TVReview: 'DNA defines and empowers life on earth" - this was the winning argument proposed by a real-life barrister to a real-life judge in a hypothetical case that pushed (or blurred) the boundaries of TV drama.
Born With Two Mothers (Channel 4 doesn't mess around with its titles) concerned the case of a black couple and a white couple who attend the same IVF clinic on the same day. Somehow their respective embryos are mixed up and the black couple's embryo is planted into the white woman's womb, resulting in pregnancy; meanwhile, the black woman, who has received the white couple's embryo, miscarries.
This conjectural situation was populated by real-life professionals - doctors, lawyers, psychiatrists - who interacted with the couples, the Mayfields and the Bridges, played by actors. The "script" was largely improvised and the outcome as to which couple should parent the child, Joe, was decided not by a scriptwriter but by a judge in a family court.
Issues of infertility, IVF and surrogacy are emotionally charged and the actors in this extended role-play were obviously moved by the plight of their characters. There were a lot of tears, and the sheer willingness to enter into the lives of the central characters - especially by Lesley Sharp and Sophie Okonedo, who played the two mothers - led to compelling performances. In the end the judge gave custody to the biological parents, and the white couple who had birthed Joe and cared for him for the first 10 months of his life had to relinquish him.
This was an intelligently realised idea, which skilfully dealt with important issues such as the needs of a black child in a white family, but the problem with dramatising a gynaecological myth - apparently based on a hybrid of various cases - in such a realistic way is that it somehow feels like it has actually happened. Born With Two Mothers will not increase the confidence of any couple facing IVF, and there's a degree of discomfort about witnessing a heart-rending quasi-exposé of something that is unlikely, in reality, to become a major issue.
YOUR STARTER FOR five: if Bono hadn't jumped off the stage during the Live Aid concert in 1985, would Temple Bar still be a bus station? Time up. Chain Reactions, a new six-part documentary series which examines the links between the people and events that have shaped and changed Irish society over the last 25 years, kicked off with the high-school rock'n'roll band graduating on the world stage and ended with Riverdance conquering China. Despite an appallingly clunky narration, delivered by Simon Delaney with the sangfroid of a puppy with a toilet roll ("Ireland was always cold, but was it about to become cool?"), the opening programme was an interesting trawl through our burgeoning music and film industry.
That said, circumnavigation of the hyperbole was essential - especially to be avoided were rose-tinted memories of "the baptismal font of the Dockers Bar", where apparently Dublin's intellectual elite and the average journo on the street "drank from the same cup". Eek.
There were bleak reminders from the archive of the dreary and doleful Dublin of the late 1970s and early 1980s, where you could go grey waiting for a cappuccino or a breast implant. From this "desolation and isolation" to the Oscar nominations of Fricker, Day-Lewis, Sheridan and Jordan, we were brought on an entertaining canter through the ensuing decades. A prescient Louis Walsh, bemoaning the demise of the showband era and the "end of heaving BO", was apparently told to get back in his box when he said boybands were the missing link in Irish music. However, despite some notable costume faux-pas - remember Boyzone's dungarees on the Late Late Show? - Walsh was proved right. Boyzone, we were told, outsold Take That and Westlife outsold Boyzone.
Confidence, apparently, was the key to our success; we have now, according to the assembled pundits, collectively gotten over our inferiority complex, so, unless we picked up something unpleasant drinking out of the same glass in the Dockers, we should be all right, no? The tight-lipped warning wasn't far behind: "We are getting too cocky"; "Cocky is what other people were, we were never cocky"; skint, miserable, unemployed, flat-chested and windswept maybe, sitting on our boyfriend's knee listening to Radio Luxembourg with a telephone book and a double gusset between us, and eternal damnation, absolutely - but cocky? Never cocky. God forbid.
Chain Reactions is certainly worth a watch. The question, though, of why to hang this potentially interesting series - which will over the next five weeks examine sport, politics, organised crime, the Catholic Church and sexual censorship - on such a tenuous premise as a chain reaction, when nothing in the cultural or socio-political life of a bite-sized country can exist in isolation anyway, remains unanswered.
"MEET FI-FI the wonder boa," said fat "liberationist" and platinum-haired guru Marilyn Wann, as she flicked a shocking pink feather boa over her substantial décolletage. Wann, "confidence coach" and author of Fat! So?, believes that people can be fat and happy. "Life," she asserted, "is too short for celery sticks and self-hatred." Wann, blossoming with bon-mots and party games, was on Mexico's Caribbean coast at the world's first fat-friendly holiday resort, Freedom Paradise.
Welcome to Fatland brought five obese Britons on holiday to the resort, which offered them the freedom to partake in activities such as swimming and snorkelling without scrutiny from skinny onlookers (albeit that they travelled with a camera crew). But there's no such thing as a free lunch - the participants also had to work with Wann on being fat and happy.
Steven, Mel, Wayne, Helen and Mandy's collective weight could flatten a tribe of Aztecs; their combined grace and intelligence, however, changed what was essentially a pseudo-sensitive documentary, splitting at the seams with Schadenfreude, into a salient lesson in self-respect which punctured their verbose and patronising liberationist leader in the process.
"Welcome to fat liberation," screeched Wann as she decorated her students with swathes of body-paint and then stood them on the "yay scales", which compliment rather than weigh. "You 'yay' fabulous and sexy, now let's shout the word 'FAT' in a positive way!" With the stunning coastline behind them, and a glistening pool shaded by palm trees beckoning, one wondered at the cruelty of imposing this eccentric American ("how about some synchronised swimming?") on the five Britons, of whom one had never been on holiday before, one was a virgin about to have a body massage and one just needed a break, having split up with his long-term partner - all intelligent, overweight human beings rather than psychologically distressed Teletubbies.
"Flirting workshop," yelled Wann.
By the end of the week, Wann, whose methodology proved as disingenuous as her weighing scales, and who refused to "take in negativity", was packing up her fun suitcase and extravagant sunglasses feeling "tired, giddy, exhilarated and despondent". The participants gratefully collapsed on the reinforced loungers and generously proportioned beds.
SINEWY GARY RHODES and Jean-Christophe Novelli - the most Gallic French chef in the history of French cheffery - have been going at it cleaver-and-crusher all week. Hell's Kitchen is back - sans Gordon Ramsay. The 10 contestants have been divided into two teams of wannabe chefs, all vying for a wodge of cash with which to open their own restaurant. Also present are a continuous parade of celebrities, who travel to a warehouse-turned-temporary-restaurant to be filmed eating the creations of the amateur chefs who have toiled, bled, sweated and wept to get something edible on the plate.
With extravagant waiting times between courses, as the celebrity chefs berated the wannabes, flinging over-cooked salmon and ladles around the kitchen while singing invective at them ("repeat after me: I am stupid"), many of the hungry celebs resorted to whacking into the Chablis. There was as much fun to be had in watching the celebs in Jimmy Choo heels falling off their chairs as there was in observing the contestants pouring beef sauce over the veggie-burgers. With Angus Deayton at his most laconic ("the closest he'll get to a Michelin is being run over by one"), Hell's Kitchen is more fun than it should be.
