The property rotters

TVReview:'Tis the season to be jolly - oh yeah? Not if your thigh-high Christmas boots are tripping over open manhole covers and the hem of your mac is dragging through slush and muck as you try to visit your neighbours on one of the countless Irish housing estates that have been abandoned by unscrupulous developers.

Developers who, as soon as your hard-earned cash is shoring up their offshore accounts or being used to quieten the roar of the Criminal Assets Bureau, pack up their JCBs and leave entire communities stranded, some with inadequate water provision and pumping facilities, others in a restless sea of dirt and structural problems.

Prime Time Investigates once again opened up a can of fat, fetid and peculiarly Irish worms, this time with a special report on the property market by the excellent Oonagh Smyth. "Buyer beware" is the advice we are armed with when entering the labyrinthine and unregulated world of estate agents, property developers and, of course, the Tiger's new mewling offspring, property management companies.

Prime Time Investigates is a superb strand which, in the absence of legislation (it's coming - yeah, yeah, so is Christmas), is doing a massive public service by opening our eyes to incidences of false bids, ghost bidders, gazumping, and under-pricing properties to meet monthly sales targets. In one proven case, an estate agent allegedly obtained a client's personal financial details to determine what limit the potential buyer could be pushed to.

This was an ugly and gobsmacking programme. As one estate agent commented to an undercover reporter: "You're playing a game between greedy vendors and scabby purchasers - there is no distinction between conman and salesman."

But it's not enough to rely on a bunch of excellent and committed TV journalists to drag bad practice into the public domain. In the UK, all bids are in writing, leaving the industry's processes open to inspection, while in Australia, misleading a buyer by giving false information is a criminal offence. What is criminal here is that as we build and buy faster than any other European country, we are still patiently waiting for our elected representatives to provide us with adequate legal protection.

WITH THOSE TWO bumptious and irritating words beloved of TV publicists, "gritty" and "drama", dashing ahead of Victoria Wood's Housewife, 49 like a pair of demented bridesmaids, and having always found Wood's comfortable humour about as appetising as a plate of turkey giblets, I have to admit to approaching her oblation to the altar of the Sunday night drama with a sleigh-load of trepidation.

I could have been less neurotic: Wood's adaptation of Lancashire housewife Nella Last's extensive diaries for Mass Observation (a British government-funded research project during the second World War), written during Last's sojourn in the Women's Volunteer Service, was (much like Wood herself, who also played the title role) solid and workmanlike.

And, while occasionally bordering on the anaesthetically dull, the "drawer full of mother's feelings all in pencil" that Wood mined for her script had a certain tapioca-like charm. A delicate goldmine of domestic anxieties and fragile emotions, Last's diaries saw her emerge from a chrysalis of isolation - unhappily dependent on a taciturn and phlegmatic husband whom she called "daddy" (a spam-munching David Threlfall) - to find her strength among a group of previously timid women for whom the war offered a kind of liberation.

This "hugga-mugga" drama, a bit like Dad's Army on the psychiatrist's couch, was ultimately concerned with a search for identity ("I am sad and scared and I don't know who I am," Last's diary begins).

"Little Mrs Last", as she was referred to by the wonderful Stephanie Cole ("We can't have people hanging around like a bad smell on the landing"), mindful of her duty, stayed on in her solid house with her slowly thawing husband, continuing to post her diary until her death in 1968.

FAST-FORWARDING 60 years or so, and swopping dried eggs and bloomers in Barrow-in-Furness for an arty loft in Manhattan, a far more complex search for identity seemed to be underway. In the summer of 2003, in Coney Island, a 35-year-old man wandered into a police station carrying a backpack containing dog medicine and a guide to Latin America. He did not know his name, had no memory of his past life, and was in a "fugue state".

English film-maker Rupert Murray's very personal film, Unknown White Male, charted his old friend Doug Bruce's first two years living with "retrograde amnesia", a rare condition which wiped away Bruce's "episodic memory" while preserving his "procedural memory" (how to use a can- opener or write a signature - which, unfortunately in Bruce's case, was illegible). After 26 blood tests and countless Cat scans (which revealed nothing but a small tumour on his pituitary gland), Bruce's name was discovered and his old life reclaimed by means of a scribbled phone number in his guidebook.

