New York states of mind

TVReview: As determinedly bright children in shiny shoes lined up to embark on their education this week, RTÉ pulled up its crisp new knee-socks too and offered us its autumn season of programmes to while away the darkening evenings. Top of the class had to be True Lives: Tails from America, a documentary as smart and urbane as its protagonist, publisher John Ryan.

Ryan (as he told Pat Kenny on an otherwise desperately dull Late Late Show) fled an unforgiving Irish media for New York with his tail between his legs after the collapse of his publishing folly, Stars on Sunday. Three months later, depressed and broke, while dog-sitting a friend's pooch in Central Park, he met a woman hanging around the dog run who was grieving for her dead mutt.

"Shame no one publishes dog obituaries," Ryan proffered and - ping! - with the alacrity of Newton after being hit by a falling apple, he conceived the magazine The New York Dog, a canine Cosmopolitan for the Big Apple.

In the post-9/11 era, with New Yorkers craving "something living" to come home to after a stressful day of chasing moolah in their Manolos, Ryan's eureka moment proved lucrative.

Now with a sister title, Hollywood Dog, based in Los Angeles, the two magazines (which run articles with headlines such as "You've Got P Mail") are turning over in excess of $3 million (€2.3 million) a year, and the laconic Ryan is in Rover (sorry, clover).

The programme, borrowing the evocative theme tune of The Odd Couple and narrated by a bemused but jaunty Tom Hickey, went on to examine the US's "canine economy". Worth an estimated $36 billion (€28 billion) a year, the industry includes doggy day care, "doga" classes (doggy yoga for meditative mutts), doggy hotels (where hounds sleep on velvet cushions and are served chargrilled vegetables and chicken on a bed of basmati rice, for around a $1,000 or €780 a night) and $3,000 (€2,300) bottles of pooch perfume (and if you've ever lived with a flatulent Labrador, you'll know how much good that'll do you).

The programme was pretty sickening and desperately dysfunctional. Indeed, it was quite terrifying to observe east coast intellectuals in footless tights and cutting-edge eyewear buying four tiny strappy canvas sandals and a gingham frock for their spoilt little . . . curs (I'm running out of words for dogs).

The question, of course, is why. Contributors answered almost unanimously that dogs have "no hidden agenda" and "no ulterior motives", are faithful and loving, are "members of the family", and don't sue for alimony.

Among the doting doggy parents was a dewy-eyed Henry Kissinger, lost without his dearly loved and recently deceased . . . bow-wow (phew!). The old warmonger is now on the board of a New York animal hospital which services the pets of affluent owners.

It really takes the biscuit to watch a wealthy retriever having a $700 (€545) Cat scan, a super-rich spaniel on dialysis and a snappy little shih tzu having a $1,000 (€780) MRI scan when, as the programme pointed out, impoverished Americans who can't afford health insurance are dying for want of these tests.

But Tails From America was a fascinating glimpse of Manhattan life in all its loneliness and inequality, and Ryan and Winky, his one-eyed Mexican chihuahua in a pink angora roll-neck, were elegant hosts.

SEVEN MILLION NEW Yorkers (and their three million best friends) face the fifth anniversary of 9/11 this coming week, and programmes commemorating the event are already filling the airwaves, among them 9/11: The Miracle of Stairway B.

About as far removed as you can get from the pitter-patter of miniature Jimmy Choos on Fifth Avenue, the documentary interviewed a group of firemen who were inside the North Tower when it collapsed and who, against all odds, survived. The crew of "ladder six" movingly described the slow, treacherous walk across 16 acres of twisted metal glass and concrete that awaited them when they emerged from what they described as "a concrete vault", a protective "tepee" which had collapsed around them as they made their way down stairway B of the North Tower, having had to abandon their rescue attempts due to the heat that was making the building's frame buckle. Under a pyramid of 110 storeys which the men heard collapse above them, floor upon floor, they braced themselves for a death that never came.

Trapped, they radioed for help, and waited, and waited, hearing only "the high-pitched alarms of stricken colleagues" ringing out. When eventually their call was answered, they gave their location.

"We are underneath stairway B of the North Tower," they said, not understanding the scale of the devastation under which they were buried until they heard their colleague at the other end of the wire ask: "Where's the North Tower?" Looking for hope in the bleakest of moments, the crew of "ladder six" - navigating through euphoria, guilt and depression, coming to terms with their "luck" on a day when more than 300 of their colleagues died - experienced what they believe was a miracle.

A middle-aged woman called Josephine had been struggling down more than 70 flights of stairs in a bid to escape the burning building, an old leg injury hampering her progress, when the ladder six team encountered her. Although aware of precious seconds ebbing away as the building shuddered around them, the crew dutifully decided to wait and oversee Josephine's treacherously slow descent. But while many who managed to escape in the ensuing minutes died as the tower collapsed, Josephine and the crew survived. The programme 9/11: The Miracle of Stairway B told just one of many stories, a snapshot.

Was it a miracle or was it just luck, that elusive, promiscuous little concept that fails to confer meaning; and given the momentous nature of what they had endured, it's no wonder that these heroic men found it inadequate to explain their survival.

IT'S DOCS ON the box again. Wanting to be a doctor because you fell madly in love with Carter on ER may sound like somewhat flimsy motivation from someone who has just graduated with a degree in medicine, but hey, what ever gets you through the night (and the day before the night, and the following day). Junior Doctors, a strange but highly entertaining hybrid, which follows the internship in St Vincent's Hospital in Dublin of four newly qualified Irish doctors, is like watching Casualty in casualty - it all seems terribly real, because it is.

The four - Sinéad Beirne, Paddy Barrett, Paul Carroll and Catherine deBlacam - are an attractive and likeable bunch of twentysomethings who swing into their white coats and stethoscopes with just as much pizzazz as the unreal thing, proving that you don't need George Clooney to make other people's digital rectal examinations alluring.

At times working more than 100 hours a week, the interns - sleepily wandering through the maze of the St Vincent's basement in search of charts - battle radiographers, wake up registrars and mine plump, juicy veins on two hours' sleep and all with a camera breathing down their necks. Televisually, it seems to work. They may not be Carter or Abby but these flesh and blood fledgling docs are relaxed with the camera and the intimate, almost conspiratorial atmosphere makes quite riveting viewing.

DR GILLIAN MCKEITH has fallen out of the autumn tree, again (You Are What You Eat). A ripe little vegetarian full of stern advice and beetroot juice, the woman makes me want to run screaming to a wine bottle and a fag. And just in case you were congratulating yourself on surviving the first week of the new term without strangling your offspring or losing their football boots, McKeith, interfering ruddy guru-ette that she is, has trained her carotene-enhanced, asparagus-fuelled eyes on your child's lunch box. Yeah, yeah, she's right, no cheese-string has any right to be that orange; yes yes, my children will turn yellow if I buy bottled sun-junk; and no, I don't know how many litres of toxic waste went into that slice of ham I've just bunged between two slices of incendiary bread and shoved into their Batman boxes. Oh be quiet, Gillian - if I sent my children to school with a sardine and a sugar snap pea secreted between two lettuce leaves they'd just rob someone else's Batman box.

And another thing, Dr McKeith: it is not nice to go into people's homes and put their "poo" (as you call it) into Tupperware boxes (seriously, she really did do that) before criticising their habits.

Frankly, Gilly, that is a very weird thing to do and, you know what, I would probably contemplate the contents of one of said Tupperware boxes quicker than I would the light-brown, alarmingly flaccid, spicy baked banana you rave about - but hey, Gill, no hard feelings, it's just been a long week and I think I deserve a drink.

tvreview@irish-times.ie