TV Review: And the winner is . . . Telephone voting to choose the worst idea of the week is over. Phone lines are now dead and so, presumably, is the winner. The posthumous honour goes to the hermaphrodite banana slug, who keeps its penis behind its ear (no, that's not the worst idea).
The banana slug, in a post-coital effort to ensure paternity (worst idea coming up) chews off his (or do I mean her) own penis and uses it to block up her (or do I mean his) own vagina and thus make it safe from other roving banana slugs with more sperm than sense.
This mind-bogglingly useless information was brought to us courtesy of biologist Dr Olivia Judson. Dr Judson seems like a no-nonsense kind of woman, the kind of woman who can wire a plug, deliver the kittens, re-pot the hosta and still remember the dry cleaning. Occasionally, however, Dr Judson morphs into Dr Tatiana, her showbiz Doppelgänger. Then, as brisk and frisky as a head girl with a bottle of Babycham hidden in the pocket of her gymslip, the doctor travels hither and yon in white high heels and a miniskirt, exploring the sexual predilections and malfunctions of button beetles and flatworms.
Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation is a musical exploration of the evolution of sex, based on Judson's bestseller, and it is televised insanity of operatic proportions. Dr Tatiana is a kind of agony aunt to arachnids, a Robert Kilroy-Silk in slingbacks, probing the paraphilias of creepy-crawlies and things that should stay under their rocks. Her "clients" are played by needy actors in Lycra who dance and sing and hop about with papier-mâché erections and wobbly plastic antennae. This late-night zoological titillation amounts to a salient argument for bringing back the test card. If you happen to trip over a rerun, do yourself a favour: turn off and go to bed. Life is too short, especially if you're a banana slug.
IT IS SURELY only a matter of time before telephone voting replaces the ballot box. In the time it takes to stuff a mushroom we'll be texting the name of our favourite politician and watching as Angus Deayton consoles the losing candidate.
In The Apprentice, Alan Sugar didn't rely on a telephone poll to choose an assistant. As he kept telling us, he makes his own decisions. Twelve weeks, 14 contestants, one job with Sugar on a hundred thousand a year. The two finalists, Saira and Tim, with the help of ex-teammates, a boat and five grand, had three days to conceive and stage an event on the River Thames.
Tim's team, who were the slightly classier bunch, opted for a fashion show with some fetishistic underwear and a bevy of art students to soak up the free champagne. Saira, who seemed like she would sell her granny to the wolf to keep herself in fashion eyewear, blagged 120 free bottles of Californian wine and threw a tasting party. Saira, though, had promised a Californian theme in return, and failed to deliver as much as a cactus. "We've got . . . is it called bunting?" she said in her defence.
Sugar eventually put the candidates out of their misery but not before first dismissing their teams from his presence. Branson, Murdoch and Gates, Sugar informed the hushed losers, were business acquaintances he now numbered among his friends; then, in an act of unprecedented generosity, he passed around his card. "I will," he said, "take your call." Tim won.
It is now safe to walk through Covent Garden without being accosted by a bellicose Saira with a megaphone, inveigling you on to her ship to get a hangover for a fiver.
THE LAST SURVIVING member of Gary Rhodes's red kitchen and Jean-Christophe Novelli's blue kitchen also battled it out, the carrot here being a quarter of a million quid to help the winner open their own eatery. The final contestants in Hell's Kitchen were Kellie (from the blue corner) and Terry (from the red). "North versus south," Angus Deayton said. "Girl versus boy, hairy versus bald."
Kellie, a hard-working, tenacious Londoner, clung on till the bitter end like a Doberman with a thigh-bone. She was beaten on the final count, however, by Big Terry, the deserving and gentle Geordie who thought all southerners were softies, wept when he held his wife and figured he'd have had an easier time of it if the producers had provided him with an interpreter. During the two weeks of culinary cut-and-thrust that was Hell's Kitchen, the public voted to jettison the more moneyed, privileged and self-reverential competitors first; we were left with two adults who had battled more than a lumpy roux to reach the final.
COMPARED WITH TWO weeks chained to the cooker, Shaun Murphy's quarter-of-a-million-quid snooker win looked like child's play (World Snooker Championship Final). That's probably got everything to do with the fact that Murphy, the latest and last Embassy world snooker champion, closely resembles a toddler in a dicky bow.
The cherubic, calm, and previously little known would-be champion seemed to play as effortlessly as a tot in a sandpit, while his fiancée shook and prayed in the gallery in some kind of transcendental fervour. Hell, it worked.
Murphy's opponent, Matthew Stevens, running his hand ruefully over his hair gel, accepted the £125,000 (€184,000) runners-up prize. "It's my job," he shrugged in the post-tournament interview when asked how he felt. After seeing beaten finalist Kellie wringing her tears from her tea-towel, it all seemed a little flat.
Doubtless Murphy will be around long enough to lose his rosy glow, but the centrepiece of TV snooker championships will no longer be sponsored by the tobacco company. It's a sign of the times.
THE LUMINOUS BACKDROP of Dublin Bay, stretching from Howth Head to Dalkey Island, takes less than 10 minutes to reach from the city centre, but many Dubliners are aware of it only as a glint in their wing mirrors as they sit in traffic. It was hugely refreshing to get out then this week with The Bay and leave the steamy interiors behind.
Over the next four weeks the series will explore Dublin Bay, the activities on it, the personalities around it, its history, and the environmental and political issues relating to it. Many cities, we were told, are built on rivers; Dublin, however, is unique in a European context, being in the enviable position of having a marine playground at her front door.
The Bay, in the tradition of Ulysses, started with a view from a Martello tower. Then it was on to a dip in the Forty-Foot.
"You don't need Viagra or a psychiatrist," said one daily swimmer, sea water running down his face, his athletic 74-year-old body framed by a gun-metal sky.
Since the new sewage treatment plant has become operational, water quality has improved, the bay is cleaner and richer, and fish are returning. Bulloch Harbour is fished for lobster and crab and Dublin Bay prawns may even one day be from Dublin Bay.
The programme brought us on a constitutional down Dún Laoghaire Pier, built as an asylum harbour to protect ships from easterlies that threw vessels against the cliffs at Seapoint and Blackrock. Children messed about in boats, elderly couples strolled, others power-walked off the weekend's excesses. With a warm narration from Brenda Fricker and underwater film of grey seals chatting among the algae, there was a freshness and vitality about the programme. After those fraught boardrooms and snooker halls, switching over to The Bay was like waking up and discovering the sun had finally come out.