Cutting Edge - Channel 4, Tuesday
Face To Face - BBC 2, Monday
Undercover - RTE 1, Thursday
Undressed - Channel 4, Sunday
Shop Till You Drop - Channel 4, Tuesday
Tony does the full monty. In fact, he does an exceedingly full monty. Discarding the Stars and Stripes flag which was all that hid his, eh, montiness, male stripper Tony gambolled naked among his all-female audience. Unlike most of the principals featured in Cutting Edge: Rogue Males, it was clear Tony does not give short measure to his paying punters. They stared and shrieked, gulped their drinks and cheered wildly as gyrating Tony leapt on to a table and let it all hang out.
Gippo (aka Alan) likes to let it all hang out too and, as a result, has eight children by five different women. "I never use condoms," he sniggered, adding a triumphal wink. Gippo, though, is not a stripper. A Strangeways graduate, he asks no questions about the goods - camcorders, video players, even a motorbike - he buys and sells. Ian and Karl are carpet fitters and Steve and Derek are . . . wait for this . . . "builders". We haven't seen so many cowboys in one film since The Magnificent Seven.
Some of the lads, of course, are more cowboy than others. Steve and Derek are the John Wayne and Roy Rogers of builders. Cowboy to the core, they built (maybe "created" is more accurate) a wall and plastered a ceiling. The wall appeared to be inspired by the Pisa School of Architecture and the plastering, were it entered for the Turner Prize, might be interpreted as homage to the old building workers' practice of working on the lump. Then again, perhaps it embodied some high concept of artistic juxtapositioning: the bedroom ceiling as ploughed field.
In part, Rogue Males was hilarious. Seeing, for instance, the clients of Steve and Derek discover the wall and ceiling was like watching a Laurel and Hardy movie in documentary form. Slapstick without contrivance can make for deliciously black humour. But these tales from Britain's black economy were not just blackly funny. Too often they were just black, reminding you that a rogue society is also part of the reason why these rogue males have become such complete chancers.
Steve and Derek, as artists sometimes do, explained their inspiration: "Maggie Thatcher started it, getting everybody self-employed, on your bike. Everyone was being made redundant, y'see, so we had to diversify . . . We're our own boss, aren't we? All the other bosses go out with the (golf) clubs and everything, so we can go out with ours. If you say to a customer, `We're playing golf this afternoon', they'll think, oh aye, this guy knows what he's doing."
So there you have it. Forget all that Harvard Business School nonsense. Just be entrepreneurial and play golf. For Steve and Derek, the tenets of Thatcherism were no mere tips to success. Rather, they had crystallised into a complete and coherent philosophy, a world view, an ideological full monty. This was sad - men without training or skills, Del Boys without redemption - spouting yuppie guff while swamped by inner city deprivation.
Made by Dominic Savage, Rogue Males depicted a 1990s Wild West of cowboys abandoned by the state. The Right will argue, of course, that there are issues of personal responsibility involved. Fair enough, but there are also political reasons giving rise to such widespread lumpenness. Not that all the cowboy capers are on the workers' side: Ian and Karl had to wrestle with one thug to get him to pay for the carpets they had laid perfectly.
Still, the larger picture aside, some of the rogues' carry-on was side-splitting. Splicing scenes of Steve and Derek philosophising in the pub ("You gotta survive. It's the '90s, fast life and we want to do a fast life") with scenes of their victim discovering what they had done to his ceiling was inspired. Indeed, it was so good that you had to wonder if the appalling mess of plaster wasn't a set-up for TV. Steve, looking like a nearly-made-up mime artist, had almost as much plaster on his face as Derek had on the ceiling.
As the latest fly-on-the-wall (though a fly would probably have toppled our builders' wall) documentary to get people exposing themselves, this Cutting Edge episode was engrossing. Watching Tony, as genially sincere as he is genitally endowed, go ape when he got his kit off, it was impossible not to laugh at the transcendental vulgarity of his act. Watching Steve and Derek in action, however, was something seedier, sadder and far, far funnier - a kind of Candid Camera without the usual cloying bonhomie at the denouement.
There was little in the way of bonhomie on this week's Face To Face. Jeremy Isaacs introduced Yoko Ono by quoting the old line about her being "the most famous unknown artist in the world". Thereafter there was a tetchiness between the pair. Either Ono was so avant-garde in the 1960s that the rest of the world still hasn't caught up or she had about as much artistic talent as Steve and Derek. These are subjective determinations but it was quite clear that Isaacs inclined towards the opinion that Ono was more cowgirl - the Annie Oakley of the avant- garde - than artist.
