Everyman: Hallelujah Kids BBC1, Monday
Would You Believe: Healing Hands RTE1, Thursday
Boston Law BBC1, Wednesday
Baddiel's Syndrome Sky One, Sunday
Five years ago, documentary-maker Christopher Moore discovered Shaun Walters and his dad, Mike, moving from car to church to motel, clocking up 400,000 miles of jabbering, convulsing revivalist services in Bible-Belt towns where the minds were small but the hair big. Shaun then was a little boy evangelist constantly living in the front line of the rapture, his hair wilder than the apocalypse, his voice rasping and possessed. He was a pale 14-year-old stuck in a white suit and white shoes, thrust out there to rescue the doomed. A Milky Bar kid for God.
This week in Everyman: Hallelujah Kids, Moore went back to find Shaun, at 19, utterly lost. In the dustbowl town in which the Walters have settled, he spends his time indoors, either doing nothing at all or occasionally perched inches from the telly, the outside world flickering across his face. He only sparks up on the altar, but off it he is friendless, unable to communicate, a lifer released early into a world he doesn't recognise. He is in constant hand-to-hand combat with the demons he is convinced have advanced on his soul. Last time we saw him, Shaun had eyes like a shark's, the fat black pupil pushing the white out to the edges. Now they are shrunken and burnt out. You spend all that time fighting the devil, and the devil's gotta start winning sometime.
He is still a child, with a father determined to live his dreams (and worst nightmares) through his son. Mike - not a con man or huckster by any means, just utterly blinded by conviction - is not a man who could be accused of setting his sights too low. Finally achieving his ambition of building his own church, with a 1,000 capacity - in a town with a population of 1,000.
But now he had a new focus. Ten-year-old Jacob was a Billy Barry kid of preaching, with all of the cuteness but none of the throat-throttling conviction his brother could convey at his age. The three travelled across the state to Jacob's ordination ceremony, stopping off along the way to join in services, where people wailed, fell over, shook and gibbered like drunken cabaret crooners. As Jacob cured the real estate problems of all-comers, Shaun stayed on the front pews despairing as his raison d'etre was taken away from him.
After another night sitting on the bench, watching his little brother steal his preaching time, Shaun became convinced he had become a vampire and would burn up at dawn. It was left to Moore to calm him, reason with him, while dad Mike remained with Jacob, who was writhing on the floor overcome with the Holy Spirit in advance of his ordination.
"Are you looking forward to it, Jacob?" asked Moore at breakfast the next morning.
"Oh yeah," he beamed, before looking at his pop. "What's `ordained' again, Daddy?"
Run, Jacob. Run.
About half-way in, Mike admitted that Shaun had recently been diagnosed with "mild autism". It explained so much: the obsession with demons, the mania summoned within himself, the social inadequacy. It didn't explain much to Mike, who simply moved more and more away from Shaun and towards Jacob. Shaun's mother, who had split with Mike - "as a result of long periods of separation and the work of the devil" - showed her anger at the state her son was in, but little interest in doing anything practical about it.
In the end, it was Moore himself who began to take on a paternal role, trying to understand Shaun, to persuade Mike his son needed serious help. At the mention of his son's problems, though, Mike would adopt a gaze which hinted he had turned up the voices in his head to shut everything else out.
We left the three as they headed back to the big church in a small town, and the threat that failure there would mean hitting the road all over again. Creepily, every time Shaun stepped into the daylight, flies seemed to go for him. He was dead before he ever lived.
Mary Malone would fit in neatly in the Walters' world, with her country 'n' western music, American registered car and Daniel O'Donnell photo. Healing Hands showed how a little faith goes a long way, but a little science could have gone even further. As Mary and fellow healers were followed laying on hands, the only testimony of any healing having actually occurred came with a man and his tennis elbow.
"Are you on tablets?" Mary, from a radio phone-in, asked a woman suffering from depression.
"I am."
"Are you on eight?"
"Four."
"You might have to double them at some stage."
This was the kind of vague prodding used by Doris Stokes in her hey-day, and is still practised by any half-baked psychic in a shawl and tent off Moore Street today. Later, reporter Gemma McCrohan asked if telling someone to double their medicinal dosage wasn't a bit risky.
"Did I say to go to the doctor? Usually I do. No? You know, there was an eight there, it could have even been eight weeks. Eight? Did she not know what that was? Did she give me an answer to that?"
"No, she said she was on four tablets."
"Oh yeah. But it wasn't helping her, was it not?"
Bad memory? I know a woman who'll cure that for you.
A murder in an Irish bar was the focus of Boston Law. Daniel and Joseph Downey were on trial for the stabbing of Jimmy Murphy in a brawl a week after St Patrick's Day in 1997. But in the South Boston world of thick necks and thicker blood ties, getting anybody to talk wasn't easy. Ten people were in the bar that night, none of them saw a thing. Witness testimony came as a series of shrugs, one-word answers and memory losses. Eventually the victim's half-brother, Frankie, took to the stand in his freshly-pressed prison uniform and got his story so mixed up that his own lawyer couldn't figure out what was going on.
"He didn't want to be a snitch," said his Ma. "I said, `Snitch on who? He's your brother'. I said `give him five years'. That's tough love for you." It was standard, if dramatic, docu-soap stuff until towards the end of the trial when, as if to emphasise the reality of it all, Murphy's corpse flashed up on screen. The look of surprise on his face was so stark it is probably still imprinted in the ether beside the phones at Kelly's Bar, South Boston.
IF I ever get a syndrome of some sorts - and I have been on the look-out for one - then I could do worse than Baddiel's Syndrome. By that, I don't mean Baddiel's Syndrome the sitcom, but rather Baddiel's Syndrome - the affliction in which TV executives give comedian David Baddiel lots of money to go off and make shows that either a) required no work whatsoever to put together, or b) required quite a bit of work with even worse results.
Baddiel's Syndrome (the sitcom) falls into category b. I've seen £5 million mentioned as a fee for Baddiel and co-writer Peter Bradshaw to go off and come up with this. All I can imagine is they must have spent £4.9 million on some amazing lunches while they wrote the thing, because it's hard to see where else it went. I was looking under the set's couch throughout, and it certainly wasn't stuffed there. Lord knows it wasn't in the acting.
Bradshaw, who has written himself the part of Baddiel's flatmate, is a film critic with The Guardian, and proves that, whatever judges of other people's talents critics are, they can be even worse when it comes to their own. And all that cash certainly didn't go into the jokes. A straight rip-off of Seinfeld - four losers, the foibles of everyday life, passing characters solely defined by an annoying trait - it was unfunny on all those levels and more. Seinfeld is still running on Tuesday nights on Sky One, if you do want the real thing.
Baddiel also got some daft sum of money to do Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned (all week on ITV), which is himself and Frank Skinner on a couch in front of an audience for half-an-hour. That's it. An improvised hit and miss - it's hard not to give them credit from having burgled ITV so gleefully. That I ended up watching it three times in seven days showed there wasn't too much on the telly this week. Maybe if Mike and Jacob and Sean or Mary are passing by my house some day they could do me a favour and lay their hands on my TV and cure it of showing too many bad programmes. Better still, they could do something else for me that I should probably do more of. Switch the damn thing off.
