TVReview: It had been nearly four weeks since Dennis Rodman (all 6ft 8in of him) had had sex, four weeks since George Galloway had had a political career and four weeks since Chantelle stood at a bus stop in the south London drizzle dreaming of being famous. The three potential evictees, chipped from the frazzled coterie of assembled celebrity that is the Big Brother house, waited on Wednesday for Davina McCall to put them out of their misery.
In the days prior to this penultimate bloodletting the housemates had begun a quite spectacular deterioration, induced by boredom, cigarette and intellect deprivation, and of course the stress of not having a new tube of foundation (Chantelle), not to mention the deeply cynical manipulation of the series producers. The playmates in this truly horrible but morbidly enduring televisual head-wreck were as combustible as Preston's pimples and as vulnerable as Pete Burns's surgically traumatised lip line. Arguing, bitching, threatening and sulking their way through egregious tasks to earn food, fags and drink, the group was like a bunch of verbally incontinent prairie dogs blindly scrambling towards the precipice.
At the time of going to press, the winner of Celebrity Big Brother has yet to be announced. I hope it's Pete Burns - he's the only contestant who can look dignified with a jock-strap over his tights. But the ultimate winner, of course, is the format. The hungry, frustrated, over-medicated house had some real potential for violence this time around - what else bound viewers to their seats? Traci Bingham wasn't going to oblige Dennis in the shower, Chantelle and Preston weren't going to get their kit off (and reveal to the nation that they were in fact made of plastic).
On Wednesday the main player left the stage: the insanely egotistical George Galloway was voted out and emerged from the house to a chorus of boos and hisses.
"You've been the best contestant we've ever had," said Davina McCall, and she wasn't joking. As Galloway swivelled in his chair to see a mock-up of the derisive headlines that have peppered his time inside and then to watch a video of himself licking imaginary cream from his whiskers and purring in Rula Lenska's lap, or fluttering in his revealing red-hot leotard, he must have known he'd blown it. The man's boundless ego had deluded him into thinking he could take on Big Brother and win.
"I will have failed," he said to McCall, "if I have failed to bring people together into a common cause." Touch of the Norma Jeans there, George, as Burns would say. Did Galloway really think that a bunch of teenagers with their thumbs on their text buttons would crown him king? Sorry, George, you've been framed.
"I've had more than 2,000 women," Rodman told McCall later, after he too had been evicted from the asylum. In the background the remaining contestants, unhearing in their glass prison, stifled their yawns and Michael Barrymore, a man perpetually caught in the headlights of his own disintegration, arched his eyebrow.
FICTION SCARCELY STANDS a chance against this kind of voyeurism. This week saw Sky One usher on to our screens the war drama, Over There, a fictionalised account of a real catastrophe. Produced by Steven Bochco (NYPD Blue, LA Law), Over There focuses on a US army unit on its first tour of duty in Iraq and is said to be the first American TV war drama to have been aired while the war it represents is ongoing. The usual stereotypical TV soldiers are on duty: tough black guy with a Hershey-bar heart; runtish intellectual with spectacles and an oversized helmet; and, in deference to the subject matter, Tariq the Muslim, from Detroit, who conveniently understands the diversity among the host population. Their unit, stationed on a deserted sandy road outside Baghdad, seems to man one of the most deadly checkpoints in the entire piteous country, with unlit vehicles hurtling towards them with alarming regularity.
Often violent and at time viscerally shocking, Over There, while claiming to be non-partisan, is certainly anti-war. The members of the unit, seemingly unsure whether they were in Iraq to defend or destroy, found themselves caught in a dirty conflict where civilians are used as bullet bait by terrorists, where children have their heads blown off and where fear overcomes patriotism.
While observing crows pecking at the mangled corpses of two young men baking in the midday sun inside a bullet-riddled car, a couple of rookie soldiers, who had shot out the car the night before, discussed in a haze of disorientation and shock what had driven them to enlist. For these fictionalised working-class soldiers, as with their real-life counterparts, the events of 9/11 had been the common catalyst. If Over There was intended as a gory wake-up call to an American nation jaded by body-counts, it was worth a shot. But somehow, with its uneasy mix of Hollywood soldiers (they all have great teeth), soap opera (storylines about wives and girlfriends on US army bases in Germany) and quasi-educational discourse on the horrors of war, the piece doesn't quite hang together, and it's difficult, given the evidence of appalling recent events in Iraq, to buy into the sensitive soldiering genre. As one anonymous blogger put it: "If I'd wanted a fictionalised account of the Iraq war I'd have turned on Fox News."
WHILE GEORGE GALLOWAY was languishing in his goldfish bowl, having his political message edited into oblivion by Channel 4, some of his constituents were offering their insights into Muslim values, a subject increasingly on the TV agenda. Gay Muslims spoke to young men and women struggling with their sexuality in the face of families and communities who see it as sinful and un-Islamic. Among the contributors to the documentary, only one man was prepared to be identified; others were filmed from their neck down, while one young lesbian (and practising Muslim), who passionately believed that her religion was and could be interpreted to be more inclusive, was filmed wearing a burka and a combat jacket.
Another interviewee, Farah, was a student, a Muslim and a lesbian; through her pixillated features her distress was clear. "My mum would rather say I'd been knocked down by a truck than tell her family I was a lesbian," she told us. "Jihad," she explained, was a daily internal battle for good, a battle she fought with her sexuality. Defeated and lonely, she was considering marrying and having children in order to be accepted by her family, whom she clearly loves. "My mum said: 'If you were a proper Muslim you would have killed yourself,'" Farah told us, heartbreakingly.
By contrast, Adnan Ali sat on a bench by the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens with his lover, Eric, whom he plans to marry. He referred laughingly to Eric as a "Mohammed queen" (because he's with a Muslim) and himself as a "vanilla queen" because he's with Eric (apparently you can also be a "rice queen", but don't look for the recipe in your Delia Smith). Adnan, having endured isolation from his family (including his mother feeding him from separate plates and cups so that he did not "infect" his relatives), having being beaten up, ostracised and threatened, was determined to live openly as a gay Muslim. Unwelcome in the mosque, he prayed at home.
The programme introduced Razeem, a young gay Muslim from the north of England, to Adnan and his metropolitan life. Sitting in Adnan's roof garden overlooking the cosmopolitan heart of west London, Razeem's sense of new-found freedom was palpable. Later, interviewed back home among a community - some of whom still believe that homosexuality should be punished by stoning - his optimism had abandoned him. "I will accept an arranged marriage," he said. "I will be a good son and a good Muslim."
ONCE AGAIN, AND for no good reason, RTÉ has put John Kelly out with the milk bottles and the moggy. Kelly is presenting Other Voices, a late-night, nine-part music programme featuring Irish and international musicians who gathered to perform in St James's Churchin Dingle over a period of about a week before Christmas.
Interspersed with the music are interviews Kelly conducted with the musicians at various venues in the town. As witnessed in his recent far-reaching interview on The View with writer and artist John Berger, Kelly is a calm and well-informed presenter who is capable of actually conducting a conversation with his subjects. Unlike some of his RTÉ contemporaries, one feels he is listening to what is being said rather than zoning out into another orbit between questions.
Among the performers in the first of the series was former squaddie James Blunt. When Kelly pointed out to Blunt that, given his massive record sales, he didn't really need to be promoting himself in a church hall in the wilds of Co Kerry, the musician replied that his invitation had been received before You're Beautiful and his meteoric rise to fame. In a rather posh and unsquaddie-like voice, he expressed his appreciation at being invited at a time when he was "not everyone's cup of tea".
Rufus Wainwright and The Waterboys are to come - well worth staying awake for.
