The Springer Show ITV1
Sugar Rush C4
A Picture of Britain BBC1
For those of us who, with guilty but none the less visceral glee, regularly seek out telly that resembles a pile-up on the M25 during rush hour, anything with the words Jerry Springer in the title is going to be essential viewing. And Jerry getting to grips with vindictive, feral, emotionally inarticulate and incomprehensibly shouty British people is an appointment I wouldn't miss for anything other than a seat in the front row of the stalls for Jerry Springer: The Opera.
'Today, I'm meeting liars, cheats and people about to dump their partners!' announced Jerry at 9.30 on Thursday morning, to which the only response was: 'Yippee! Bring on the tea and the Hobnobs and the lie-detector tests!' First up was Lisa. Lisa was pretty angry with her partner of five years, Jay, because he'd bought a bumper packet of condoms and seven of them were mysteriously unaccounted for. According to Lisa, Jay claimed he'd used them on himself.
'He used a condom on himself? Do you do things differently here?' wondered Jerry, but it was no laughing matter for Lisa, whose lips were trembling as Jay swaggered on stage.
'Is it true you done it with Hayley?' Lisa spat. One look at Jay and you couldn't help but think he probably had done it with Hayley; he looked shiftier than the shiftiest shiftworker ever to work a double shift. Hayley herself had 'issued a statement', via Jerry, which claimed that she hadn't done it with Jay, but even though we never laid eyes on Hayley, we didn't like her because she'd bullied Lisa at school. Jay's lie-detector test turned out to be disappointingly inconclusive, which is the kind of result you'd sort of expect on a British Springer even if it would never be allowed to happen in the States.
'Can you look her in the eye and say you love her?' Jerry asked Jay.
'No,' said Jay.
Close up, Lisa's face crumpled like a baby's. Jerry was gentle: 'You are gonna find someone who will love you the way you wanna be loved,' he said, at which point my lip trembled and my hands wobbled and I added a fresh tea stain to an impressively large-scale yet also mutedly abstract collection of older sofa stains acquired in a not dissimilar context (confession: I'm often crying in front the telly).
Next up, Dale was upset because his partner Sharon had come home late at night with a hole in her tights.
'Where was the hole?' wondered Jerry, reading our minds.
'I want a big apologise [sic] from you!' screamed Sharon at Dale from stage left, all guns ablaze.
'This is my show!' bellowed Jerry.
'Since when does a bingo hall ever have a lock-in?' shouted Dale, a line of dialogue which might easily have been written by Caroline Aherne.
But this bingo hall did, because Sharon sailed through her lie-detector test (96 per cent accurate) and, therefore, the hole 'in the wrong place' that Sharon said was due to 'wear and tear' had indeed been thusly acquired. Luckily, we didn't have too long to dwell on the specific nature of tight-gusset disintegration before the arrival of Beth and Scott, not a word from whom could Jerry understand.
'I'm going to practise speaking Scottish,' said Jerry after Beth and Scott's broadly unfathomable predicament had been neatly resolved (with assistance from some other people who may or may not have been have been friends or relatives) just in time for the credits.
'I'm Glaswegian,' said Scott, 'they're Fifers.' Jerry didn't understand, just shrugged and smiled. Cue credits and applause. Nobody does this stuff better, with more wit, empathy, intelligence and warmth than Springer, even without an interpreter, while the guests patently adored him. I've got a bit of a crush, personally, but then I'll fall for anybody who can make me laugh and cry in the space of an hour.
Sugar Rush (C4) is a 10-part (blimey: Band of Brothers was 10 parts) adaptation of the novel for teenagers Julie Burchill wrote in about 45 minutes, including a couple of tea breaks. I haven't had the pleasure myself, not being of the target demographic, and, anyway, I have an all-too CGI SFX-vivid memory of what it feels like to be 15, particularly this week.
(Is there any correlation, I wonder, between dramatically increased levels of sunshine and the sudden desire to paint one's toenails with little daisies, buy an iPod and download Razorlight, decorate a mobile phone with pointless dingly-dangly bits of jewellery and some Miffy stickers or stand around on street corners late at night giggling and sending daft txts? Look, I don't get out much.)
Sugar Rush was terrifically pleased with (and, indeed, pleasuring) itself right from the off, as our narrator, 15-year-old Kim, talked in voiceover about masturbating with an electric toothbrush. Phwoaar! Saucy or what? In the late Seventies, when I was of an age to get a kick out of whatever it is an electric toothbrush might have to offer, we not only didn't know about the existence of plaque or, indeed, flossing, but (unless one was an Osmond) objects of oral hygiene were still perceived to be essentially inanimate.
Anyway, I enjoyed Sugar Rush - basically, girl with a crush on her best friend simultaneously attempts to relieve herself of her virginity - which was equal parts funny and sweet. The dialogue was the kind of stuff teenagers would like to think they'd be smart enough to come up with all by themselves ('Obviously the blood destined for his brain had been diverted to greedier organs'; 'He is the worst DJ in Brighton. Which, when you consider how many DJs there are in Brighton, is something of an achievement'; 'The problem with men is that the reality never lives up to the promise' etc) but which was clearly the work of someone undistracted by having to revise for their GCSEs.
Though flattering for the target audience (who, rather than being inside watching C4 at 10.50pm, will have been out on the street corners with their mobiles - I know, I saw them), I suspect the kids will think Sugar Rush is all a bit, well, desperate. There is, of course, nothing a 15-year-old will find more 'whatever...' than something they're meant to like, given that the whole point of being 15 is about wanting to be 18, ergo those who tuned in will probably have watched it as almost guiltily and furtively as their naughty, guilty, furtive dads. Effectively, Sugar Rush is Hollyoaks with a much better soundtrack, though none the less enjoyable for that.
BBC1's delicious A Picture of Britain, presented by David Dimbleby, is, unsurprisingly at the opposite end of the spectrum of British TV from both Springerville and tales of teenage autoeroticism in Brighton. I tuned in rather dutifully and ended up breathless and seduced as David declared: 'I'm going to take you on a journey through some of the most magnificent scenery to be found anywhere on Earth: the landscape of the British Isles', over a fat, lush, verdant orchestral soundtrack.
Starting in the north and deploying the work of mostly 18th- and 19th-century artists and writers to illustrate how the most awesome and savage landscapes in Britain were tamed into a fashionable, accessible romanticism - 'the birth of the picturesque' (which, in turn begat mass tourism) - we were told of 18th-century painters' guidebooks which decreed one must never include more than three cows in a foreground (though you could paint as many unshorn sheep as you liked). We were also reminded of Wordsworth's poetic epiphany; as a child, he stole a skiff to row across a lake and felt as though he were being chased by the mountains. These days, William's Grasmere daffodils are effectively guarded because tourists regularly try to dig up the bulbs.
As a soppy southerner, I realised I had forgotten how big and empty and wildly lovely so much of the north of Britain remains. I haven't been to the Lakes (900 square miles and a population of 41,000, swelled by as many as 15 million tourists annually) or the Dales since I was a teenager, and I've never been to Northumberland, though I'd like to, preferably first thing tomorrow morning.
On Ilkley Moor, Dimbleby asked a member of the Black Dyke brass band what it meant to be a Yorkshireman.
'To be born in God's Own Country; there's nothing better is there?'
David, rather sheepishly, admitted that his roots lay in East Sheen.
'That's not God's Own Country, is it?'
'It is to me,' replied David, defensively. But I don't think any of us, including Dimbleby, were entirely convinced.
