TV Review/Shane Hegarty: Girls Alone put 10 girls in a house for six days without adult supervision, and proved that if William Golding had shipwrecked girls on his island, it would have descended into an endless, feral pyjama party. They immediately evicted all silence and replaced it with impressive, nerve-scraping levels of screaming.
Girls Alone, Channel 4, Tuesday
So Graham Norton, Channel 4, Tuesday
Dracula's Bram Stoker, RTE1, Tuesday
Baddiel & Skinner Unplanned, ITV, all week
Profits Reunited, BBC2, Wednesday
There must be nothing on earth to compare with the sound of rampaging tweenies, fuelled by crisp sandwiches, jelly babies and whatever Pot Noodles haven't been mashed into the carpet.
This "cutting edge" documentary was a follow-up to last year's one featuring 10 boys, who destroyed the place and broke into two groups with the strong turning on the weak, while fuelled by crisp sandwiches, jelly babies and whatever Pot Noodles hadn't been mashed into the carpet.
The girls, it turned out, operated more as a group, despite some splits. One girl adopted the role of mummy, and was shunted into isolation. Another's hyperactivity also saw her pushed aside. Yet conflicts tended to be resolved with a determination absent among the boys, and on both occasions that a girl opted to return to the adult world, the rest huddled together in a corner until the shockwaves dispersed.
To call these programmes "experiments", however, would be to elevate their scientific value. They have both lacked insight, and haven't sought it. If a girl wanted out, there was a bell she could ring, with a psychologist on the other side of the door ready to put the pieces back together. The viewer was given no such luxury. We learnt little other than the British birth notices must make far livelier reading than ours. (Kaylie, Charli, Sherry, Alysia, Sadé, your dinner's on the floor!)
It's not as if the schedules aren't overloaded with showbiz psychologists. They are increasingly drafted in to fly-on-the-walls and reality shows to interpret marriages and friendships and arguments and to generally make us feel comfortable in our voyeurism. Why Girls Alone couldn't borrow one for this programme is a mystery. They should place a camera in the production meetings that decide these things, with psychologists on hand to translate the decisions.
By the way, during the break for Girls Alone, there was a trailer for So Graham Norton that spoofed the documentary you hadn't finished watching. He and a gang of women were dressed as 10-year-olds and running as a group through the same house you were seeing either side of the break. It was deconstruction on the hoof, television recycling and discarding a programme before it had even finished. They used to let these programmes go cold before dissecting them. Now, they burst out of its still-beating chest.
Bram Stoker would not have appreciated such immediate deconstruction, given that his famous novel was a masterpiece of late-Victorian repression, of subtext and suggestion. In Dracula's Bram Stoker, the academics stripped away what they could, but the author, it turned out, covered his tracks well. When Stoker died, his obituaries talked of his years as manager of London's Lyceum Theatre and that he was a sometime novelist. They certainly didn't mention that he had been trapped in a sexually-barren marriage to a society beauty whose previous lover had been Oscar Wilde. Nor did they talk of his repressed homosexuality, of the gushing letters written to poet Walt Whitman. Nor that he then transferred his affections to the greatest actor of the day, John Irving, writing of him in barely-restrained homoerotic language comical to the modern ear. He wrote in Irving's biography: "At the sight of his picture, at those loving words, the record of a time of deep emotion and full understanding of us both, each for the other, unmans me once again". The Noel Pearson-produced documentary, well researched but a little dry, talked of all of that. We live, as we were told, in a post-Freudian world. Maybe Stoker was being deliberately ambiguous, perhaps not, but every word has been turned upside down, every bite mark examined in an attempt to find out.
Stoker, though, was a man who settled into a life in the shadows, or rather Irving's shadow. The actor was most likely the Count in all but the length of his incisors. Working day and night for Irving's Lyceum, Stoker had spent seven years scribbling the novel on hotel letter paper, railway stationery and British Museum notepads. Irving didn't care for the work at all, denouncing it as preposterous nonsense. Yet Stoker's attachment to the man included him having a stroke soon after Irving's death. Stoker eventually died the same week that the Titanic sunk. None of the major obituaries mentioned Dracula.
There is little that is lasting about Baddiel & Skinner Unplanned, apart from one's awe that the comedians continue to get away with it, and that ITV continues to pay them an enormous sum to do so. Here, they present a programme for which they only need to show up. There is a sofa in the middle of the stage, a piano to their right, a caricature of themselves behind and an audience in front. They are asked questions such as: "As a child, did you watch Tiswas or Swap Shop?" or "Are you going to the Chelsea-Arsenal game on Saturday?" David Baddiel and Frank Skinner's answers last for as long as it takes for them to decide that there are no more cheap jokes to be found in the subject. Eventually, they end the show on a song, the running gag being that while Baddiel is quite handy on the piano, Skinner has the tone of a piano dropping from a height.
It's a matter of personal taste as to whether you can tune into their flatmate banter and quick-fire smuttiness. If you can, Baddiel & Skinner Unplanned is a kind of televised sedative, with some mild chortling as a side-effect. Following the 10 O'Clock News, it is the fag-end of the day, television to watch with the eyelids half-closed. Before you know it, it's over. The only lasting evidence that they've been there at all is the extra nought that's appeared in their bank accounts.
Do you remember watching Profits Reunited on Wednesday night? A programme about the old nostalgia industry, all that money that was to be made? There was Dollar, with their platinum hair, tummies tucked in and studded leather suits that would cut off your circulation. And Human League, looking like pensioners who'd applied make-up in the dark. And do you remember it showed them doing that tour with Kim Wilde last year. Kids in America, woh-oh! And they made more money on that tour than in their heyday! God, we hated those bands then, do you remember? But then when you saw them again didn't it make you feel kind of warm inside?
And there was that thing, School Disco. We'd dress up in school uniform and dance to the Grange Hill theme. And some of us had only left school a few months before! And that guy behind it, Bobby Sanchez his name was, he put on a sports day at Clapham Common, with wheelbarrow races and pommel horses and people pretending to be teachers, and he made £1.2 million in one day! And there were those other people who made all that cash with Friends Reunited.com, where you could find out what happened to old schoolmates. Do you remember how 15 per cent of the adult population of Britain was registered with them? Last year they were going to sell the company for £30 million, but held onto it and instead released tie-in Eighties compilation CDs.
They were only repackaged versions of all those other Eighties compilations we already had, but do you remember how we kept buying them anyway? How stupid were we? And do you remember in Profits Reunited there was no mention of all those nostalgia programmes the BBC shows? There was an I Love 1999, shown in 2001, with Jennifer Lopez and Posh and Becks and Ali G. Wow, where are they all now? And they replayed them over and over again, only later and later at night because there was no one left who hadn't seenthem.
And do you remember how little we had? We had no new music or new fashions. It was all hand-me-downs and stuff that had been worn before and listened to before and expensive re-hashes of things we'd thrown out long ago. But we would spend loads of our pocket money on it. Do you remember? Don't you miss it?