality. Brooke's sexualised posturing becomes all the more hideous for her absolute innocence in striking too many pelvic-thrust poses, and by the time she wins the title, you've glimpsed a decadence Bertold Brecht might only have imagined. What makes her special? She is the ultimate "packaged product", says a pageant judge. Already, the spunk is gone from her. Brooke speaks to camera like a dead soul, a husk for Mom's ambition, and Granmah too, the formidable Bunny Breedwell. The Breedwells exercise total control over her because she is their property, but unless they interfere with her material body or her physical life, no court will deny them that right.
It's all done in the name of love, the best excuse for everything. Or could it be power? On True Lives this week, a fundamentalist Mormon called Randy explained why polygamy was God's way of multiplying His chosen people in the world. While his congregation sang a hymn about struggling seamen, Randy's pastor preached that polygamy was the greatest test of manhood God could set. Polygamy had nothing to do with sexual gratification, absolutely nothing. Nor with power. It was about respect, the man respecting women by marrying them all at once, the woman respecting man's authority as head of the family. Manhood meant governing the family wisely and besides, women were ruled by their emotions, which would never do at all. There was more than a touch of the Roman Catholics - God was a man, therefore men were born to govern, and God justified every step they took. Polygamy, we quickly realised, was a men-only vocation. Women are too spiritually immature to cope with it.
Great feats of human endurance were laid before us. Imagine how difficult it was to ration yourself out fairly and squarely. Imagine the pain Randy felt leaving on honeymoon with his second wife while his first wife of nearly 20 years wrestled with ungodly emotions like jealousy and insecurity. "Toughest thing I ever done."
One guy had five wives and 13 children. Another engaged in oral threnody by playing Danny Boy on his mouth organ to all three wives at the same time. Serial monogamy began to look distinctly conservative, such was the extent of the uncontested PR job this programme performed. Nothing was said about the context, the culture, nor the legal limbo in which they exercised their divine rights. Nothing was necessary.
"Hogamus, higamus, man is polygamous," wrote Aldous Huxley. "Higamus hogamus, woman monogamous." Extraordinary how conjugation helps you to fool yourself.