He returned to a privileged life of talent and travel, of handsome friends and leggy girlfriends, of a healthy bank balance and of the aforementioned sexy, light-filled loft that he shared with his ex-girlfriend's abstract paintings, three cockatoos and two dogs. Through old acquaintances, Bruce learned that he had been a successful stockbroker who had retired at the tender age of 30 to train as a photographer. He had family living in England and Spain, and was told that he had been deeply hurt by the premature death of his mother (to whom he had been strongly attached) from cancer in Paris.

Bruce was aware of the significance of this crucial relationship, the memory of which was utterly lost to him, and recognised the possibility that he could be suffering from "psychogenic amnesia", in which the brain shuts down because it is unable to deal with an emotional trauma.

The story - fascinating, frustrating (so many practical questions remained unasked) and so like a modernist novel that one began to suspect the sun-kissed public schoolboy and his media-savvy button-down-shirted mate of indulging in some languidly conceived existential game about the nature of memory and identity - was ultimately convincing and unsettling.

Not for Bruce the dowdy psychiatric ward and a stoically borne bus to rehab from a chilly bedsit; instead, a fantastically beautiful new Australian girlfriend and a second bite at art school, which he approached with a renewed vigour and intensity.

The film excavated some knotty questions. Who are we without our past? How would we feel if we could be born again, moneyed and beautiful, into a sensuously welcoming world? And, God, could this happen to me if I got the subway to Coney Island?

THE ART OF reinvention was much in evidence in the outstandingly well-made documentary series, Hidden History: Founding Fathers, which this week focused on Frank Aiken as gunman and statesman.

Drawing on new research and dramatic reconstructions, the meticulous documentary traced the Armagh-born Aiken's trajectory from his recruitment to the IRA as a 15-year-old orphan, and on to 1922, when, as leader of the Fourth Northern IRA unit, he was involved in several bloody ambushes and attacks, among them the "holocaust" of Northern Protestants in the small, vulnerable community of Altnaveigh, during which six people were ruthlessly murdered. From these bloody beginnings, he moved on to a period as chief of staff of the IRA and thence to a lifelong role in Irish politics, eventually accepting, as a friend and confidant of de Valera, the slow evolution of the Republic. The political path of the "loyal, diligent but uninspiring" Aiken finally led him all the way to the UN where, as Ireland's representative, he enjoyed a vigorous career batting away the might of US chagrin (and the angry crozier of Cardinal Spellman) over Ireland's opposition to American policy towards China.

Hidden History told Aiken's story with precision and, without recourse to sentiment or sensation, charted his progression from revolutionary gunman perpetrating despairing brutality to a position of growing pacifism. His son Frank, visibly moved, remembered his father saying: "Dreadful things happen in war, worse in civil war."

Hidden History, however, does more than simply burrow around in our past; the strand also, implicitly, raises questions about our future. The programme invited obvious comparisons with the current peace process and that gala's glittering participants, who have reinvented themselves with acumen for this media-hungry age. Ultimately, we were asked, as with Aiken, which identity will history favour: gunman or statesman? After all, does modern Ireland really care about the atrocities committed by the founding fathers in the name of the emerging State?

'HOW CHRISTMASSY IS that? A juicy old bird and a fairy," commented Jonathan Ross as Nigella Lawson and Graham Norton shimmied on stage to present yet another arty glass rectangle to Ant'n'Dec or Mitchell'n'Webb for their blahdy-blah overwhelming-endless-scintillating contribution to the industry in the British Comedy Awards 2006 Live. A veritable feast of innocuousness, the laughs were as sparse as Harry Hill's tresses.

Charlotte Church shared a stage with Russell Brand, who delicately ignored her, rather as he would a plate of wilting hors d'oeuvres. Matt Willis, recently crowned king of the celebrity jungle, was upstaged by a terrified giant python who obviously hadn't heard of that particular coronation.

Madonna, meanwhile, mastered the autocue well enough to honour a brisk Sacha Baron Cohen for being Borat. But enough of this nonsense - time, as Ross said, rather like Jan Leeming's HRT patches, presses on.