Sex and The City C4
Better Sex C4
Jungle Janes C4
Challenger: Go For Launch BBC2
Restaurants From Hell ITV
Changing Rooms BBC1
If a man is a bad kisser, is he necessarily bad everywhere else? If a woman lights up a post-prandial snout and he says: 'I don't want to be a jerk, but I can't date a smoker', is this indeed instant and irrefutable proof of a man's jerkiness? If a woman waits too long to sleep with him, does she run the risk of 'missing the window and becoming good friends'? If a man shouts out: 'You whore!' at the moment of orgasm, should a woman take it in her stride or take up tapestry? And if a woman is still serial-dating in her thirties, is it sensible to wonder 'how many men are too many men?' No doubt about it, Sex and The City never fights shy of tackling the Big Stuff.
You think I'm joking? Far from it. Despite the vast, rent-controlled Upper East Side apartments and the expensive heels, sometimes Sex and The City looks like a dirty-realist document strand. I doubt there's an urban single woman in the land who hasn't listened to Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie Bradshaw without wincing at least once an episode. And, most rarely in the context of American comedy drama, the show never succumbs to schmaltz.
When a man runs Carrie a candlelit bubble-bath, she says: 'Wow, it looks like a Danielle Steele novel in here', which is as it should be, because men who think cheap, quasi-romantic, Cosmo , girlish courtship rituals are the fastest way into a adult woman's bed deserve everything they won't get. Then again, it may just be because last week was such a profoundly dire seven days for TV drama - indeed, the worst I can remember outside of August - that Sex and the City looked so damn good.
More sex in C4's Better Sex, in which we followed Relate's psycho-sexual counsellors and their clients. In a training session for would-be therapists, the group sat down to watch a video featuring a pair of 1970's Californian Joy-of-Socks-and-Sandals types getting it on to a soundtrack of such overwrought cheesiness that it could have been a very early work by TV's King of Strings, W.G. Snuffy Walden.
Afterwards, invited to discuss their reactions, the answer to the question: 'So, what sort of person wants to become a sex therapist anyway?' turned out to be the sort of middle-aged women who kick off their critique by saying: 'Normally when you watch a pornographic film...' Clearly, I must stay in more.
But the heart of the story lay, as it were, with Petula and Chris from Cardiff: 34 years of happy marriage and a clutch of grown-up kids, when, bam!, thanks to press coverage about abuse in children's homes, Petula was reminded of her own long-suppressed memories of childhood sexual abuse and decided she couldn't stand her husband making love to her ever again.
Petula's courage in, first, addressing this issue, then going to Relate and, finally, allowing herself to be filmed was, clearly, above and beyond, but it made for fine, optimistic television. I didn't warm to Gareth, the couple's counsellor - too young, too male, not much of a listener and with far too much Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen hair - but his prescription ('sensate-focus' - basically a massage without hidden extras) seemed to work ('It's like we've started courting again!' admitted Chris, blushingly).
Relate may be justifiably proud of the fact that 20 per cent of clients rekindle their sex lives by the end of their treatment, even if the best way to ensure great sex appears to be to have no sex at all. Can't see this one working for Carrie Bradshaw and friends.
Week Two in Borneo and, for the Jungle Janes, the desire for sex is probably somewhere just above the desire to wear stilettos. Though the narrative is exhaustingly riveting (every time the women took a break and reached for a fag, I'd find myself doing the same), visually this series sucks: Borneo looks like a very unimaginatively designed set for a cheap remake of Tenko , so even when the women complained about one site for a camp being 'too jungly' (cue fits of giggles), we couldn't see how it was any junglier than the jungle they had just heroically negotiated. Still, I'm more than happy to take their word for it.
Though this exercise looks hellish, the women are all shaping up to be a bunch of Lara Crofts, though without the fun of slaying grunting thugs and retrieving a series of fluorescent, wiggly, computer-generated treasures en route . They also take it in turns to cry against the manly chest of their expedition leader, Major Ken Hames (Army, Retd), but who can blame them when Major Ken comes on like a cross between Castaway Ben Fogle and a Relate counsellor? 'Tonight the stars will be shining, the moon will be out and all will be well.' Cut to night-shot of the women sheltering under plastic sheets in the torrential rain.
Unsurprisingly, it's the emotional journeys that makes Jungle Janes such compulsive viewing. All have their coping mechanisms, from Catholicism ('Now I know how Jesus felt carrying the cross') to HRT to near-constant laughter ('If we can keep laughing, especially at ourselves, then we can't go far wrong').
I'm also in awe because I know I'd last a day, at best. None of these women is looking for validation from a man, but it can't hurt that Major Ken is fulsome in his praise of their efforts: 'The UK Special Forces come to Borneo to sort the wheat from the chaff.' Happily, all the women appear to have chaff allergies.
Christa McAuliffe, another envelope-pusher who would have seen the Borneo jungle as a walk in the park, was the star of the doomed Challenger space shuttle mission, but it's easy to forget there was a whole crew whose names aren't as easily recalled. Finally, 15 years after the event we got to find out precisely how doomed the ship was in the excellent Challenger: Go For Launch.
One Nasa employee returned home to his wife and met her 'Nice day at the office, dear?' inquiry with a despairing: 'They're going to launch tomorrow and kill the astronauts, but other than that it was a great day.' Yes, that's how doomed it was. Like the Titanic, a series of cost-cutting cock-ups and management blunders pretty much ensured the shuttle would fail. I'd always consoled myself with the thought that, when it came, the end probably came pretty fast, but no: apparently, the astronauts may have been conscious as the explosion of half-a-million gallons of liquid oxygen and hydrogen propelled them towards the sea at 200mph. Which makes it all the more extraordinary that Barbara, McAuliffe's understudy in the programme gave up teaching and carried on training, qualifying as an astronaut in 1999. She is now preparing to fly shuttles herself and I doubt she loses much sleep over men who are bad kissers.
Bravery is, of course, relative. For Barbara and the Jungle Janes it's about digging deep to discover one's inner Right Stuff, while for the rest of us it might be surviving one of the Restaurants From Hell. Here, I was delighted to see a hideous Aberdeen Angus Steak House - venue for the worst British restaurant meal I have ever eaten (beaten only by something unspeakable I once consumed in Soviet Russia) - being exposed as the House of Vermin Droppings and Bad Sewerage Smells.
It is a mystery how they stay in business but, in the meantime, I guess even a little Health and Safety prosecution helps to undermine a company that still turns over £20 million a year. With its litany of e-coli 0517, salmonella, deep-fried lizards and quarter pounders with mould, I'd have said Restaurants From Hell was the most blackly comedic programme of the week, until I saw Changing Rooms.
Confronted by a demanding, design-conscious bunch of 'performance artists', the designer's (slip) covers were finally blown. Obviously, there's only room for a handful of stars in the show but, as the camp split in two and Carol Smillie consoled Anna Ryder Richardson ('They're wearing me down'; 'Yeah, I feel a bit sorry for you'), it was clear that the stars must never be the contestants - much less those who might know their Barratt from their Bauhaus or recognise that wacky installations made from polystyrene look 's--t'.
It was very funny TV but for all the wrong reasons - so hurry up, Laurence and Linda, let's get busy with those stencils! Surely, for Changing Rooms , the writing's on the wall.
