Jungle Trip - Channel 4, Monday
Cutting Edge: Bus Pass Bandits - Channel 4, Tuesday
Prime Time - RTE 1, Wednesday
The Ad Factor - BBC 2, Tuesday
Heroes Of Comedy - Channel 4, Sunday
Plants talk to Piers Gibbon. The actor, voice-over artist and amateur botanist hears them, but he says he doesn't understand their language. His area of expertise is hallucinogenic plants, which makes things a little clearer. He developed his interest in botany at university, which makes things a lot clearer.
He might not know their language, but he understood enough when the plants told him to find a documentary team to bring him to Peru to track down the ayahuasca, a plant that offers a way to the spirits in a way a bottle of spirits can't.
It's also a bit of shrubbery yet to be brought to Kew Gardens, the London Mecca of exotic plants, which meant it was his chance to win some kudos from the botany community - and get stoned in the process. For the makers of Jungle Trip it also offered the chance to drop some subliminal shamanic chanting into the shots of the very wimpy, very English, very pale Gibbon in Kew's manicured surroundings. It would go all Apocalypse Now at any minute, you knew. He'd be stripped naked, covered in paint and hacking his way through the jungle before you could say Heart Of Darkness. But first he needed to fly to Peru and find a shaman, a wise man to guide him in the ways of the spirit world. He found one. His name was Alan.
"It's all about purging," said Alan the shaman, and by God he was right. Every time anybody drank tea made from the plant, it led to projectile vomiting of the kind that got The Exorcist banned. That was followed by the beating of stinging nettles all over the body. Then there was an injection of tobacco juice up the nostrils, before a bit more vomiting.
"It just didn't feel sacred. It felt a bit silly," admitted Gibbon. "Again, it's all about purging," said Alan the shaman. Enough with the purging.
Jungle Trip was hilarious television, as nice, middle-class Gibbon went deeper into the jungle in search of the plant and the spirits - and met more and more people who were happy to help him vomit, lead him up some hallucinatory path, then mock him.
"It'll be interesting to see how he reacts to a talking candlestick," smirked one. The frog poison burned into his skin was particularly impressive, the rampant diarrhoea that followed less so.
Gibbon eventually found someone willing to give him the ayahuasca treatment in full, and went into self-analysis about how he was looking for himself, the missing pieces of his life, the darkness that lies within, and that perhaps he would find it in the jungle. How original. He only broke off to ramble on about the wood spirits of his dreams.
"This is acting," said his guide.
"He's a spoiled brat," said the local sorcerer.
After the cameras left, Gibbon stayed in Peru for 30 days' intensive shamanic study under the influence of ayahuasca. A caption at the end of the programme told us that, when he got home, he hadn't filled in the right forms, so customs destroyed his prized plant. When I read that, the laughter spirits took hold of me and didn't let go until I had fallen out of my chair.
Gibbon wouldn't approve of Bunty McSkimming. McSkimming was a bluerinsed, pension-drawing Sunday-school teacher, girl-guide leader and, one would assume, the sensible choice when she volunteered to take over as treasurer of Glasgow Tree Lovers' Society.
These tree lovers are not the sort Gibbon would find projectile vomiting and rolling around in nettles in the middle of the jungle. They are generally women of a certain age, with dentures gleaming like the ivories on a Steinway and hair so well set a hurricane couldn't budge it.
One tree lover claimed she knew McSkimming was a bit shifty as soon as she saw her. "She had a hat!" she exclaimed, her eyes rolling to heaven, or perhaps to check her perm was sitting firm.
Glasgow Tree Lovers' Society was doing quite well until McSkimming took the helm, as Cutting Edge: Bus Pass Bandits explained. At that point, the organisation had £84,000 in the bank. By the end of her first year minding the money, it had £75,000. By the end of the second it had £17. Bunty McSkimming was skimmin'.
If hardly cutting edge, Bus Pass Bandits was an entertaining addition to television's new-found obsession with OAPs, and delivered a wrinkly rogue's gallery of smugglers, cheque-book fraudsters and con artists. Most, like McSkimming, got away with fines and community service or a light sentence.
Sid Chaney, a 71-year-old, was even trying to get caught, claiming that he robbed financial institutions only because they'd been robbing him for years. He did it by opening accounts in the names of his dead pets. Skeet the budgie and pals stole £117,000.
At 83, "Bang Bang" Charlie Cowden was a little more tired than he used to be, but having racked up an impressive 579 convictions for fraud and bank robbery, he probably deserved a rest. He took to fraud once five heart attacks forced him to retire from hold-ups. "Have you ever had a proper job?" the film makers asked him, at which point he laughed so much it seemed number six was imminent.
On Wednesday, RTE broke off what seemed to be turning into an unofficial Des O'Malley week to bring us Afghanistan: A Hostage Nation, Mark Little's Prime Time report. This kind of thing is often buried under the smugness of reporters who continually point out how they've had to film in secret.
It all seemed a bit ominous when Little began by pointing out how they'd had to film in secret. There's a smarm to Little that seemed appropriate when he was based in Washington, but doesn't look quite right when he's walking down the dusty street of a medieval hellhole in his best chinos, nice shirt and freshly pressed hair, like the Man from Del Monte.
It turned out to be an unfair prejudice, because Afghanistan: A Hostage Nation was a rounded, well-researched report that veered away from cameras hidden in bags. Instead, it set out to explain the recent history of the country. The portal where the Buddha statues stood until recently, when they were blown up, the women covered from head to toe and barred from education, the gun-toting locals: all confirmed the image of a country under extreme religious rule.
But Little visited Jalozai, a huge refugee camp in the Pakistani border city of Peshawar, and spoke with victims of a famine described by the UN as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today.
The weasel words of the man from the US department of state, who denied his country had helped to create the ruling Taliban, was an illustration of another place where the larger powers lit the fuse, then tippy-toed away as soon as the whole thing went up.
Little toured one of the biggest employers in Kabul, the Afghan capital: the prosthetic-limb hospital that deals with the aftermath of a country seeded with mines. The hospital is funded by Western aid. The mines, you won't be surprised to hear, are bought from Western countries.
There was cultural control of another kind in The Ad Factor, which looked at the campaign to sell Guinness to the Irish. Obviously, it requires a London agency to do this. Dean, an American, Andrew, a guy with an accent so mixed his first language may be Esperanto, and the creative team flew to Ireland to find inspiration for a campaign based on the hurling championship. They visited Croke Park, gingerly sipped Guinness in a Dublin pub, then went back to London to come up with a campaign.
They talked about "the whole kind of Irish displaced thing". They deconstructed "the passion of the country". They wondered: "what happens if some sort of fascist regime takes over which makes people stop supporting their teams?" They decided: "it needs to be much more guerrilla."
Here's a thought. Why not just pull up on the side of the road in Tipperary, Kilkenny, Cork or anywhere in Ireland and ask the first people you come across what hurling means here. It's a whole kind of Irish displaced thing, though, so you might not get it.
The final word this week goes to Heroes of Comedy's look back at the mindboggling brilliance of The Goon Show. The pressure drove Spike Milligan mad, of course, but what madness. "I'd like to introduce you to Mr Harry Secombe," he once announced. "The world's tallest dwarf."
tvreview@irish-times.ie
