Positive Women BBC2
The Pride of Britain Awards ITV
Ride The Wild Surf C4
In the documentary Positive Women, 30-year-old Emma was filmed lecturing to a bunch of schoolgirls - candidly, eloquently, courageously - about living with HIV. There, in the library of my old school, underneath the very large and familiar Victorian oil portrait of the first headmistress, Miss Jones, the young audience sat rapt - and so did we.
Funnily enough, only the week before, I had revisited the dear old school for the first time in 20 years. The headmistress told me that these days there were lots of absorbing extracurricular lectures, from politicians, environmentalists and, indeed, women with HIV, only one of a slew of radical changes that made me feel like Methuselah's great-aunt.
In my 1970s human biology lessons, however, we were still largely taught by clever, well-meaning (though rarely inspiring) variations on the theme of Miss Jones, so while the Sex Pistols topped the charts we were warned about the possible dangers of sitting alone on a sofa with a young and uncontrollably virile member of the opposite sex.
It was made clear that we were all potential passive victims of a kind of male biological madness - one kiss and we'd be unhinged with desire; one grope and our O-levels would be in jeopardy; one screw and it would be bye-bye further education, hello Fallen Womanhood. Sex, then, in all its complex glory was apparently catching. Back then, of course, we couldn't know how catching.
At 22, having just graduated from university, Emma met a man - 'a bit of all right, really!' - and after six weeks of dating and insisting on safe sex, caught herself a potential death sentence when the condom broke. 'I was gobsmacked. I couldn't believe this person I had fallen head over heels in love with had it... in the first two years, I went to maybe a dozen funerals which, in your early twenties, you don't expect to be doing.'
Emma is an extraordinary young woman, smart, funny, pithy, seemingly unconsumed by anger ('Time. Great healer. Move on!' she said, with irony. 'Well he didn't go out of his way to infect me...'). She doesn't appear to have much contact with her family now because they didn't take the news very well. Instead, she paints, plays golf, uses a flat-packed 'sort of Ikea' coffin as a windowseat (it houses her record collection), is upfront about her condition when she meets men ('and see if I get a first drink out of them', though unsurprisingly they tend to bolt) and she waits.
There's an awful lot of waiting. Allergic to the drugs that might arrest the HIV, she doesn't expect to make 40, much less 50. The man who gave her the virus is now dead.
Sarah discovered she had contracted HIV at 17, when she was pregnant. She terminated the pregnancy and more or less took to her bed for a few years. Now 25 and on a cocktail of drugs that appear to be working (the virus is currently 'undetectable'), Sarah enjoys the support of her mother and a lovely nurse: 'They're all special to us,' said Jenny of her HIV-positive patients, 'but Sarah could have been my daughter.'
Jenny talked, too, of the way the disease is seen: 'People have cancer and you feel sorry for them, but HIV? You walk away. It's the British attitude to sex, I think.' Quite true, but then what hope is there for a nation whose teachers inculcate in their pupils a lifelong fear of sofas ?
Sarah was filmed in the West End celebrating her twenty-fifth birthday with a giggle of girlfriends and looking very much as though hers would be the most positive outcome for a Positive Woman. Blithely, she remarked: 'A few boyfriends have taken a few days off work after I've told them [about the virus]. I don't know if it's a coincidence...' Probably not.
Nicki is my age, 37, so she probably had the same kind of biology lessons. Either way, as a travel rep, Nicki had a hedonistic time cut short only when she discovered she had the virus, at 25. Five years later, she met Karl ('I just wasn't fazed in any way at all') and they practised safe sex until their condom broke, too (this programme wasn't great PR for the barrier method). Though Karl didn't catch the virus, Nicki discovered she was pregnant. 'It was better to think positive,' she recalled without irony. She had a daughter, Ellen, who was diagnosed HIV-positive at 15 months.
In a heartbreaking scene, Nicki recalled her daughter's death. After an 'amazing vision', in which a 'beautiful' Ellen was being led away from her, she decided that her sick daughter 'might need to hear from us that's it's OK to go. And as I said those words she took her last breath and it felt so right... she'd opened my heart to a love that I'd never known existed until I'd had a child.' Karl and Nicki have now split and Nicki is 'not in a relationship and I don't intend to be', but she treats herself to a lot of massages because 'it's important to be touched'.
I have given all three of the Positive Women so much space because they deserve it. These days, when the format often looks tired and debased, this was a perfect documentary that simply and seriously tackled a highly emotive subject without squeezing from it a drop of sentimentality.
In a week that also saw ITV's Pride of Britain Awards, a syrupy gong show for an arbitrary selection of the extraordinarily ordinary, in which the likes of Ulrika Jonsson 'honoured' the architects of the London Eye alongside a woman who ran a hospice for children, a little girl with cancer and another woman who saves swans, Positive Women highlighted how desperately important it is to be touched by dignified and moving factual television, rather than bludgeoned into crocodile tears in the name of ratings.
But just to reassure readers that I'm still in touch with my shallow side, the second best documentary of the week was about surfing. Like all the finest sports, surfing is beautiful, terrifying and pointless in equal measure, so while C4's Ride the Wild Surf might have been shallow it was shallow in a really deep kinda way. Or at least as deep as rudely healthy American men called Laird Hamilton, Darrick Doerner, Brett Lickle and Rush Randle (yes, really. Only Boogie Nights' Dirk Diggler was missing from the surf-porn all-stars line-up), with their bull-necks, David Coulthard jawlines and the kind of blank expressions that hint either at a great spiritual peace or an enormous stupidity, can be when talking really heavy shit about big waves.
'Fear gives you intelligence' (though not obviously manifest here) or, after a fun day out avoiding death on a small tsunami : 'That was pretty gnarly!', and my favourite, when faced with an imminent wipe-out: 'It's balls to the wall! Suck, tuck and duck!' The titans of the tides, kings of the crests - the so-called 'Watermen' - are mad, but my god it makes for great pictures.
They ride only the biggest and most fearsome waves in the world, like Maui's Jaws, a wall of water that has been known to roll in at 70ft, though usually hovers at around a manageable - for the merely mildly certifiable - 30ft. Given that the watermen face death regularly, their claim that the experience offers quite a lot in the way of 'spiritual growth' probably isn't to be laughed at, though it's fabulous for one's muscle tone, too.
All the men interviewed (thirty- and fortysomethings, mostly - this is a sport you grow into, not out of) are sponsored professional surfers, so when they're not tracking waves and weather formations on the web, they're inventing real neat new surf stuff, like the snowboard-style surfboard (an 'airboard') with a hydrofoil that literally allows the surfer to fly above the water! The airboard experience looked so mind-blowingly thrilling that had I known such a thing might one day exist, the teenage me would have got straight off that sofa and delayed losing her virginity indefinitely. Suck, tuck and... well, never mind.
And there was pathos, too, beyond the hard body swagger, notably when Laird mused on the possibility of encountering 'surf so big and so perfect that I might not see it again in my lifetime'. Wow, that would be sad, wouldn't it? Not perhaps quite as sad as the possibility of dying of Aids before your fortieth birthday, but pretty poignant, none the less.
