Popstars ITV
Adrian Mole, The Cappuccino Years BBC1
Rebel Heart BBC1
Second Sight BBC1
As it's broadcast on Saturdays and tapes are generally unavailable in time for my Friday deadline, not being able to write about Popstars has made for a frustrating three weeks. But thanks to ITV squeezing an extra hour of the show into last Wednesday's schedule and then hastily dispatching me the first of last night's two shows, I've finally got my big break.
By now, Wednesday's 10 finalists - Danny, Jessica, Kevin, Kelli, Kym, Michelle, Myleene, Noel, Suzanne and Tony - have been whittled down by the judging panel - 'Nasty' Nigel (actually a sweetie), Paul and Nikki - to the final five. Even as I write, they are living a sort of Monkees-like existence in a celebrity safe house. If, that is, the tabloids haven't already unearthed them. It's been white-knuckle TV all the way.
Plundering the best 'hey-kids, let's-do-the-show right here!' musical plots, Popstars is A Chorus Line , 42nd Street and Fame, lit by the brutal spotlight of reality TV. The first couple of shows followed nationwide auditions for singers-who-dance and dancers-who-sing, with hilarious emphasis on the death-by karaoke crash-and-burn of numerous profoundly talentless hairbrush-wielding Ricky Martins and showerhead-waving Robbie Williamses. Ah, already I feel nostalgic for Robbie's 'Angels' as interpreted by a selection of potently spotty young men shouting flatly or sharply (sometimes both simultaneously): 'Anthrooit AHWWL she ovARSE Meee ProTEKshun/ Aliddleluvan affekshun/WedderahmrideorRRROONG'.
Though the hopeless boys were invariably funnier than the hopeless girls (mostly mangling S Club 7's 'Reach! for the Staaarrrs!'), you had to admire their collective gall. Last week, though, the laughter gave way to several Man-Sized Kleenex moments. It was horribly tough on the kids who made it into the last 23 and then the last 14 before being told by Nigel Lythgoe that they had 'won the silver medal, not the gold'. Ian, for example, sang much better than Tony, but the singing coach thought that 'Ian would be better off selling me a used car'. So Ian was history and Tony was in.
Meanwhile, Taz enthused to the judges about how much he'd enjoyed the fake press conference as Paul gently interjected 'Taz, mate...' He was out and he looked firstly numb, then desperate.
Happily, all this violence took its toll on the judges too: 'What must they be going through in that other room?' wondered Nikki, snuffling. 'The plan tomorrow is to wear waterproof mascara.' After the charming, gracious Raymond was given the elbow but composed himself sufficiently to shake the judges' hands, they all cried and so did I.
What they were going through in the other room was some pretty intense bonding. After each of the kids emerged with the judges' verdict, the others offered their generous support, so when it came to raw rollercoaster emotions, Popstars was pretty much to Fame what Apocalypse Now is to Caddyshack . But far from putting off any sofa-bound popstar wannabes, I should think the show will only fuel their desire for stardom, however statistically dismal their prospects: after all, every one of Wednesday's boys was a better singer than Ronan Keating, and all of the girls a cuter bunch of belters than the Spice Bints.
For the record, then, after the first of last night's programmes, my Fickle Finger of Fame had picked: Jessica (the girl next door with the 'great personality, very bright, very honest and very sexy-looking'), Kelli ('looks like a model, dances brilliantly, sings really well'), Suzanne ('our only blonde'), Danny (the boy next door: 'such star quality but there's humility there') and Kevin ('what a jawline, and a very strong voice'). Then again, Myleene is deliriously pretty, and Noel does have a certain sweet something...
I could envisage the younger Adrian Mole entering a Popstars audition accidentally while accompanying the lovely Pandora Braithwaite, but despite a promisingly thespian start to her career ('who could forget Pandora's performance as Mary in the school nativity? It was her idea to give Jesus a forceps delivery...') instead of becoming Ashby de la Zouche's answer to Posh Spice, Pandora has grown up in The Cappuccino Years to be both Helen Baxendale and a Blair Babe with a PhD, while Adrian is now thirty-and-a-half, a divorced father-of-one and 'offal chef to the stars'.
