TV ReviewMental equilibrium is hard won. Having regained mine I am not going to put yours at risk by mentioning The X Factor, the latest offering of ritualised humiliation that used to be called a talent show.
Never. You are free to read without fear of a sudden gust of Wind Beneath My Wings hitting you at a whopping high D before plummeting to middle C. One thing - and I swear this will be the last - if you are considering putting yourself forward as a contestant for this X-rated Opportunity Knocks, take my advice: think image, forget about singing, just scale your teeth and stuff your crotch, the camera is cruel.
She's Gone (let's not beat around the bush with the title), a two-hour drama with Ray Winstone, seemed like a cheerier prospect. Winstone is Harry Sands, a businessman whose teenage daughter is in Istanbul, where she is supposedly working for a children's charity. When she disappears, Harry goes to find her. In a beautifully shot, atmospheric production we follow Harry around a wintry Istanbul, from the offices of the blasé British consulate to the East/West Club, the Turkish lap-dancing club where his daughter was employed. Istanbul - tense, volatile and at the centre of East/West conflict - becomes a perfect metaphor for what turns out to be Harry's journey of self-discovery.
"You came to find your daughter and you find someone else instead," says the Turkish policeman who assists and resists Harry in his search. Harry's first discovery is that his daughter lives with her lesbian lover and that her trip was not to gain a little work experience before college but a concerted effort to get away from her over-protective father.
Winstone's portrayal of Harry as a man convinced that some bloody foreigner must be to blame for his daughter's disappearance is compelling. That his little girl has chosen to disappear, has chosen to leave him "at the edge of the wood and walk on alone", is unthinkable to him. But she has. She has left her lover and her father and chosen to live among Turkey's oppressed Kurdish community.
When Harry does find her, he also finds his own certainties shattered, his own prejudices blown apart.
Harry's obsessive search, his expectation that he will be prioritised, his belief in procedure and assumption of safety are shown up for the delusions they are, when set against the reality of the carnage caused by the Istanbul bombings. To the policeman who is dealing with an increasingly unpredictable and vulnerable city, Harry's search is a trivial domestic issue. Leaning against a white wall in the police station, listening to the sirens rushing the dead to hospitals, he points out that although it is Western targets, international hotels, embassies, that are bombed, "it is our people, Turkish people, who die. What is happening to our world?" In this complex, moving drama, this is the question we are left with.
It was a question answered moments later by an exhausted-looking Tony Blair, commenting on Sunday's car bombs in Iraq on the BBC news, saying we now have nothing less than a new conflict. Well, fiddle-di-dee, Tony, how did that happen?
Okay. You've twisted my arm. For those of you who have never endured an hour of The X Factor, let me give you some pass notes:
I Fifty thousand people (I'm not joking) volunteer to be held in hotel function rooms around Britain and Ireland, where they practise the Mexican wave until their number is called.
2 They are ushered into another room by a preternaturally blonde, emotionally intact presenter, where they sing a bar or two of a BIG song. (I suspect preternaturally blonde presenters are hatched in the UTV canteen, the bit where they keep the food warm. 3 The contestants (some simultaneously singing and cartwheeling) are insulted by Simon Cowell, propositioned by Sharon Osbourne and gaped at by a perpetually astonished-looking Louis Walsh before being thrown out again. (They are the lucky ones; some, for reasons that will remain a mystery long after transubstantiation, get to stay and repeat the procedure in round two.)
4 The jettisoned ones get to cry and hug Blonde One, who now has so many new best friends she can't afford Christmas. Okay?
This goes on for a long time while we, the viewers, wonder how the poor contestant with the John Lennon glasses, Status Quo hair and the terrible, terrible optimism of the truly lost can bear to get out of bed in the morning. And that's before he sang a note.
The X Factor visited Dublin and Leeds last week. In Dublin, Louis Walsh said yes to all the hopefuls and a priest blessed a competing boyband in the hotel toilet. Later, in Leeds, contestants - one of whom had just lost her appendix (and I mean just), one whose new husband had expected to be honeymooning with her in Barbados, and another whose girlfriend was in labour (the act, not the party) - competed for a second-round place with identical twins who looked like two Bet Lynches and sounded like my washing machine.