Recalling how she used to be "so embarrassed" by her privileged, wealthy background, Ono tried to explain the cultural and political significance of wearing, in the early 1960s, one earring and shoes with the toes sticking out. The memory of such provocative genius made her giggle with delight while Isaacs remained silent. "I wanted to create a new language," she said. Isaacs gave the impression that he just wanted her to talk sense in an old one.
Wearing purple-lensed glasses perched professorially on the tip of the nose, Yoko Ono proved she is no raconteur. Her answers routinely meandered into unnecessary detail and trivia. Whether this was evidence of Japanese inscrutability, irritation at Isaacs or an undisciplined, avant-garde mind was impossible to say. But it meant the conversation never really flowed, even if we learned more than we wanted to know about the cultural geography of Manhattan in the 1960s or her first impressions of Swinging London.
The interview was at least half-way through before John Lennon's name was mentioned. "Tell us how you met John Lennon," prompted Isaacs. "Do you want to hear that story again?" she replied. (Well, yes - almost any story about John Lennon has got to have more popular appeal than the impenetrable art guff.) So, she told of their first meeting but Isaacs clearly had no real feel for the sex 'n' drugs 'n' rock 'n' roll lore of the late 1960s. Thereafter, he asked almost nothing about Lennon and it was tempting to think that interviewer and interviewee had agreed beforehand that it should be so.
It was a mistake. Yes, Yoko Ono is a person in her own right. But the punters also wanted to hear about John Lennon. Still, Isaacs finally asked the most pertinent question: "Do you think you broke up The Beatles or would that have ended anyway?". Narrowing her eyes and glancing over her purple specs, she replied: "Of course I didn't break up The Beatles." She looked aged and weary as she made what must have been her millionth denial of the charge for which she is most famous.
Back on RTE, Undercover gathered six writers - Tom Kilroy, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Roddy Doyle, Deirdre Purcell, Michael Longley and Emma Donoghue in studio. As there is at best a tenuous relationship between the ability to write prose and/or poetry and the ability to talk engagingly about it, this was risky. However, after a laboured beginning, the sextet became more animated and open and, as conversation shows go, this was among the better ones screened by RTE this year.
"It's supposed to be all pain and anguish but, while we're not supposed to say this, I'm having a ball," said Roddy Doyle. The talk turned to the subject of writers "borrowing" material and Emma Donoghue ruminated on why certain things stick in the memory and others don't. "The Velcro of the mind," she said, using a phrase which might have been magpied from her father but, hopefully, was original. Michael Longley made the point that writers often write better against mood - penning elegies while happy or humour while sad.
This was perceptive, suggesting that the necessity to concentrate on technique - made more acute by not just following mood - is a useful lesson for writers. Anyway, after that stiff and stilted opening, the conversation became more natural. All agreed that editing nowadays is not what is should be and it is true that inside (almost) every big book, there is a little book screaming to get out. But publishing, for all its self regard, is an industry, more typically concerned (like Steve and Derek) with the "bottom line" than with the well-turned phrase.
Elsewhere, fashion appeared to be the fashion of the week. Both Undressed and Shop Till You Drop attempted to cast fashion as serious art. The former included interviews with fashion gurus Largerfeld, McQueen and the late Versace. Well, why not, except that their concentration on their "art" while omitting the, eh, bottom line of consumerism was irritating. Clearly, some designers have considerable talent. But the easy use of the word "genius" within the fashion industry is plainly ludicrous.
Shop Till You Drop was a stew of marketing buzz-phrases and pseudo-academic psychobabble. Retail psychologists have decided that women do not simply go shopping. Rather, they engage in "compensatory consumption" or may require "retail therapy". There was guff about young women in groups indulging in an "affiliation ritual" and seeking "display approval" from their peers. Grim guff indeed! But those women who demand "partner display approval" took the biscuit.
Why women drag their male partners around stores knowing that the blokes aren't really interested, know nothing about clothes and that they (the women) will buy what they want anyway was not explained. Perhaps the retail psychologists will get around to it. In the meantime, hideous rubbish about "forming a relationship with a garment", "co-ordinating staff with customers" and "decompression zones" (don't ask!) seem to be about their measure. It makes you realise that there are also plenty of cowboys and cowgirls outside the black economy.