TV Review: One in every two marriages in the US ends in divorce. Britain is not far behind, with irreconcilable differences leading to the dissolution of 40 per cent of all unions. Welcome to One Week To Save Your Marriage, fresh hell from the inferno of reality TV.
This nuptial makeover is exactly what it says on the tin, only a lot less durable. US "divorce-buster" Michelle Wiener-Davis is on "a personal mission to save UK marriages", and her first challenge was the Jacksons: Marianne, a doctor, and her husband Michael, a teacher.
Marianne and Michael's divorce papers were practically in the post. Married for 12 years, they had three children aged under 10, a trough of acrimony and a garden shed. Having agreed to be filmed for seven days, the Jacksons waved goodbye to their children, who were replaced by cameras. Wiener-Davis moved into the garden shed with a bank of television monitors and a listening device, and the countdown began.
With Michael's umbilical attachment to eBay on the laptop and Marianne's abhorrence of wet towels or her husband in, on or near the marital bed (they hadn't had sex for five years), coupled with endless bickering about scratch-marks on the table or Michael's desperately eclectic dress sense, the prospect of seeing these two reconciled was as likely as the Dalai Lama releasing a line-dancing video.
Television therapy is never a barrel of laughs, but the minutiae of the Jacksons' lives were profoundly depressing: Marianne sleeping stiff as a corpse under her yellow duvet, hostile to the empty space beside her, Michael having been exiled to the couch yet again, desultorily licking his yogurt spoon, late-night TV glowing in the corner.
After a week of role play led by Wiener-Davis, which included screaming into the wind, a visit to a Brighton sex shop, and being sent to bed with a sex-education video and a bottle of Bolly, the couple seemed to be getting closer, but their well-rehearsed, deadeningly mundane patter of accusation and counter-accusation was never far from the surface.
"The lower echelons of an average marriage," as Marianne, at her most caustic and profound, described her relationship, is not a pleasant place to visit. Surprisingly, jaw-droppingly actually, the Jacksons have decided to make a go of it; the dogs of divorce have been called off for now. With even the most casual attention, though, you can still hear them bay.
APHRODITE, WE WERE told by Kim Cattrall (formerly Samantha in Sex and the City), as she pranced along the 26-foot-long chalk phallus of the Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset, had no interest in preserving monogamy. When the love goddess emerged from the waves, a mortgage and a canteen of cutlery were the last things on her mind.
Cattrall's Sexual Intelligence was an epic voyage (undertaken in a tightly belted mac and a pair of stilettos) to places associated with sexuality, a kind of geo-sexual treasure hunt through the ruins of Pompeii, the hills of Britain's West Country and the beaches of Cyprus. (She didn't make it to Ireland, probably thinking a Síle na Gig was an antipodean rock concert.) And despite some very purple narration, some of which was delivered through a mouthful of oyster ("desire is like the sun: it nurtures, it burns"), Cattrall was a seductive guide.
Sexual Intelligence, however, had a voracious appetite; it just didn't know when to stop. Interspersed throughout the programme were words of winsome from a collection of "sexual adventurers": among these "hetero-flexible" pundits were a wholesome lesbian, a couple of straight guys with torsos, a self-satisfied girl with a feather boa and an intellect, and a bisexual female with a busy tongue-stud. And they talked about everything, from genital cosmetic surgery to pet names for their whatsits. Add to this flock of sexual hyperbolites a swarm of sexologists and a murder of authors responsible for such page-turners as The Book of the Penis and The Soul of Sex and you ended up gagging for a bit of chastity.
Among the interesting titbits (sorry) was an explanation of the word "pornography", coined by a German academic who was cataloguing the ruins of Pompeii: "porn" means whore and "graphy" writing. The many decorative and practical phallic symbols in the prematurely consumed city, from door knockers to lanterns, were hidden away in museum vaults until the year 2000 but are now deemed fit for public viewing.
DESPITE ITS TABLOID title, Desperate Housewives, which concluded its first series this week, is really very tame. Bar Susan (Teri Hatcher) draping herself over boyfriend Mike (James Denton) in a mini-kimono and buxom Edie (Nicolette Sheridan) vengefully propositioning the helmeted foreman of her building project, it is almost good cleanish fun. During the series we've had arson, violence, blackmail and murder, and this week's final episodes mopped up the bloody spills and then whistled over their shoulders to us to follow them into the second series.
Movingly, and typically, Bree (Marcia Cross) received the news of her husband's death (speedily engineered by the spooky chemist) while she was polishing the family silver. Lynette (Felicity Huffman) got her marching orders from domesticity, Susan moved in with Mike, and angrily pregnant Gabrielle (Eva Longoria) got all the best lines. "I am not putting a baby seat in my Maserati," she told her husband, who needed her to testify for him after being arrested for beating up yet another gay man he mistakenly suspected of sleeping with her. And, of course, we learned Mary-Alice (Brenda Strong), the celestial narrator's, dark secret (it's too complicated, you'll have to watch the reruns).
Desperate Housewives, having hit the ground running at the start, has mellowed a little too quickly. There is no chance of the producers killing off the Bambi-esque Hatcher: even though the first series ended with Zac holding her at gunpoint, she has negotiated a lucrative contract for series two, and the prospect of more sweet-'n'-kooky antics to come makes this once muscular series less appealing. As Bree said to her dying husband as his potassium levels plummeted: "The best is yet to come." It'd be good to believe it.
THE MOTHER AND father of all reality-TV shows, Big Brother, closed its padded doors on another cache of wannabes this week, an Irish white witch, a hairdresser, an entertainment entrepreneur (what?) and a boy in a sari among them. Pointless, cruel and shockingly dull (the spotty new sheets are more interesting than the inmates/housemates), there will be hours more of this dross before the manipulation ends and Roberto the smoothie Italian or Craig the bitchy stylist walk back out again to instant forgetability. What the contestants are worrying about in the house, however, is whether or not they are "good television", whether or not they are being "real" reality-TV contestants. The mind-boggling tedium of this debate was momentarily relieved when Craig, in mid-diatribe ("this is reality, the emphasis being on the word re-a-lit-y"), shouted "we are all disgusting". You've got my vote, Craig, now please let's not bother with the rest of the series.
IN THE FOOTSTEPS of Fame comes presenter Caroline Morahan and RTE's new reality TV slice, Chance To Dance. Eight young hopefuls have been chosen from among hundreds of dancers to live in a Dublin penthouse-come-studio and work with choreographers Timothy Nobel and Marcos Parker-White for 10 episodes. One contestant will be eliminated each week, and the winner will receive a scholarship to a prestigious dance academy in London and representation from dance agency Pineapple. Unlike Big Brother, where the emphasis is on sitting on your backside and the exercise regime amounts to a bit of back stabbing, this is an energetic and enjoyable contest.
Some of the young hopefuls have been making a living dancing in nightclubs and bars. One tenacious - and very young - woman who took up an offer of club work within days of her baby being born and who attended the open auditions for the series with numerous bras on, having just had breast augmentation, was wry about her timing but happily committed to her art.
Another young man told us of his previous problems with drink and drugs, and high-kicked himself into contention with a vow to make dance his new addiction. Now that is "re-a-lity" and good television.
