The Edwardian Country House C4
The Experiment BBC2
Spooks BBC1
Ricky and Bianca BBC1
Raised By the State BBC2
Helen, the innately blonde hairdresser-cum-moron, whose love of glitter, Gucci and mockney housemate Paul, coupled with an ability to make startlingly banal observations such as 'I like blinking, me', became the silly season sunny delight of the last Big Brother series (and indeed became famous enough to achieve the honour of being regularly impersonated by Ronni Ancona).
Meanwhile, the eventual winner, that camp child, Brian, a sort of Graham Norton-lite (and just how lite is that ?) has now earned himself something approaching a TV career. Given that this year's collection of housemates will inevitably have to out-witter, out-flirt, out-pout and out-sulk last year's bunch of idiot tweenies, I am filled with an irrational dread about next week's return of Big Brother .
It doesn't matter how much of it I choose to watch, or not, because I'll still end up reading about every last personality and 'plot' twist in heat magazine (and giving up reading The Magazine of the Year for the duration of the show is inconceivable: for the casual celeb-junkie it's chocolate, 'Cake', yaba and crack cocaine all rolled into the one irresistible weekly hit). Then again, I've never been so excited by the prospect of a World Cup because it just might - please god - distract great swaths of the nation from the navel-pickings and nose-gazings going on inside the big new primary coloured playpen (with rather expensive 'designer' furniture, if last week's issue of heat, with its BB interior decor special feature, is anything to go by. Oh dear, I appear to have been suckered already).
But despite loathing BB and having let this year's series of Survivor float right on past me like a stray pooh stick on the Thames, I'm still game for some top quality nasty Reality TV, replete with extreme physical and/or psychological suffering. Obviously The Edwardian Country House (though at what point does a country house get promoted to a stately, precisely - because Manderston is one very big pile?) continues to delight in this regard, particularly as each episode sees the distinctly odd butler, Edgar, become more even more eye-brimmingly tremulous, on the brink of ending it all in the kitchen with the lead piping.
Poor old Edgar was reduced nearly to an attack of the vapours last week by the curled lips of whatsisface - Captain Peacock? - blanching at the sight of a pig's head being carved for the upstairs family's dining-pleasure (they've been cheating by not taking a little light Edwardian offal at breakfast, too), so it is increasingly, even troublingly, clear that Edgar was never cut out for this century, or indeed, most of the last one. I dread to think how he might have fared on BBC2, had he been drafted into The Experiment.
Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that it has no winsome blonde wenches wearing either corsets or glittery customised denim, The Experiment is oddly gripping. Randomly divided into 'prisoners' and 'guards', 15 male volunteers are repeating a notorious psychology experiment which took place at California's Stanford University in 1971. Only this time they're doing it with cameras and the considerable benefit of hindsight.
While in the original Experiment things all went a wee bit Lord of the Flies, this time around it's more Animal Farm. The 1971 version had to be abandoned after just a few days when the guards turned into bullying sadists and the inmates were reduced to gibbering emotional wrecks, but of course a television camera or 10 changes pretty much every thing: this lot of 'guards' are presumably so keen to be perceived as decent, fair, modern blokes that they have compromised themselves to the point of wilful emasculation. After just six days, they are turning out to be an ineffectual bunch of in-fighting, confrontation-avoiding big girl's blouses, just as the 'prisoners' are becoming sophisticated trouble-makers and consummate underminers of authority. It's great stuff.
In last week's most rivetting moment, the catalyst for this volte-face was revealed to be the handsome, charismatic Pentecostal Youth Minister, John, who, during the contest in which one 'prisoner' was selected to become a guard, saw his clear-cut leadership skills rejected by the other guards in favour of a more passive, malleable alternative. When the results were announced the expression on John's face was priceless: It was a Barry Manilow song made flesh - possibly something to do with smiling through the tears. Either way, you could tell he was both hurt and shouldering a sizeable chip, but the big surprise (given that he's a man of the cloth) was that within hours he was causing trouble, though - and virtually alone among his fellow inmates - without using an f-word stronger than 'flipping'.
By the end of episode two, which featured both the arrival and sudden departure of a trade union official-turned 'prisoner', Derek McCabe, the interpersonal group dynamicy-thing was all over the place. 'We're here to to get on together, to respect one another,' said Grennan, one of the tougher guards, to McCabe during some absurdly soft prisoner-guard conciliation talks on the subjects of hot beverages and air conditioning. Surely some mistake? And, even then, surely only for the cameras?
Meanwhile, poor Tom Quarry may run a multi-million pound computer business in real life, but here he appeared almost pathologically uncomfortable in an authoritarian role: 'Why does it have to be like this? Why does it have to be like this ?' he chanted hand-wringingly as he formulated a plan for 'a virtual revolution ... Why can't we make a bloody commune?'.
As McCabe left The Experiment, it was only the clever, wily Scouser, Bimpson, a heavily-tattooed beefy martial arts black belt and not, I think, a man who'd thrive inside a commune, who had guessed that McCabe had been removed by design. At this stage of the game, Bimpson - who, unnervingly, has something of the Keith Allens about him - is very much in charge.
Last week in the Guardian , the former 'spy', David Shayler, wrote an article in which he said that BBC1's new drama series, Spooks, doesn't accurately represent life inside MI5 - which is a bit like saying that The Experiment doesn't accurately depict life inside my local penitentiary, the Scrubs. Well, of course it flipping well doesn't - if everybody in the secret service was as shiny and good looking as Matthew Macfadyen, Keeley Hawes and Lisa Faulkner, we'd regularly read all about their lovely weddings, exciting careers and gorgeous homes in OK! So Spooks might be frothy nonsense - if last week's plot, revolving around a bombing campaign by a rabid pro-life terrorist, can be considered frothy - but it's top-quality froth and though, thrillswise, it's not exactly 24 , the good news is that it doesn't star Amanda Burton, either.
Last week's most affecting programme (aside from the ear-splitting Ricky and Bianca, an EastEnders spin-off, which affected my emotional equilibrium quite badly), was the restrained, dignified and enormously touching documentary, Raised By The State, in which David Akinsanya revisited his damaged childhood, spent mostly in care. I'd have liked more on precisely how Akinsanya turned his life around from being a borstal-residing teenager to a Prince's Trust board member, but maybe that's another film. In the meantime I'm haunted by the leftover scraps of the kid that remain inside the grown man. In one scene it was the father who had left him in the children's home (and failed him in so many ways on numerous other occasions) who was crying while Akinsanya attempted to comfort him, saying 'I'm sorry ... I'm sorry'. But there was obviously no need for Akinsanya to apologise - nothing, indeed, for him to apologise for. This was effectively a version of The Experiment made familial flesh, and all the more painful for that.
