Television

Gawping at babes

James Delingpole

0 ne of the disadvantages of having to write your television column a week before the programmes actually come out is that you can never be quite sure what will be worth watching until it's too late.

After my last column, I kicked myself for having wasted space on Carlton's clunky Heat of the Sun when I could have done Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends. And this week, I found myself lumbered with two preview tapes of programmes which sound- ed promising but which turned out to be almost unreviewable.

The first of these was Dazzled (BBC 1, Monday), an Inside Story which offered a behind-the-scenes look at the modelling world with, inter alia, Kate Moss and Sophie Dahl. Mainly, though, it was a pre- tentiously shot, lazily put-together plug for Richard Branson's model agency, with a ludicrously portentous voice-over platitu- dinising about the terrible price these ingenues have to pay for their brief period of fame and fortune. It was a great excuse to gawp at lots of gorgeous babes. I just wish the programme had been honest enough to admit that that was the point of the exercise.

I notice you're leading a double life - that will be extra.' The other programme was Painted Babes (BBC 2, 9 p.m.), Jane Treays's agonisingly watchable documentary about Brooke and Asia, the skull-faced five-year-olds forced by their parents to dress up as women ten times their age and compete against one another in grotesque, quasi-paedophilic beauty contests in the Deep South.

Fantastic, reach-for-the-sickbag, gosh- aren't-the-Americans-weird? stuff, I'm sure, but I think that's what I said last time I reviewed it. Yes, despite the Radio Times's misleading claim that it would pre- sent a full update of the original documen- tary, it was actually just a repeat.

Anyway, because it was the final edition of BBC 2's Under the Sun, it does at least give me a chance to say how utterly bril- liant the series has been. One of the best episodes was last week's about the sweet- natured inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha, that doughty, fanatically loyal colonial out- post ,stranded in the South Atlantic, 2,000 miles west of Cape Town.

Despite their almost prelapsarian inno- cence, their evident friendliness and good- ness, their rude health and sparse but magnificent surroundings, I felt rather sorry for the 300 islanders. Especially for the handful of pretty teenage girls whose choice of potential mates seemed to be lim- ited to swarthy old fishermen with bad teeth and jutting jaws.

Had I been younger and less married, I might yet have been tempted to take the next crayfish boat out there and relieve the girls' plight. But not once I'd learned that the island's shop was replenished only once a year by a cargo ship. It quite clearly stocked none of the essentials, such as Budvar, balsamic vinegar, green Pringles crisps or Tuscan extra virgin. Without them, I doubt I'd last more than a fort- night.

Still, the standard Cunhaian fare of fish and potatoes is an improvement on the diet of Uganda's Karamajong people, who were featured in the series' star episode, A Gun for Sale, Being cattle-herding folk they sur- vive mainly on cow's milk and blood, sup- plemented with whatever meat they can scavenge. But even they have their stan- dards. One tribesman, whom we'd seen earlier smearing his face with the half- digested stomach contents of a sacrificial bull and gnawing its raw, blood entrails, was presented with a dish of roast baboon. `Urrgh,' he protested, `I'm not eating that!'

This is one of the joys of Under the Sun. Instead of simply titillating you with the strange antics of sundry savage, weird or eccentric races, it allows you to get to know them as real people and to appreciate how surprisingly much you have in common with them: I won't eat budget supermarket mince or battery chicken; your typical Karamajong draws the line at baboon. See? Brothers under the skin, almost.

Louis Theroux (son of Paul) occasionally achieved something similar in his Weird Weekends series. The episode about the `gee! ain't we wacky?' alien hunters may have dragged on a bit, but the ones in which Theroux masqueraded as a prospec- tive hard-core porn star and hung out with paranoid, conspiracy-theorising survivalists were both funny and enlightening.

Because of his perpetually faux-naif air, it's often difficult to tell when Theroux is taking the mickey and when he's being sin- cere. I'm not sure that even he knows half the time, which can make him rather unset- tling company. But his ironic mask does enable him to ask the sort of questions which would get more straightforward pre- senters killed.

On discovering, for example, that a burly, virulently homophobic, neo-Nazi had a soft spot for Are You Being Served?, Ther- oux gamely enquired what the man thought of camp Mr Humphries. As the neo-Nazi writhed with disgust, Theroux tried coaxing him to say 'I'm free' in a high-pitched voice. 'I'm not free!' snarled the man. `You're not free?' said Theroux. 'But five minutes ago, you were telling me how free you were.'

Oh. And here's another disadvantage of ordering up the wrong preview tapes. You can't think of a decent pay-off.