Gest mounts his challenge

TVReview: 'Holy focaccia!" Guess who's outstaying his welcome? David Gest, the diminutive, mesomorphic bling-holder with the tummy tuck and the bald patch, having apparently won the hearts and minds of the great telly public when he emerged from the celebrity jungle (minus a stone and gagging for his moisturiser), has a TV series all to his hirsute self.

This Is David Gest (the title does not mess with subtlety) is a fly-on-the-flock-wallpaper documentary series that follows its protagonist as he takes up residence in London's Grosvenor Hotel and embarks on a media assault to capitalise on his new-found Brit popularity.

"Why not stay where you are loved [ pronounced 'luuuved']?" asked furry David from the languorous depths of his linen lair. "Also, I love clotted cream [ said with a worrying flick of a moistly avaricious little tongue]." What followed was a grimly entertaining revolution of the twisted spoke on the reality TV wheel, Gest treating us to faux-hysteria over a muddy footprint on his "caaarpet" and feigning a bout of obsessive compulsion over a tincture of gnat urine on the Armitage Shanks (I exaggerate, but only mildly).

"I always brush," he said, flaccid mouth frothing with toothpaste over his spectacularly clean hotel sink, the surrounds of which were littered with tubs of vitamin supplements. "Even after cunnilingus, I always brush my teeth." More information, I suspect, than any of us need.

Then there was outdoor David, on a photo-shoot in Hyde Park organised by his "commercial agent".

"Don't film this," snapped Gest to his camera crew (which can be translated as "film this quick!") as, wearing a pair of remarkably eye-catching tan- coloured riding boots, he tottered towards a sleepy horse and mounted the yawning beast with the help of a rather large stepladder produced by his faithful factotum, Imad. Really, you have to admire the savvy little media tease for his blatant manipulation of the reality genre (not to mention his luck at finding an apostle called I-mad).

Pity the chambermaid, certainly, but Gest's Gest is a pretty fantastic creation, laughing all the way to cash-happy celebrity-ville. He really can't lose in his bid for our attention: now being touted to replace Louis Walsh on The X Factor, this is one celebrity bunny we won't see reduced to playing an ugly sister in a Bournemouth Christmas panto. And then there's the slew of afternoon chat-shows where he can promote his autobiography, feed his diet book and share his anti-ageing secrets (which include having his pate professionally plastered with dark-brown eye shadow).

"Age is just a number sign," said Gest, excavating the pimple that Imad had helpfully pointed out on his master's stretched chin.

Next week, Gest is planning to find that "someone who knows how to bounce on the bed" (actually, she's the unmemorable Malandra "used-to-be-in-Emmerdale" Burrows, another jungle has-been).

"I'm in love and I hope to have children very soon," confided Gest. For all our sakes, let's hope he does it in the privacy of a closed set.

GEST'S PLAY-ACTING WAS about as funny as it got this week, given the unexpected disappointment of Risteárd Cooper and Gerard Stembridge's combined attempt to water the arid planes of Irish satire in the first of their four-part series, The State of Us. The contribution of the two men to Irish comedy has been considerable, and their credentials are well-known, Stembridge for the radio satire Scrap Saturday, Cooper as part of the brilliant Après Match.

In the run-up to the general election, however, at a time when the frothy new Ireland seems to have more 4x4s than milking cows and when our Taoiseach has to grapple with the Hollywood monikers of his twin grandsons, The State of Us felt like a dowdy and thoroughly dated affair.

In an incestuous and terribly in-house jaunt around Donnybrook, Dublin 4, the programme attempted to satirise an encounter between a politician and members of the Irish media, with Cooper playing all the principal roles. The opening salvo featured a morning in the life of Tánaiste Michael "Poodle" McDowell, from grumpily chastising his eastern European nanny for her mispronunciations (hardly side-splitting) to an interview with a neurotically fastidious Pat Kenny, who, after a laborious, predictable and elongated sketch, ended up, along with lisping gardener Dermot O'Neill, being arrested by McDowell's L-plated Garda Reserve for having narcotic plants in the radio-centre studio.

From McDowell and Kenny to a nicotine-soaked Marian Finucane (rendered as a gasping pulmonary car crash), Cooper proved himself a competent mimic, though, funnily enough, the one character that worked quite brilliantly was not someone recognisable to the general public but an obscure, carrot-topped, desperately helpful and hard-pressed radio researcher trying to marshal the interactions between Cooper's other various guises, including George Hook and Kevin Myers.

Cooper's characters came thick but not fast enough, the fact that he was playing all of them demanding cutting and camerawork that were overly ponderous.

There were one or two moments of pithy observation (McDowell reminiscing about Law Society cheese-and-wine evenings and a chilled Fintan O'Toole with a hukka pipe in China), but The State of Us might be in a better state if Cooper's obvious talents weren't over-extended and if he was buoyed by a script released from the constraints of an RTÉ broom cupboard.

ELSEWHERE IN THE home schedules were two meditations on art and science that humanised both poet and surgeon. The first, Arts Lives: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill: Taoibhsí i mBéal na Gaoithe, told a riveting love story laced with breathtaking poetry and almost carnally beautiful footage of the west of Ireland. Ní Dhomhnaill has worked in Irish since she began writing poetry in her teens, when she won £3 in an Irish Times competition and began to think of herself as a poet. Interspersed with her life story - and most specifically the story of her meeting and falling in love with her Turkish husband, Dogan (much to the violent chagrin of her family) - were her readings from her work, which were translated in subtitles. Without doubt, had her electrifying poems, heavy with the tremulous beauty and sexual intensity of first love, been taught during my school days, when we were all up to our necks in Peig Sayers, I for one would have sat up and paid attention.

A linguist, wife, mother and daughter (of a frustrated, disappointed and "deranged" mother), Ní Dhomhnaill spoke with clarity about both opening herself up to her art and the reality of her family life, of "letting the world seep through you as if you had no skin, and then getting up to make the dinner".

"It has humanised me," she said, "writing and my children." A mesmeric film in an always excellent strand and a fantastic testament to the power of Ní Dhomhnaill's imagery, this was a programme that will live on in the mind.

THOSE AUTHORITATIVE MEN (usually) in green gowns, who wield the scalpel and have a reputation for draining current accounts and employing the bedside manner of an unwashed David Gest, were in the dock in Surgeons, a superb RTÉ documentary from the makers of Junior Doctors.

Part one of a four-part series focused on the work of two neurosurgeons, Ciaran Bolger, at Dublin's Beaumont Hospital, and Charlie Marks, at Cork University Hospital, with Bolger performing an "awake" craniotomy on a 42-year-old single mother of two lovely daughters (a procedure that was a lot uglier and more terrifying than the recent prettified TV version in the aborted medical drama 3lbs). Interestingly, both men spoke of the potential for failure in their work, and of the awesome responsibility of entering someone's brain, the "centre of the soul", repository of memory and personality.

"I lie awake at night worrying about the awful consequences," said the gentle and eloquent Marks who, rather charmingly, described himself as "a bit of a dismal Jimmy at times".

Bolger, dynamic, briskly intelligent and down to earth, was refreshingly candid: everyone is treated the same way - badly - he concluded, pointing out that waiting lists for non-emergency neurosurgery run to more than a year, whether you are a public or a private patient. Bolger's plea was for a doubling of the number of consultants in his field. In an era of continuing crisis in the health service, when there has been a sense that consultants hold a stacked deck in their elegant fingers, this timely series showed committed individuals struggling to work in an under- resourced area, not demi-gods wafting around hallowed operating theatres. It should be compulsory viewing for the shadowy vote-seekers who'll soon be crowding your doorstep.