AS PARADES OF horror go, however it had nothing on Dispatches: The Dirty Meat Scandal. If this roll-call of victual sin didn't catapult you into vegetarianism, nothing will.
Dispatches sent a reporter undercover to investigate how meat unfit for human consumption ends up as a nasty secret in your butcher's shop or hiding under the korma sauce in the local takeaway.
The programme followed Colin Patterson, a meat supplier to dozens of butchers in east London. In one day he sold 15 tonnes of lamb slaughtered and processed in an unlicensed abattoir. The illegal carcasses in the back of his van included "smokies", sheep that had been slaughtered then blow-torched, their fleeces producing a smoky barbecued flavour. Bits of wool still visible on the sheep were home to bacteria, parasites and tapeworm eggs.
But that was the least of the problems. Inside the cavity of one poor emaciated sheep, a food safety inspector found pleurisy-infected lung tissue and heart muscle still clinging to the thorax. In another, an ulcerated liver was still attached. The gloved expert then lanced an abscess on yet another carcass. Believe me, you don't want to know what emerged.
Industry insiders stressed the importance of food standards, how the industry had cleaned up its act, how consumer confidence was vital. It was crucial, they said, to train meat-industry people to prevent potentially hazardous cross-contamination whereby faeces and stomach contents come into contact with the meat.
Then they introduced us to Alfred Carter, a former recipient of the freedom of the city of London for his work during the BSE crisis, who was doctoring the incorrect examination papers of potential meat-industry employees and selling pass certificates. He was also swindling government grants designed to assist the industry. He blatantly advised an undercover reporter posing as a meat supplier to keep his dirty meat alongside his registered meat and to get it out of the factory and into the shops as fast as he could in case an inspector called. Carter, who is currently under investigation, told the programme he had nothing to say. Confident now? Excuse me while I reach for the lentils.
DOUBTLESS, THE LENTILS, along with anything other than burgers, chips and cola, would have ended up along with the courgettes and olives being spat on to the floor by blindfolded children in Tonight With Trevor McDonald, in which former Hell's Kitchen chef Angela Hartnett took on six recalcitrant teenagers and their vicious eating habits. A band of Rottweilers would have been infinitely preferable.
The phrase "teenage obesity" is now a familiar one. The programme went behind the phrase to examine the eating habits of the assembled junk-food junkies. One day in the eating diary of Luke, a 15-year-old who weighed 18 and a half stone, included two sausage sandwiches, two sausage rolls, a burger, a chocolate bar, crisps, chips, chicken tikka masala, pilau rice, naan bread, three onion bhajis and two samosas, all washed down with three pints of lime soda. Other teens who were not so obviously overweight were indanger of developing scurvy and diabetes, so lacking in fruit and vegetables were their diets.
Childhood obesity, we were told, has trebled in a generation. And, as Hartnett helpfully pointed out to the non-obese in the group, in 10 years the rest of them wouldn't be able to run upstairs to put their teeth in.
The programme clearly made an effort to recruit children from across the social spectrum: all of them, from Katie in Surrey to Jody in Essex, gagged at the sight of a real fish - whoops, we thought they swam about in the ocean covered in batter . . .
The sad fact is that an epidemic of childhood obesity will see children dying before their parents. "Do you realise that?" the programme's nutritionist asked Luke's mother. Yeah, she said, it means he won't be around to look after me. Look after you, said Luke, you'll be going into a home! They have four days to change the habits of a lifetime. Compulsive.
Simon Cowell, meanwhile, sinking into the leather upholstery of his shiny I'm-a-very-rich-man-now car, said he wasn't quite sure what the X factor was, but he'll know it when he sees it.
If you see it first, run.
Hilary Fannin is a playwright
Shane Hegarty is on leave
tvreview@irish-times.ie