THE history lesson offered little comfort. "Abraham was commanded by God to circumcise himself and his sons throughout the generations," said a rabbi. "Abraham, by the way, was 99 at the time." Cut to Steve Harding on an operating table. The surgeon held up a forceps and a scissors, which glinted under the lights. A person in a mask huffed Steve's member with a pastry brush and tied a ribbon around it. A big, black, censoring X appeared on screen.
We should be grateful that the cut was cut. His work done, the surgeon put Steve's foreskin in a little bottle. He would send it to a university. Modern Times: A Jewish Wedding followed the pre nuptials of Church of England Steve and Jewish Michaela, as the putative groom converted to Judaism. Steve had decided, if the idiom isn't inappropriate, to go the whole hog. After the circumcision, he plunged into learning Hebrew and taking religious instruction.
He lay in the bath, suds now doing the work of the censoring X, as Michaela asked him cathecism questions. Before the wedding, Steve would have to face three rabbis asking him similar questions about his new religion. If he failed, the wedding would have to be postponed. Colin, Michaela's father, had taken out insurance in case Steve couldn't make the cut as a Jew. Meanwhile, the preparations for an extraordinarily extravagant wedding gathered pace.
Food, clothes and beauty treatments became ever more lavish as the documentary unfolded. Colin, already beyond prosperously stout, phoned Bernie, his caterer friend. Bernie has the figure of a dangerously overinflated Michelin Man. If he is what he eats, Bernie is a three tier wedding cake, sorbets in brandysnap baskets, orange and brandy pudding, hot chocolate pudding with chocolate sauce, creme brulee, chocolate mousse, fresh fruit salad, crepe suzette, Danish pastries, apple flan and sticky toffee pudding. "Just a nosh," he said.
Anyway, as Colin arranged the nosh with Bernie, Michaela and her mother, Barbara, went shopping for a wedding dress. Considering the eating that faced them, the dress would require generous elastication. But nothing would do Barbara. Michaela tried on more dresses than Bernie has had hot dinners (well, figuratively speaking) but none would do. Finally, an explosion of lace imported from the US was deemed suitable. "It gives me a waist," said Michaela. Yeah, well, so will Bernie's nosh.
Throughout, Steve's parents, Bob and Doris, seemed bemused. Their Englishness was manifest in self restraint. Yet their son, circumcised now and wearing a yahamah, couldn't get enough Jewish ostentation. His scar healed and his religious examination passed by this stage, he was learning Hebrew, Jewish dancing and Jewish wedding etiquette. "Have you to be born a Jew, to really be a Jew?" Colin was asked.
"For me, Steve's really Jewish," he replied. Why? "Because I want him to be." The wedding itself was as lavish as Bernie's nosh. The car for Michaela was an unusually tall, vintage taxi. Back in Oliver Cromwell's time, they wore top hats, so they had to have the height," the owner told the bride. Perhaps this was the very car that Cromwell drove around Drogheda in 1649. Presumably, even after such a careful, Protestant owner, the engine has been reconditioned since.
The cameras zoomed in on Bernie's nosh, Michaela's dress and Steve's dancing. It was like a wedding from a Hollywood film - only richer, more sumptuous and screaming money. Doris was asked what she thought of Jewish weddings. She pondered a while. "Hmmm, glitzy," she said, "by Church of England standards." It had, in fact, been glitzy by even Dallas or Dynasty standards. Barbara's lime green and gold (mostly gold) dress would have been improbably flash for Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra.
Modern Times has mocked, ridiculed and humiliated more than its fair share of camera keen punters in recent years. But Jewish Wedding required no cheap set ups or sneaky edits. Any bloke who allows a camera team to film, full on, his circumcision, has got to be missing more than his prepuce. Perhaps it was all for love, but really, you'd need to be cut out for this sort of marriage. Fascinating, nonetheless.
WHATEVER pain and effort Steve has undergone for love, it's nothing compared with the pain of Ben Needham's family. Ben was 21 months old when he disappeared from the Greek island of Kos on July 24th, 1991. Since then, his grandparents, Eddie and Christine Carpenter, from whose care Ben was taken, have searched tirelessly for blond, blue eyed boys, one of whom just might be their lost grandchild.
Cutting Edge's The Lost Boy was harrowing. The cameras focused repeatedly on empty landscapes. If it had been a Hollywood film, at least you could be sure that, eventually, a blond boy would appear on the horizon. But, in this documentary, the landscapes would remain empty; Ben's mother, Christine, would remain between nervous breakdowns; the searching grandparents would remain thwarted.
