Richard and Judy C4
Kenyon Confronts BBC1
Linda Green BBC1
Bridge BBC2
The new-look teatime Channel 4 Richard and Judy kicked off last Monday with a slightly more upmarket set of sofas and a thrilling showbiz exclusive. While it may not have been Robbie and Nicole announcing their engagement, for some of us the prospect of Les Dennis and Amanda Holden talking for the very first time on live television about Amanda's affairlet with Neil Morrissey (Amanda: 'It wasn't about anyone else, really, it was about me') was a pretty good substitute. 'We've all been there,' said Richard, with a dismissive wave of the hand. Blimey - that's Neil's ladykiller reputation in shreds then.
By Thursday, the show was evolving into quite a strange beast. I switched on just two minutes into the proceedings to find R&J interviewing the world's most boring couple (though perhaps that's how they were billed) about their wedding proposal, which made one yearn for Dr Raj Persaud. But happily they were soon off the sofa in favour of Sophie Ellis Bextor, invited by Richard to talk about her 'unusual face'. Described recently as 'a satellite dish' by Robbie Williams, even Sophie admitted that 'my features took a while to find out where they wanted to settle' and went on to reveal that she was such a miserable child she had even been bullied by her own imaginary friends , Emily and Charlotte. 'They ganged up on me', a psychological trauma that possibly explains why Sophie's maquillage made her look as if she'd just lost a fist-fight with a Terry's Chocolate Orange.
From this to 'the Robin Hood of Ramsgate', an anonymous stranger who occasionally sends £20 notes to the inhabitants of Ramsgate's Cannon Road and environs. In a bid to get to the bottom of the mystery, R&J called upon a psychological profiler: 'What sort of person does this... a man or a woman?' wondered Judy, 'Mmmm, it's difficult to say really,' said the profiler, revealing himself to be less Cracker than Inspector Knacker. But by the time we got to the story of Alexandre, there was something very odd going on. Alexandre (no surname, or not one anybody on R&J could bring themselves to try to spell) was a Portuguese amateur footballer who said he'd been approached in Faro by someone claiming to be a scout for Southampton who had invited Alexandre to fly over for a trial.
After spending all his money on the ticket, Alexandre claims he was never met at the airport and couldn't track down the 'Kevin Smith' who had invited him but, despite being stuck in Britain and having no money at all (not to mention being 'too proud' to ask his family for a loan), Alexandre was also in no particular hurry to get home. Indeed, now he was here, he'd kinda decided he'd like to follow his professional footballing dream.
Alexandre's mum and brother appeared on video, pleading for him to come home, but Alexandre was unmoved. However when Richard and Judy offered him the choice of either a plane ticket home or a train ticket to Peterborough FC (who had heard the story and clearly fancied a bit of publicity) for a trial the following day, he took the ticket to 'the Posh' (I had had no idea until that moment that Peterborough call themselves 'Posh' - and apparently with even less justification than Victoria Beckham).
Now I can't explain this as anything other than a hunch, but my feeling while watching this story unfold was, unfortunately, that none of it was remotely true , that maybe someone somewhere was pulling a bit of a fast one and that that someone wasn't called 'Kevin Smith'. Obviously, I hope I'm wrong, otherwise the new-look R&J may end up heading the way of all flesh (or at least the way of Vanessa ).
Another of Richard & Judy's Thursday guests was Paul Kenyon, plugging that night's Kenyon Confronts: The RIP Off, an entertaining look at insurance scams in which people fake their own deaths, à la John Stonehouse, then waltz off to a comfortable, debt-free new life elsewhere.
The world centre for illicit bucket-kicking is Haiti, where death is pretty much a way of life (there's a road called Funeral Street in Port-au-Prince) and, if you know where to go, also the place where death certificates can be acquired along with a video diary of your own funeral (tidily deceased with all the right paperwork for just $2,500, or more than a year's Haitian salary).
Kenyon posed for his own video death by lying convincingly, albeit briefly, in an open casket (subsequently filled by the corpse of a 26-year-old waiting on a nearby gurney) and told R&J that: 'Everybody thinks I must have had some sort of epiphany, but it was just very, very hot.'
The people to feel most sorry for in Haiti are those who actually die legitimately: at worst, nobody will believe you're really dead; at best you get a bunch of strangers piggybacking your funeral to film your keening relatives and claim them as their own. In Kenyon's case, however, his colour instantly put him at a slightly surreal disadvantage when attempting to hijack someone else's mourners, while the reluctance of anybody to acknowledge this during the film made it all the funnier. Somewhere in Haiti there's a sign pinned up behind the desk of a funeral director: you don't have to be white to die here, but it helps.
In last week's Linda Green (which, after initial doubts, has grown on me, though I could do without the singing) there was another gatecrashed funeral and (not that they're often a hoot, admittedly), a pretty sad one, too, for an alleged comedy.
When Linda and her mates discovered that a former classmate, Debbie Mott, had passed away, they decided to take a day's compassionate leave from work and go to her funeral, despite the fact that none of them could remember who she was. Debbie's mum eventually rumbled Linda's mate, Michelle (Claire Rushbrook), who had become obsessed with the apparent smallness and loneliness of Debbie's life (no close friends, still lived at home in her thirties and kept a half-finished jigsaw in her bedroom) to the point where, after the funeral, she started turning up on Mrs Mott's doorstep claiming Debbie as a close friend.
'She was happy. She liked walking, she liked reading... she liked Emmerdale until it went five days a week,' explained Mrs Mott of Debbie when the truth eventually came out. And though Michelle felt guilty about lying (and possibly even more so about bullying Debbie at school), she still struggled to imagine such a twilit half-life. 'What if she doesn't get any friends?' she wondered of her own sleeping daughter. 'She's got loads,' soothed her husband. 'But that's because we've got PlayStation 2.'
This wasn't really Liza Tarbuck's episode but it's good to see a series in which the supporting characters can shine. I've previously thought that the show is a bit cramped at 30 minutes, but this episode was well-paced, beautifully written and rather touching. Clearly, Linda Green has picked up the gauntlet thrown down by Cold Feet: sad is officially the new funny.
The most haunting parts of BBC2's pretty (but also pretty ponderous) Brooklyn Bridge film, the first of Lucy Blakstad's Bridge trilogy (Mostar and our very own wobbly bridge are to follow) was, inevitably, the now-you-see them, now-you-don't Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre. In the footage made a year ago, they seemed to pop up almost everywhere in Brooklyn's Manhattan backdrop, jostling into view, visible from every angle, shouting: 'Hi mom, over here!' (The former Kid Creole sidekick, Coati Mundi, had a particularly fine view of the towers from his living-room window. And, subsequently, it turned out, an equally grandstand view of the planes as they ploughed into them.) But more fascinating than the bulk of the film was the footage shot a month after the towers had collapsed, which turned out to be an architectural version of pin the tail on the donkey: stick the skyscraper on the skyline. Where, precisely, had the towers been?
'You see the Bell sign? And you see the Brooklyn Bridge. It would sit right up over there,' pointed out a Brooklyn native to his friend. Later, a couple were filmed strolling over the Brooklyn Bridge. 'The Trade Centres were... left? Right?' she wondered. 'Right by that black building. The smaller of the two black buildings,' her husband replied. 'Right here?' 'Yeah.'
It was no surprise that I couldn't place the towers, but that this problem wasn't merely confined to non-New Yorkers came as a bit of a shock. I'm assuming that, for example (and god forbid), if St Paul's, Big Ben or Canary Wharf ever went missing from the skyline, Londoners would be able to look down on the city from a suitably high vantage point and know straight away where those buildings weren't, as it were.
