Big Brother C4
Vincent: The Full Story C4
Imagine: The Mysterious Mr Hopper BBC1
This World: LAPD - Protect and Serve? BBC2
Metaphysicians can argue over whether it's possible to have, in Eliot's phrase, too much reality - they don't, after all, live in Peckham - but it's beyond contention that there is too much reality TV.
With Gordon Ramsay still threatening to melt down, the arrival of Big Brother was about as welcome as the open fire following a prolonged sauté in the frying-pan. After Hell's Kitchen, the moronic inferno.
The problem is these shows may be light entertainment of the most contrived nature but they make hefty demands on our emotional engagement. Despite the multiplying layers of self-knowledge in which they are wrapped, and the laughable self-absorption of their participants, they still ask us to care.
Yet the thought of all those Big Brother charity cases, with their histrionic auditions for the front cover of Heat magazine, their fumbling pseudo-romances, their hot-tub confessions and Chardonnay-soaked philosophy, not to mention the deranged enthusiasm of Davina McCall, is enough to provoke chronic compassion fatigue in even the most giving of viewers.
Amid a global conflagration and a possible oil crisis, you have to ask yourself: do you really have the spare cardiac capacity for another summer of all that? The big-hearted, as well as the small-brained, answer, is 'yes' and, surprisingly, it may even turn out to be the right one.
True, at first sight, the assembled contestants did not impress. In fact they looked all too familiar: the kind of aggressively bland twentysomethings that seem to have colonised the nation's public spaces. But closer inspection revealed probably the least dull - or, if you prefer, most freakish - set of housemates since the programme's inception. Though almost perfectly homogeneous in its lumpen hedonism, the 12-strong group is nevertheless sufficiently diverse to please the most exacting of equal opportunities exploiters.
Among its number are two gay men (one of whom, Marco, is so camp that his every word drips with mindless drama); a bouncy Portuguese transsexual; a good humoured lech who, in a neat trade-off against sexism, is also black; a Scottish body-builder with a penchant for exposing his buttocks, an unspeaking and non-drinking Asian man, a Geordie lass who seems to have gleaned her ideas on romantic love from the pages of Viz magazine's Fat Slags cartoon, and a lesbian anarchist called Kitten.
'I'm an autonomous individual,' announced Kitten, who looks feline but acts feral. 'I don't really believe in rules.' Kitten flouts every social convention except the one that states that all modern rebels must wear an earring in their eyebrow. She has set herself the rather admirable task of undermining the authority of Big Brother.
'The revolution will be televised,' remarked Victor the lech in a clever riposte to Gil Scott-Heron. No one has properly attempted such a radical approach to the game before, at least not in the British franchise. Elsewhere, in Spain, for example, there have been mutinies and revolts, but in keeping with our longstanding traditions of fair play and total apathy, the British contestants, up until now, have demonstrated all the subversion and defiance of civil servants on holiday in Switzerland.
There are sound reasons for this compliance, chief among them being the stringent selection process that weeds out anyone who does not want to play by the rules or, for that matter, who can speak in coherent sentences or isn't absolutely gagging for it. In this respect, and surely many others, Kitten is reminiscent of one of those students who works like a demon to get into Oxford, acts like an incurable swot at the interview, shows the requisite interest in joining various worthy societies, and then organises an occupation of the vice-chancellor's office the very moment they arrive on campus.
While self-evidently a raging solipsist and ceaseless egomaniac, she is well trained in the art of faux solidarity. And she knows how to elicit sympathy. You wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of her at a tenants' meeting.
Yet not all the housemates, it's fair to say, are smitten with Kitten. Jason, the muscular Scotsman with a promisingly dry delivery, described her as talking 'a lot of shit'. He was referring to Kitten's seditious invention of Big Sister, an amorphous power from whom she derives the satirical legitimacy to go against the wishes of Big Brother. My suspicion is that Jason is correct in his character analysis, but it's nevertheless entertaining to see Big Brother struggle like a clueless supply teacher to impose discipline on the group.
Not since Nasty Nick rent the house with his Machiavellian plotting has there been such a disruptive, and thus enjoyable, influence. It will be a shame if Kitten is chucked out, as Big Brother has threatened, because she is exactly the spanner that the works were crying out to have thrown at them. The fact that she is irritating in more ways than I thought anthropologically possible is a small price to pay for the refreshing tension she brings to the party.
Big Brother's producers appeared to reach the same conclusion themselves, no doubt after some intense behind-the-scenes discussions. Cunningly, they came up with a ploy that challenged Kitten's sense of her own selfless idealism. They'll kick out another house member, they informed her, if she continues with her obstructive campaign. 'That's not fair,' she moaned, like a child who'd been refused pudding. Everything at last glance was nicely poised for an almighty bust-up that, with luck and careful manipulation, could turn very ugly indeed. In all conscience, how can we not care?
I wonder how Vincent Van Gogh would have fared in the Big Brother household. Actually, I wonder no such thing. It's obvious from Waldemar Januszczak's Vincent: the Full Story that he would have been the first to be voted off, if he hadn't already stormed out in alienated disgust and self-loathing.
Vincent, we gather, was not one of the world's natural joiners-in. Rejected by women, the church, and commerce, he took up the lonesome business of painting because it was practically the only option left open to him. In this three-part biography, tracing Van Gogh as he drifted around Europe looking in vain for his place in life, Januszczak brought a new standard of literalness to the phrase 'following in his footsteps'.
In the first episode, he walked all the way from Brixton to Covent Garden (for non-Londoners, that translates into a bloody long way) so as to re-enact the journey Van Gogh undertook on foot each morning when he worked in England as an art salesman.
Through all three programmes Januszczak maintained the same level of slightly breathless dedication to the cause of reanimating the artist and his work. This was no mean achievement, especially in the final part that dealt with the well-trodden territory of his self-mutilation, sunflowers and suicide.
Vincent's sexual instincts, pronounced Januszczak in a growing frenzy of excitement, were 'powerful and coarse'. Thus, he argued, he was not the nice guy of popular legend, though I'm not sure that it is his legend, and nor am I sure that nice guys can't also possess powerful and coarse sexual instincts (what other kind are there?). But, anyway, Vincent was a 'manic brothel-goer'.
According to Januszczak, the artist was inspired to slice off his lobe by the matador custom in Arles of severing bull's ears. It was a bold, fascinating theory that may even have been true.
The strength of the programme was like that of all good portraits: it commanded your attention even when it was unable to gain your agreement. Pity, by contrast, Alan Yentob, whose unenviable job in Imagine was to flesh out the thin dry bones of Edward Hopper's life.
Accompanied everywhere he went - which was essentially a small apartment in Greenwich Village and an isolated house in Cape Cod - by his wife of more than 40 years, Hopper was not, we may safely conclude, a manic brothel-goer. His wife even forbade him to employ nude models, insisting that he use her instead - it may say something about the nature of long marriages that Hopper's depictions of naked women were terrifying figures of sexless potency.
A man of few words - one contributor said that he was prone to week-long interludes mid-sentence - Hopper once said that if you could say it, there'd be no reason to paint it. This was an intelligent, if perhaps a little too reverential, documentary, but at the end of all the expert opinion, one craved the silent depths of the pictures.
Some 10,000 murders have occurred in Los Angeles since 1985, many of them in the under-policed black and Latino areas in the south east of the city. This World followed the efforts of police chief William Bratton to lower the homicide rate as he had previously managed to do in New York. But, despite some success, he was thwarted by LA taxpayers, who don't want to spend money on the policing of poor crime-ridden areas. In the city of dreams they can't afford too much reality. And so they pretend it's not there.
· Kathryn Flett is away
