TV Review/Shane Hegarty: In Fair City, Kira has had her baby. Kira, just to remind you, is a schoolgirl. A few years ago, this plot might have been treated as an issue with which to crack open the Irish psyche and push a few buttons.
Today, it is just the latest soap plot featuring a teen mother. A bauble. A sparkly diversion. Carrigstown has recently been home to gangland murder, rape, prostitution and heroin abuse. It has only just concluded an incest storyline. Kira screamed a good deal during her labour, but she will have to scream a lot louder to attract attention among that lot.
Anyway, showing early awareness of the time constraints inherent in soaps, the baby girl cut short the drifting storyline that was her mother's pregnancy and arrived into the studio premature. She also arrived with impressive veracity. For instance, she was not six months old, as many TV newborns are. As the midwife plucked her from behind Kira's gown, as if pulling a rabbit from a hat, she also had a realistic umbilical chord attached. The nurses took the baby straight to the Special Care Unit. Her life in Carrigstown is likely to feature a string of broken marriages, deaths, crises, at least one complete change of appearance, and taboos we haven't even thought of yet. They would be better bringing her straight to a foster home.
There are true stories even Fair City can't come up with. A Mother's Love told the story of Hannah, a little girl who was told that she had cancer. Not by the hospital, but by her mother. For nine months, Terri Milbrandt fooled the people of Urbana, Ohio. It is a town where the Stars and Stripes flutters in the street and on beer glasses. Where people go to church and then the nail parlour and they all have big hair and stonewashed jeans. It's the kind of place, you feel, that still believes Ronald Reagan is President. The kind of place that acts as a nursery for the "And finally . . ." sections of news bulletins.
Then we met Stephanie Milos and your smirk made a panicked dash for the exit. In the US, kids collect ring-pulls from the tops of soft drink cans, gather them up in bags and send them to be melted down into aluminium. It's a big charity money-spinner. Stephanie has a muscle wasting disease that renders her severely disabled and reliant on a respirator. She had been saving ring-pulls for nine years so that she could help her parents pay the medical bills. Then she heard about Hannah's plight and decided she would give her the precious, hard-won ring-pull collection. It made the local papers. The local television station sent a reporter.
Stephanie relayed the story through her mother, who translated her speech of staccato squeaks. The sound of the respirator hummed behind them. A bag of ring-pulls sat on a table beside them. It was a scene of almost outrageous melodrama, almost too much to take in.
But, then, A Mother's Love was an outrageous tale. Milbrandt had shaved her daughter's hair, put bandages in places where chemotherapy lines would go, and kept the good Christian folk of Urbana updated on her progress. A new tumour. A new prognosis. The steadily-shrinking amount of months Hannah had left.
She gave Hannah sleeping pills for the supposed trips to the hospital. She printed pictures of her and put them on the side of collection boxes. She toured the shops looking for donations. The town gave. It held raffles and gave loose change. The local fire station donated $500 towards medical bills. A fireman bought Hannah a puppy. Her school held Hat for Hannah day, in which all the pupils wore a hat to make her feel less self-conscious. Last Christmas, Hannah met Santa. What would she like for Christmas, he asked. To live, replied Hannah.
Before Christmas arrived, the scam was blown. The town is seething. "I've delivered a lot of death messages that were easier than the message I delivered to these people," said the local sergeant. Terri Milbrandt is pleading not guilty by reason of insanity. Her husband, Robert, says that he was also conned into believing that his daughter was ill, and didn't twig it because he had never accompanied them to the hospital and Terri looked after the bills in the house. He is pleading not guilty by reason of stupidity. Grandma Mary, meanwhile, is on trial for selling candles at the local bingo hall. As for Stephanie, well, she got her ring-pulls back. When the police raided the Milbrandt's home, they found bags and bags of them, abandoned in a dusty corner of the garage.
I'm not entirely sure what Under The Knife With Miss Evans aims to achieve, but it is late-night television that is guaranteed to send you to bed with a headful of images your mind won't thank you for. It is either straight medical documentary or extreme medical voyeurism. As for Miss Evans, she is Fanny Craddock with a scalpel. She is given to that brusque, matronly tone that is so fashionable on the screen these days, but where those women usually concentrate on telling you how to lay a tablecloth without fear of social embarrassment, Miss Evans lops off hernias with a swish.
On Monday night, she performed an operation on an incontinent woman named Lynn. Miss Evans had already performed 15 operations that day, had a lecture planned in the evening and was keen on finding time to polish off her pork chop and mash. Then it was off to the operating theatre where, without so much as a warning, we were treated in great detail to a procedure in which Miss Evans used some of Lynn's own tissue to create a sling that wound itself around the bladder and prevented leakage. Excuse me if the medical details are a little askew. Two minutes of watching Cabin Fever contestants throwing up is enough to distract me to the point where I begin to forget their names. Under The Knife with Miss Evans takes an almost indecent interest in the event. Blood runs under the path of the knife. Flesh is pinned back. Hands go in. Clotted blobs come out. The camera practically pushes Miss Evans aside so that it can squint that bit closer, while she fusses over it all in the manner of a woman baking a particularly bloody cake. You, meanwhile, spend the rest of the night awake, eyes wide and fixed, replaying details of an operation normally known only to particularly nosy endoscopes.
In Big Mac Under Attack we met Ronald McDonald's nemesis. He is Subman and he is a sandwich with arms, legs and a cape. It sounds like an interesting new combination, but he is actually the mascot of Subway. He is represented by some poor desperate actor willing to point people towards the salad counter in between gigs for the Royal Shakespeare Company, but he represents the biggest commercial threat to McDonald's. Subway stores now outnumber McDonald's in America, which is quite a shock to those of us who grew up under the impression that America contains fewer atoms than it does McDonald's restaurants.
This Money Programme special erred in making no mention of Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, because it is a book that marked the point at which the subconscious of mass consumerism aligned with the conscience of the anti-globalisation movement. This programme, though, proved a valuable what-happened-next. The 21st century is not proving as fertile as the 20th. McDonald's used to open a new restaurant every two hours, but is now in the process of closing 700 of those. It opened so many stores that they began cannibalising each other. Last year it posted its first ever loss, and its shares dropped to half their lifetime high. Its unwavering commitment to predictability is now proving to be a weakness.
The programme also included plenty of footage of old Ronald McDonald ads. To be frank, if Ronald McDonald danced towards your children today you would yank the kids sharply away from him and go look for a policeman.
The fast food giant's competitors and enemies are plentiful and dedicated. In Los Angeles there is a chain called Fatburger. While McDonald's frets over healthy options and lifestyle changes, Fatburger rolls around in lard like a lottery winner on a bed of money. Meanwhile, McDonald's and its supersize meals may face lawsuits from its supersized customers. The programme concluded with the shock results from a new study that suggests junk food is physically addictive. According to Graham Norton, who commented on it a few minutes later on Channel 4, this study is brought to you by Professor You Don't Say, out of the University of the Bleeding Obvious.
McDonald's may bounce back or it may simply be at the end of its life cycle, a dinosaur to Subway's mammal. Ray Kroc, the man who made McDonald's a global behemoth, once said: "When you're green you grow. When you're ripe you rot." He may not, though, have intended that to be Ronald McDonald's epitaph.