It was, in that sense, a film more about the annihilating effects of loss than about the loss itself. In spite of their resolute searching, all the Carpenters have to show for their efforts is a large collection of snapshots of young, blond boys in Greece. People spot blond kids "on a beach" or on the Athens subway system and pass on the information. Every lead is followed up and every lead leads back to an empty landscape.
A tip off brought hope and despair in equal measure. It seems that Greece has a substantial, illegal trade in children, many of whom are sold on to wealthy families. The Greek authorities seem to have long since lost interest in Ben Needham - just another statistic in a national scandal. The tip off came from an inmate of a remote Greek prison: a gypsy family, this guy said, had taken Ben from Kos. The story hummed with a folk dread which stretches all the way back to medieval Europe.
Following this latest lead, the Carpenters and Nick Godwin's cameras tracked down the gypsy family. The gypsy leader, a belligerent old bloke chased them away and badmouthed the prison inmate. He insisted that the gypsies are easy scapegoats and he might, indeed, be right. But he was not convincing. There was a strong sense that Cutting Edge, while it did not solve the mystery of Ben, had got a glimpse of a dark truth.
Still, the loss and the pain are unrelenting. If Ben Needham is still alive - and he may well be - he's seven now, or seven and a half in proper boy-speak. He may have no memories of his former life and it's unlikely that he can speak English yet, his searchers imagine him saying things like: "Come on, grandad. I'm here. What're you messing about at? I'm here. Come and get me. But the cameras show only empty landscapes and broken adults. Agonising.
IN contrast, Loved By You, Carlton's new seven part sitcom, was peopled by empty adults It had all the ingredients of a contemporary US comedy: a successful couple of media newlyweds, Michael and Kate; a loft which could double as an aircraft hangar; supporting characters, who included a slobbish bachelor, a neurotic single woman and a straitlaced professional couple. Oh, and sex, of course.
But it was tedious. Half Terry and June and half Friends, it was bland and boring. Transplanting a couple of suburban sitcom airheads into a trendy loft and having them get their rocks off in the kitchen, while their boring guests wait for "lasagne" and "a nice bottle of wine", is not funny. The sex and dinner party routine, with Little Miss Professional acting the nymphomaniac and Mr Big Professional acting the lad, is about as amusing as undergoing circumcision.
John Gordon Sinclair plays Michael and Trevyn McDowell is Kate. Like most sitcom newlyweds, they look like they should be in a smarmy ad for cars. Kate snores and seems to be permanently randy. How clever - gender role reversal! Michael cracked a joke about Des O'Connor in the opening half minute. This was ominous. We should have been warned. Like Bernie's nosh, it just got gooey-er as it went along. Sickly, really.
THE profoundly ominous programme of the week, however, was Network First's All In The Genes.
Following the understandable fuss about Dolly, the cloned ewe, it provided a timely examination of the genetics debate. If it left any discernible impression, it is that nobody can accurately predict whether or not Dolly signals a utopian medical future or horror come true.
The film tried to be as sober and balanced as it could be. Fair enough, but an excess of balance can end in inertia. As the documentary progressed, it was clear that it felt duty bound to soothe unnecessary fears. Folk dread, as old as the nightmare of having children snatched, whispers about the dangers of monsters, if science interferes too much with nature. But nature provides its own horrors.
We saw children suffering from MPS, a genetic disorder which results in brain damage, stunted growth and premature death. Some day, they might be helped by gene therapy. It seems medievally superstitious to deny them hope of a cure. Yet, it seems almost equally awful to contemplate the prospects of insurance companies getting their hands on genetic predictions.
"We're in a competitive market," said Mary Reynolds, chief medical officer of Canadian Life Assurance. Market, market, market - it's no wonder the ethics of genetic engineering are as complex as the engineering itself.
THE market was also centrestage on What Really Matters. Father Sean Healy, of the Conference of Religious in Ireland, faced UCD economics lecturer, Moore McDowell. The discussion focused on the growing inequality in Irish society. Should Christians, asked presenter, Olivia O'Leary, be able to sleep at night, given the increasing gap between rich and poor?
McDowell was on the side of the market. It could, he argued, provide an acceptable standard of living for everybody. The fact that there does not appear to be any evidence (though there is much evidence to the contrary) for this, did not deter him. Community workers and others in the audience defended public housing schemes, arguing that the market had provided only tenements. So it had.
This fourth edition of What Really Matters was livelier than the first. The audience, at least, was animated. But the format encourages more conversation than confrontation. That, of course, can have its benefits. But when the subject is the market, we need all the cut and thrust that can be mustered, to expose the agendas all around.