Needless to say, he's still besotted by Pandora, even though she treats him like something sticky on the sole of her designer shoes: 'Sorry, Ady, I've turned into a bit of a monster since I got into politics... perhaps you could be my Voice of Little England?'
After 16 years, this very welcome six-part return to the world of Mole (formerly on ITV but now on BBC1) stars newcomer Stephen Mangan (whatever happened to young Gian Sammarco, I wonder? Maybe he grew up to become an offal chef to the stars...) as the eponymous diarist and has kicked off in fine style. The cast is excellent (Alison Steadman as Pauline Mole, Zoe Wanamaker as Tania Braithwaite and Keith Allen as Mole's boss at Hoi-Polloi), while Sue Townsend's script is as finely tuned as one would hope. Already, six parts seems insufficient.
One quibble, though: The Cappuccino Years indulges in the current trend for having real people play themselves, irritating actors in the process and pleasing budget-juggling producers no end (there are future guest appearances by the never-knowingly-shy-of-publicity Max Clifford and Antony Worrall Thompson). Yet in the first episode, both the 'A.A. Gill' and the 'George Michael' definitely weren't quite themselves. None the less, Mole does very well without them. Rebel Heart came to its bloody conclusion last week. No surprise, really, because the wide-eyed, sweet-faced James D'Arcy, as fictional Irish Republican Army hero Ernie Coyne, always had the look of a potential victim about him. Still, at least he died laughing - jarring if only because he hadn't done much laughing in the preceding 195 minutes. Having opted not to use a narrative voiceover (which would have helped those of us whose historical knowledge of the birth of the IRA is less than thesis-worthy), I found Rebel Heart less controversial than it was confusing. And though beautifully acted and never less than lovely to look at, by the end of the journey it was increasingly hard to engage with the drama, perhaps because - and from whichever side one sympathises - the IRA's real-life recent past is always going to be much more powerfully emotive than a costumed history lesson.
Increasingly, Second Sight suffers from an identity crisis even greater than that of its central character, Clive Owen's Detective Chief Inspector Ross Tanner, who has a nasty virus that has dramatically affected his eyesight. So dramatically, in fact, that it's now affecting our own. When we see through Tanner's eyes-as-a-camera it's the world viewed as if from the bottom of a couple of bottles of nasty plonk. Queasy-making stuff, then, even without the bloody plotlines.
Last week's was quite a promising plot though: Labour peer's daughter wakes at her home to find herself covered in blood, while the body of her baseball-batted fiancé is found at his home. From the off, she was so obviously guilty that I looked forward to the inevitable twists and cul-de-sacs that would lead us to who had really dunnit. Except that in the end she really had dunnit, which was pretty boring. At the heart of of the show's identity crisis is the fact that it hasn't decided whether to settle for being a detective thriller with few thrills, or a psychological drama that focuses on Tanner's increasingly skewed ability to do his job, while managing to pull off both is, presumably, above and beyond the call of duty.
This is a shame because I feel sure there's a gap in the prime-time market for a blind, secretive, psychologically troubled yet very handsome Detective Chief Inspector with nice leather jackets, who can still score a very creditable 73 per cent in his firearms refresher course even without the assistance of his guide dog. And did we really need the clunking soundtrack - 'I Can See Clearly Now' while Tanner solves the murder and 'Hello Darkness My Old Friend' while he hit the bottle in self-pity. Though it could have been worse, I suppose - he could have sung them at a karaoke night.
Which reminds me: on second sight I've decided that Suzanne might not make it into the band and Myleene might. And since Kevin is already in a band called Force Five and has been on Stars in their Eyes ('nothing really came of it. I was devastated'), surely it's the lovely Noel's turn to get his big break? Never mind being a Popstar, who'd wannabe a popstar picker?
