Radioactive split

TVReview: 'Go in, tune in, stay in." If Fallout, the controversial drama-documentary about the possible effects of an explosion at the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in Cumbria, passed you by, and you've blithely traipsed through the ensuing media discussions as to the probability of such a situation occurring in real life, then I'd like to formally welcome you back to the planet. Comfortable?

Fallout was a drama of two halves, literally and figuratively. Spread over two nights the opening programme dealt with the immediate aftermath of the explosion: clouds of radioactive waste billowing out of the plant, the story breaking on the 24-hour news channels, statements from British Nuclear Fuels and the Irish Government, alarming weather charts showing the plume of smoke stealthily making its way towards the north Leinster coast, traffic pandemonium as gridlocked cars lined the motorways, panic at bus stations as people tried to leave the city, refugee centres in the midlands bursting to capacity, decontamination tents on Dún Laoghaire harbour, looting on eerily empty Dublin streets, and an insidious rain falling on Dundalk farms, washing radioactive particles into the soil to rest for thousands of years.

Then, just as Fallout was packing its most weighty punch and the question was being asked as to why this devastation was allowed to happen, the second episode kicked in. Part two, set one year later, followed the stories of a cross-section of people caught up in the catastrophe and, although well-written and convincingly acted, the formula was recognisable and suddenly we were allowed remove ourselves from the real issues and slip gently into radioactive soap opera. And that's a shame because Fallout was an extremely well-made and challenging piece of work. Despite some sentimentality, it deserves to be applauded for raising uncomfortable questions for the nuclear power industry - and for daring to predict how we would live after an accident at Sellafield, however accurate or inaccurate those predictions may be.

The final fictional news report on Fallout spoke of a country bereft of income from agriculture, tourism and taxation, unable to sustain an overstretched health system, and bleakly, of the unknowable future for the children of a radioactive city.

"I CAN TELL from your basic level of courtesy that you love me," said Ricky Gervais's animated doppelganger, Charles, to Marge Simpson, his reality-TV wife-swap, in the latest celebrity turn in Springfield. And in a television week that dragged marriage over the coals of Hades, this painfully optimistic cry from the nuptial wilderness was about as positive as things got - but more of that later.

First contender for the tarnished tiara was Storyville: Philip and his Seven Wives, an intriguing and depressing documentary by Marc Isaacs on polygamous misery and Old Testament tyranny. Philip Sharp was a messianic rabbi until, shortly after his wife left him, taking custody of their five children, he experienced "a month of visitation" during which time God apparently told him that he was a "king". Future career prospects sorted, Sharp ditched the day job, got himself a bunch of Belgian stallions and seven new wives, and set about teaching his chattels the value of obedience, of yielding to God and king. (Although you cannot marry seven women in a civil ceremony, consummating relationships with seven women and calling them all "wife" is hunky-dory.)

"You lot - there still is not enough desperation!" roared Sharp from the head of the messy kitchen table in his suburban Hove kingdom. "The essence is getting the horse to yield! I can feel you are not yielding!" he harangued the bowed heads and tear-stained faces of his meekly compliant wives, voice booming through a hand-held microphone, an empty squash bottle reverberating to his barracking assault. Then, temper spent and wives chastised, he threw another glass of red wine into his mouth and went off to lie on the sofa and suck on an ice lolly.

Sharp was a difficult man to watch; one's overwhelming desire was to crack open the TV and drag his hairy, inflated and deeply disturbed head through the screen to slap it around a bit.

The question, of course, is why seven women chose to live with and pander to this delusional bully, to clean up his horse-shit, to run his dingy second-hand furniture shops, to sleep with him and have his children.

Staggering really, given that his sinister chat-up line was: "God wants us to have a very intimate relationship." The wives that spoke to Isaacs had had difficult lives and their self-esteem seemed desperately low. Chava, wife number three, who at 62 was almost 40 years older than Sharp's latest acquisition, Karyn, spoke of meeting Sharp when he presided over the funeral of her husband (who had died after 25 unconsummated years of marriage).

"I loved him from the moment I saw him," Chava said of Sharp. She told, movingly, of how she had not wanted to die "like a letter returned unopened" and of how Sharp had briefly fulfilled her wish to be loved and desired.

During the course of filming, however, Chava was banished from the polygamous household by Sharp. She had begun to displease him, so he sent her to live in an unrenovated house he owned, thus enabling him to let her room. "It's chilly here," Chava said quietly.

"This horrendous thing called democracy," Sharp scowled, back at the pulpit of his kitchen table, as his brow was stroked by one of his remaining minions. "There is horrendous judgment coming to this world and God will look to people like us to pick up the pieces."

NUMBER TWO ON the lousy matrimony chart was the reality TV prodigy, Wife Swap, where it was business as usual. "Her best friend is a Hoover," said a dismayed and bolshie Michelle, surveying the alarmingly pristine home of her swapette, Yvonne. Michelle is pierced and highlighted and spends all morning in bed and all night at her Isle of Wight local, playing darts with her boyfriend, Ian. Her kitchen sags under the weight of dirty washing and takeaway cartons and her three-year-old twins seem pretty much to fend for themselves. Irishwoman Yvonne, on the other hand, spends her days obsessively cleaning and washing the suburban London home that she shares with her uncommunicative husband, Dave, and their well-scrubbed, well-fed, highly disciplined children.

The outcome of the swap was predictable: slovenly Michelle attempted to mess up Yvonne's livingroom and inject some life into her largely horizontal husband, while Yvonne fed Michelle's twins, repainted their bedroom and encouraged Ian to dump the children's urine-soaked carpet. She also wept at the local karaoke night when Ian, no stranger to sentimentality, sang (relatively tunelessly) a ballad to his absent girlfriend. "If Dave did that for me, I'd feel like a princess," Yvonne wailed.

Of course, the women hated each other on sight when they met, but yes, details of their lives have changed since the swap. On the positive side, Yvonne and Dave now take regular trips down the local, and Dave, as he put it, "does try and stay awake more often".

But the sadness of the programme was in watching Michelle's three-year-old twins appear to blossom under Yvonne's dull but consistent routine, only to be tossed back to the indolently whimsical Michelle, whose self-proclaimed response to their demands for breakfast was to lie in bed and catch another 40 winks. The really depressing revelation in this reality experiment was not the blinding naivety of the contestants, but the casual cruelty of a broken promise to children who needed far more than a mum on the box for a night.

RICKY GERVAIS (the flesh and blood one with the sharp little incisors) wrote and starred in The Simpsons this week, and although much-vaunted, with funny trailers of Gervais excitedly anticipating his transformation into a yellow-faced cartoon, the episode felt vaguely reverential and star-struck.

Inevitably though, in a Gervais storyline that sent up reality TV (Homer is prepared to expose his family's most intimate moments so that he can win a plasma TV), there were some great one-liners. Charles (played by Gervais), complete with goatee and knee-length kimono, expects Marge to loathe him and feyly challenges her to "go on, disembowel me with your pointy-point words". And Homer, returning to his temporary WASP wife from "the nutmeg state" and inquiring what that delicious smell is, gets told that she is burning his underwear.