TVReview:Magic and reality don't mix well. That's the fundamental flaw in the BBC's otherwise engaging new children's reality show, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, where 14 youngsters learn magic folklore, Latin spells, card tricks and chemistry - and compete for the chance to become the "real" Harry Potter.
If the kids were secretly hoping for something on a par with shifting staircases, talking portraits, headless ghosts and the like, they'd have been sadly disappointed. What they got instead was a slightly decrepit English boarding school - think low-rent Hogwarts: mullioned windows, peeling walls, the odd candlestick - and a few fancy card tricks demonstrated for them by a pasty fellow called Mr Knight. Nothing to blow their little socks off, then. But the lack of whiz-bang-pop magic didn't seem to bother the small sorcerees, who were more concerned with the absence of personal grooming facilities on the premises. Rebecca was suffering from hair-straightener separation anxiety, while Joe felt the lack of hair gel keenly. "Ma hair has to be spot-on perfick," the little narcissist moaned. Get thee to Big Brother, Joe, you can't be a real wizard if you're obsessed with styling products.
It has been set down in the gospel according to JK Rowling that inhabitants of magic worlds shall be clad in period garb of indeterminate vintage. And so the children were kitted out in a severe uniform that made them look like a cross between wine waiters and the inmates of a Victorian reform school. They were left in the charge of Miss Ford, the stiff, loveless and remote housekeeper, who was soon cracking the whip and giving bad boy Harvey Bailey a good rollocking. (He deserved it: Bailey was clearly a messer, and his attempt to recite the Sorcerer's Oath had been, frankly, pathetic: "I vow to the Sorcerer to . . . I dunno.") As for the Sorcerer himself, the reliable Dumbledore motif of wispy beard, booming voice and pointy hat was abandoned here in favour of a posh young fop with a pink waistcoat called Maximillian Somerset, who, making up in flashiness what he lacked in gravitas, demonstrated his ability to pull a live chicken from his armpit.
Quite what winning the show and becoming the real Harry Potter entailed wasn't fully explained. What a shock if the victorious sorceree has to take part in a fight-to-the-death showdown with slit-nostrilled wizard Voldemort, traditionally the lot of the fictional Harry. Put in that position, I'm sure Joe would win, as long as his hair was perfick.
AN ENFORCED SOJOURN in a reform school would have been just the thing for the hordes of feral teenagers who wrecked the Co Durham home of Rachel Bell and her family, as reported in Tonight: Teen Party Hell. Taking advantage of the fact that her parents were away on holiday, Rachel hosted a house-party that got seriously out of hand. This wasn't a bit of spilt beer on the rug: the revellers left vomit, graffiti and urine splattered over clothes and beds; Rachel's mother's wedding dress was ripped from a wardrobe and trampled on the floor, and Rachel's siblings' possessions had been trashed, in an apparent copycat version of an incident on Channel 4's teen soap Skins. More than 200 people were involved, and it all caused £20,000 (€29,500) worth of damage.
Back in April, when the party occurred, Rachel was arrested on suspicion of causing criminal damage, after it emerged that her personal page on the social-networking website, MySpace, invited all comers to a "let's trash the average family-sized house disco party". This was clearly 17-year-old Rachel's attempt to tell her side of the story; indeed, to construe herself as a victim, rather than a perpetrator. Peering shiftily from behind a heavy fringe, Rachel protested that she had only invited a sedate-sounding "select group of friends from the sixth form" to her home - and she denied posting the inflammatory party profile on her MySpace page. Er, so who did it then? If Rachel knew, she wasn't telling.
And the programme-makers didn't seem particularly interested in finding out either, preferring instead to pad out the show with endless reconstructed footage of the "teen party" in question. Actually, this turned out to be unintentionally hilarious.
It was obviously a middle-aged telly exec's idea of drink-and-drug-fuelled adolescent debauchery, only limited by the pre-watershed hour: a throbbing soundtrack, lots of whey-faced teenagers running around in the dark with their tops off, doing rude things with tomato ketchup and scrawling the word "sex" on the living-room mirror with squirty cream. Yes, that's exactly what those wild young 'uns get up to, I'll be bound.
LONG ON SENSATIONALISM, short on analysis, Teen Party Hell offered little more than a chance for us all to shake our heads in despair at the behaviour of youngsters today, with all their puking and their smoking. Thank heavens we were whisked back to an altogether more dignified era with James May's 20th Century. The Top Gear presenter has been given a break from testing sexy cars to explore the big ideas and advances - in aviation, medicine and warfare - from the last century. Cars still featured heavily: soon enough we found May pootling very slowly down a leafy avenue in Chiswick, west London, driving a replica Lunar Rover, of the kind the Americans made to fulfil all their driving needs while visiting the moon. (Only four of the space buggies were made by NASA in the 1970s; at $38 million (€27.5 million), they were the most expensive fleet cars ever built.) And he evidently felt quite at home rattling along like Mr Toad in an early Model T Ford. What got May really excited, though, was rockets. Well, he did want to be an astronaut when he was six, bless him. He joined in a bit of joyous blasting off with a group of amateur rocketeers, shouting "3-2-1-initiate!", and firing miniature plastic liquid-fuel missiles into the air.
Yes, it's a thoroughly blokish programme - a bit "Top Gear: Rocket Special" - and most dads are sure to love it. But May doesn't make you long to custard-pie him in the way that his Top Gear stable-mate Jeremy Clarkson does. An affable chap, he's softer round the edges, and while he too wears the ubiquitous leather jacket, he's usually got a cosy chunky-knit Aran jumper underneath, which makes him more avuncular, less preening. Curiously, for a man's man, May has also got the shoulder-length, pepper-and-salt hair of a horsey matron of 63. He could probably do with a bit of advice from the image-conscious young sorcerees.
BUT GIVE US James May, with his rockets and funny hair, ahead of yet more emotionally-tortuous US drama. We're now on episode five of Brothers and Sisters, the new show from the producers of Alias and The West Wing, featuring an all-star cast, including Sally Field, Rachel Griffiths and Calista Flockhart. Set in Los Angeles, the drama is centred on the multi-generational, Irish-Jewish Walker family. It is, we are told, "about love, loss and living in a modern age". There was a moment in Wednesday night's episode that summed up much that is ridiculous in these dramas. It occurred when Calista Flockhart's character Kitty (a right-wing TV pundit - if you think that makes her sound tough and hawkish, you've clearly forgotten Flockhart's propensity to work the soulful "puppy-dog eyes and pouting" look) came into her mother's bedroom for a bit of comfort. Man troubles, you see. Worried about her relationship with hedge-fund manager Jonathan, she asked her mother, "Do you really think I don't love him?" Now that's a poser for Mom to untangle.
Can we stand any more of this obsessively analytical angst, so typical of American drama? As for the music, it's scored to within an inch of its life: practically a character in its own right, constantly intruding to point up every joky moment, every poignant moment, every revelatory moment with a jolly or mournful little tootle, as appropriate. Just in case we couldn't work out the over-wrought dialogue for ourselves, you know.
IF YOU PREFER something as down-home and earthy as coddle, you'll be glad to see the return of the animated short Auld Ones to RTÉ2. The "popular octogenarian comedy duo" Bernie and Mary have returned to our screens with bus-stop observations on everything from broadband to organised crime among the over-70s. This really is comedy from another era, from the days when the loony musings of hatchet-faced crones was thought to be the last word in humour. Still, at five minutes (10 if it's a double bill), Auld Ones has the merit of being mercifully short. Brothers and Sisters watchers have to put up with Flockhart's trembling lower lip for a whole hour: much worse.
Hilary Fannin is on leave