The things we do for love

TV REVIEW: NewsnightBBC2, Monday to Friday, Imagine . . . A Love Story,BBC1, Tuesday, Miss Naked BeautyChannel 4, Tuesday, Ryan Confidential,RTÉ2, Thursday.

IT'S BEEN A frothy old TV week: naked ladies baring it all on Brighton Pier, Alan Yentob tripping through fields of bluebells in search of the meaning of love, and comely old rock'n'rollers showing off their teeth. Maybe it's the giddying after-effect of market meltdown, but even Jeremy Paxman seemed a little playful (can you say "Paxman" and "playful" in the same sentence?). On Tuesday's Newsnight, Paxman signed off from his labours somewhat portentously, saying that as it was the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, he was heading off to the bar for a tincture of rum, but would avoid those other two predilections of naval types, as outlined by Winston Churchill. He was referring, of course, to "sodomy and the lash", although, sparing our blushes, he declined to get his tongue around the remainder of the phrase.

As the credits rolled, beneath twinkling Jeremy and his brutish curls, I began to wonder if old granite-head is in some way discombobulated by the media attention his mild-mannered colleague, Gavin Esler, has received since leaving his wife and moving in with the glamorous, nay raunchy, violinist, Anna Phoebe, 28 years his junior and colloquially known as "sex on a fiddlestick".

Midlife crisis, innit? There's Esler, an intelligent, self-effacing bloke with a successful career, comfortable marriage, couple of nice suits, nice kids, and next thing a German/Greek/Irish violinist is jumping around his psyche in a rubber cat-suit - and it's bye-bye to retirement plans, hello to youthful passion and, inevitably, some heretofore wildcat's ticking biological clock.

IT'S THE OLD 24 Hours from Tulsa syndrome, as outlined in Imagine . . . A Love Story, Alan Yentob's attempt to dissect what makes a successful book, film or pop song about love and what it says about us grubbily hopeful humans that we persist in the perilous business of romance.

Yentob, in his emotionally economic, peering-under-his-intellectual-eyebrows kind of way, engaged the attentions of various writers to look at how love unfurls between the yellowing sheets of literature. Top of the British bustier-pops were the Brontës, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, the last of whom cornered the 19th-century market in love-ya-when-you're-not-around syndrome when, having claimed to despise his wife for decades, he went into an extraordinary flurry of creativity as soon as she died, placing her coffin at the end of his bed for three days while he wrote wildly romantic poetry about her.

Yentob also spoke to Helen Fielding, the amusingly ironic author of Bridget Jones's Diary, who unashamedly disclosed that she had ripped off the plot of Pride and Prejudice when writing her bestseller, firstly because Austen was dead and could do shag-all about it, and secondly because she, Fielding, couldn't have thought of a better storyline. I was impressed with her bare-faced honesty, not to mention her book sales.

More interesting, however, were Yentob's conversations with psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, who, sitting next to his gracious London window and shadowed, as arty pundits always are, by great shelves of looming hardbacks, quietly and deftly unknotted the heartstrings in a lucid dissection of love. We fall in love, according to Phillips, in order to create the imperative to leave home and as a spur to cross the threshold into the adult world. We fall in love with the familiar, he said, and then wrap that love up in a massive invention, a fiction of our own in which all that we need to be happy exists in someone else. Even fairytales, the source of our collective narrative, weren't spared Phillips's analytical eye: those ugly sisters that impede Cinderella's journey to the ball are merely aspects of the self, he said, reminding Cinders that to love is also to risk the loss of love.

Yentob's confident guests, strewn over this balmy, pastoral programme in their floppy linens and intelligent spectacles, all reached the same conclusion: without taking the risk to love, there is no life. I guess that applies to fairytale heroines as well as itchy news anchors.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE coalface of TV tedium, Gok Wan was dispensing love (of the air-kissing variety) with the generosity of a moulting Labrador to the hundreds of women who stormed Brighton Pier in their bikinis hoping to be chosen by Gok and his cohorts to star in his new series, Miss Naked Beauty.

I am bewildered by the androgynous Gok. He is a massively successful self-creation, heavily styled from gelled crown to Cuban heel, who quite literally does not have a hair out of place, and yet his credo, since he first burst on to our screens in his designer drainpipes with his transformative warts-'n'-all fashion programmes, has been that women should accept themselves for what they are. Completely undermining his own doctrine, he then proceeds to wave his magic styling wand over clutches of pear-shaped women in sweat pants who have all the self-confidence of leftover vol-au-vents, dressing them up in cement knickers, tulip skirts and high heels.

Gok's latest venture is to find "a beauty ambassador", a modern-day Eve with brains, beauty and original body parts. Having whittled down the hundreds of wannabes on the pier to a couple of dozen women (most of those with boob jobs got culled in the first round), Gok instructed the finalists to dress up in their finery and stand in a dilapidated empty swimming pool while he (nicely powdered and sporting precision eyebrows) sanctimoniously sprayed them with water cannons to wash away their waterproof mascara and their tenacious lip gloss, with the aim of revealing the natural beauty underneath the slap (he's obviously never heard of cold cream).

Gok's eventual winner will represent a spectacular amount of conflicting interests. As Ms Naked Beauty, she will be beautiful but natural, confident but not pushy; she will have God-given breasts and balls of steel; and she will be expected to take on the fashion industry while simultaneously writing for glamour mags and modelling for Select Management. She will have her bread with jam on it, her Gok with Wan on it; she will take the plastic out of fantastic, and pull us all into an era of responsible makeover-dom. God, I'm exhausted already.

SO, A STERNLY PROFICIENT, impeccably well-groomed Gerry Ryan sat across the table from Sir Cliff Richard, looking like one of those professionals you don't want to be paying by the hour, a tribunal lawyer or an orthodontist. Ryan was well within his conversational comfort zone with the singer, a man who has been shaking his delicate bones at us for the last 50 years and still looks like a 12-year-old caught in the headlights of pungent adulthood.

Ryan was clearly chomping at the bit to move Cliff beyond tales of his impoverished childhood in post-war Britain, past a rehash of the early 1960s (when Cliff was amusingly described by New Musical Express as "crude, obscene and revolting"), past the public espousal of his Christianity at that famous Billy Graham rally, past the usual old multi-million-selling patter Cliff has to trot out in his defence against the charge of being the perennial rock'n'roll bore, the asexual God-peddler who sang some of the most irritating, banal and depressingly jovial songs in pop history (Devil Woman springs to mind - let's hope it springs out again fairly quickly).

Ryan was heading for the big question, and finally got there: people will want to know, he chivvied, if you are gay or straight (or both). But it was going to take more than a practised smile in a crisp white collar to get Cliff to answer a direct question about his sexuality. Describing himself (ad nauseam actually) as "an enigma", he confessed that he may have been overly judgmental in his early Christian life and claimed that he is now less interested in absolutes, hoping only to achieve, in his personal life, the levels of commitment and love his parents showed him.

Currently sharing his home with a defrocked priest (and doubtless a picture of Dorian Gray in the attic), Cliff remains, as Ryan said, "a tease".

"I'm up for grabs, but grab me if you can," the bachelor boy chuckled through his immensely even teeth. I would, Cliff, but I've got evil on my mind.

tvreview@irish-times.ie