BY the continuity announcer’s warnings shall ye know the programme that follows. Thus was This Morning: 30 Unforgettable Years (STV, Tuesday, 7.30pm) introduced with the caution: “Now, with brief scenes of medical nudity…”
There was medical nudity sure enough, and non-medical (the infamous Chippendales routine), sexual content (the infamous Viagra test) and disasters (the infamous Twiggy/Coleen Nolan presenting experiment). For a supposedly fluffy daytime television show, This Morning has had a lot of infamous moments, and that is without Richard Madeley doing the show dressed as wife Judy. It certainly made for educational viewing if you were off school with tonsillitis.
This hour-long canter through the years lingered longest on the Richard and Judy period, which remains the show’s heyday, with the real stars of the show, the production teams behind a rare three-decades long success story, largely staying hidden. Still, 30 years: respect. That’s a lot of fluff, but as the programme showed, a lot of people helped and kept company besides.
Horizon: The Placebo Experiment – Can My Brain Cure My Body? (BBC2, Thursday) might have made an item on This Morning, but only if it involved a skit with Philip Schofield being wired up to the mains like Frankenstein’s monster. As it was, we made do with sensible Michael Mosley, the hardest working man in medical showbiz.
With the NHS spending £400 million on painkillers, Mosley wanted to investigate whether the body could be prompted to produce its own natural analgesic. He went to Blackpool, a back pain hotspot, to recruit 117 people for an experiment. They were told some would be receiving a super new painkiller and others a placebo. In fact, all were swallowing nothing stronger than ground rice in a capsule. Everything else was real, including the GPs they saw, some for longer than others.
One did wonder, and Mosley himself raised it, whether this was an entirely fair thing to do to people, but he also cited study after study to show there was something in placebo science worth exploring. One old boy stood up from his wheelchair in the second week. Others reported being pain free for the first time in ages. In total, almost half the group said they were feeling better. The researchers had no idea why it worked with some and not others. Notably, of the group that reported an improvement, 51% were in the set who spent more time with an empathic GP.
The Big Audition (STV, Friday, 10.45pm), being a cross between X-Factor, Dragon’s Den and Fame, was a giggle. The idea was that TV’s beloved “ordinary people” tried out for a real job in entertainment. The first week’s vacancies were for a presenter on a TV shopping channel, a cover star for Dogs Today magazine, and a Henry VIII impersonator. The firms that were hiring got free advertising, the punters got the chance of paid work, and everybody was happy, though I’m not sure the pooches up for the modelling job would have chosen to wear some of those outfits.
Archie, a West Highland terrier who had been in the Daily Mail, was pronounced a “complete pro” and looked set for the £12,000 magazine contract. But what do you know, in walked an 18-month-old bundle of fur with an overbite and snatched the gig straight out of Archie’s jaws. That’s showbiz, kid.
Press (BBC1, Thursday, 9pm), the drama about, er, the press, is winding its way towards a conclusion with the same failings, and successes, it has had from the start.
On the debit side, the storylines are either unbelievably po-faced or plain daft, and the characters of the Herald editor and news editor, meant to be having an affair, are about as alive as a dead donkey. On the plus side, Ben Chaplin is a sleazy joy as tabloid editor Duncan Allen, now reaching peak Mick Jagger mode, northern news reporter Holly Evans has grown on me, ditto newbie Ed, who has been sacked by Duncan in every episode only to be reinstated.
This week, Holly swapped her itchy jumper for a blouse and went to work for Duncan, having been promised more resources and fewer mousetraps (the last straw for Holly had been seeing a dead rodent near the cash-strapped Herald’s photocopier. Taxi for metaphor!).
Thankfully, the move was a disaster, and the stage is set for a Holly-Duncan clash of the titans in next week’s finale. Will Press get a second series? Shocking to think, but perhaps only media folk are interested in dramas about media folk. As for Chaplin, however, hire him for anything and do it now.
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