The weight of the world

TV REVIEW: Horizon: Why Are Thin People Not Fat? BBC2, Monday Too Fat Too Young Channel 4,Tuesday A Short Stay in Switzerland BBC1, Sunday

I'VE JUST BEEN stomping up and down the seafront in a pair of unbecoming trousers, in an effort to try and lose weight. And last night, when I should have been at home watching the telly, I was pinned to a rose-coloured gym mat, vainly trying to contact my pelvic floor through the medium of Pilates (although I suspect it would have been easier to open up negotiations with my long-dead granny Maddie through a braceleted medium in a beaded headscarf).

Come to think of it, I never remember Maddie jogging down to Tesco Extra in her Air Max Nikes to pick up a Weightwatchers curry and a litre of slimline milk. Maddie's was a generation that were born and died with waistlines, who ate seasonal vegetables and cows without passports, who thought McDonald's was a very jolly musical farm, and who got so excited about tangy Spanish oranges that they hid them in their Christmas socks.

I blame January (a month that outstays its welcome by about a week every new year) for the glut of lardy body-image television that is silting up the box these nights. It is traditionally a time of abstinence after the Yuletide blow-out; this year, with our dish of self-restraint peppered by stricken economics, we are being asked to check into purgatorial self-denial every time we flick the remote control.

The couch-potato punditry began this week with Horizon: Why Are Thin People Not Fat? Apparently, some clever boffin has discovered the "fat gene". The common misconception, ever since this shy gene popped out from behind the ice-cream truck, is that if you were unfortunate enough to be born with the "FTO variant" (don't ask me what FTO stands for), you're genetically predisposed to be bloody enormous and you may as well throw in the towel and lash into the Belgian chocolate milk rather than insert yourself into your hula-hoop of good intentions. But nope, that ain't what Horizon said. During a repetitive and stiffeningly boring hour, we saw 10 goofy med students stuff themselves full of squirty clotted cream and oily sausage rolls in an attempt to digest around 10,000 calories a day over a period of a month, to see if any of their number didn't actually get fat.

Apparently, this "controversial eating experiment" was first tried out on a group of Canadian prison inmates in the 1960s, although, because the human guinea pigs had little arrows painted on their suits, it seems that no one took the findings too seriously. I'm not really sure what was learned from Horizon's experiment either – most of the volunteers put on a few pounds and one bloke's gut measured the same (though he appeared to have gained muscle mass, lucky bugger).

Horizon did have a bottom line (who doesn't, these days?), and it was this: firstly, we all have "fat-baby ancestors" (the ones who survived the cave days without Calpol), and secondly, the current obesity crisis wouldn't be so bad if, like previous generations, we cooked the food we gathered, ate it slowly and got up off our lumpy posteriors occasionally to chase a couple of chickens around with a spear rather than phoning up for pizza. Fat gene or no fat gene, too much food makes you fat, and marching up and down the seafront in your ugly trackies may not make you look soignée, but at least it makes you feel better.

YOWZA. THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, Gok Wan shimmied forth in his little leather trousers. He proceeded to flail around the gym of a Leicester comprehensive, his alma mater, and to have a fit of the vapours, declaring that underneath the expensive foundation and designer labels, he was actually "a fat person in a thin person's body" (Oh, what tripe).

The elegant and increasingly egocentric Gok had, it seemed, polished his rectangular spectacles to present Too Fat Too Young (another don't-mess-with-the-title job), a documentary entirely devoted to his painful reminiscences of his fat teenage-hood. At 17, we were told, Gok weighed 20 stone; eight months later, he'd lost nine of them.

Being "fat, Chinese and gay" on his suburban estate was a tough station, and Gok clearly empathised with the overweight Leicester teens he sought out on his mission to understand why young people are increasingly increasing, so to speak. A vicious circle of low self-esteem, bullying and compensatory eating had left some teens contemplating suicide, others dropping out of school and wearyingly significant numbers undergoing heavy-duty surgery to stitch up their teen stomachs.

Gok was trying his best to be deadly serious and he was playing a blinder, bar one unintentionally comic episode when the delicately spruce presenter dragged a timid 30-stone teen around an ugly Leicester shopping centre, becoming desperately concerned at the self-conscious child's obvious discomfort (it mustn't have occurred to him that a camera crew and a celebrity pretty-boy were not the most low-key companions).

"F**k me, I was massive," he volunteered, pulling his cashmere collar around his much-reduced neck and shivering with a kind of ghastly self-fascination.

Enough of the crocodile tears already. A Short Stay in Switzerland, playwright Frank McGuinness's delicate dramatisation of the progressive decline of terminally ill Dr Anne Turner, culminating in her decision to end her own life in a Dignitas clinic in Zurich on January 24th, 2006, was a profoundly moving piece of television, a story that demanded and received real tears. This was a cogent, deeply affecting piece which, in the light of the recently televised assisted suicide of Craig Ewert in John Zaritsky's documentary, Right to Die?, again grappled with weighty moral questions about the right of individuals to end their own lives in a dignified manner.

Assisted suicide, as Dr Turner (a GP for 30 years before she was struck down with supranuclear palsy) argued prior to her death, offers the alleviation of suffering that is one of the fundamental duties of medicine. For every three people who approach Dignitas, only one will avail of its service, but, as McGuinness's poignant and intelligent script showed, its very existence can be a source of deep comfort.

Julie Walters's portrayal of Turner, a strident woman who, extraordinarily, had nursed her husband through a progressive disease almost identical to her own, was superb. Her forceful characterisation showed a vociferous, capable woman almost evaporating as her debilitating illness took hold, but managing to rise to the final challenge of persuading her three adult children to support her decision.

There wasn't a beat out of time in this film – it was one of those rare occasions when you can still feel the pulse of television's power.

tvreview@irishtimes.com

Cooped up Fighting the chickens' corner

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (pictured), the whimsical furry chef of River Cottage fame, has for a long time been (justifiably) unhappy about the state of the UK’s poultry industry. Last year his eggs-posé (sorry) of the industry radicalised the free-range market and was a wake-up call to bird-roasters everywhere as to just how appalling conditions were (and in many cases still are) for your bog-standard chicken. These birds are raised crammed together in ugly bunkers, 48,000 of them at a time, without natural light or room to move. These sad, pumped-up, hybrid creations of mass production are about as close to a farmyard chicken as your average taxi driver is to Noddy.

Anyway, a year on from HFW’s last TV campaign, many of the UK’s big supermarket chains have almost eliminated the standard chicken from their shelves and are now selling RSPCA-

monitored birds who fly in under the Freedom Foods label. Not Tesco, though, which is still selling chickeny-type thingies wrapped in cellophane at two for a fiver, or sometimes even less.

Chickens, Hugh and Tesco Too proved a highly entertaining stand-off between Free Range Fearnley and Tesco’s PR machine. Frustrated by months of failure to secure a televised interview with Tesco top brass, our Hugh came up with the canny scheme of buying a single share in the supermarket and securing the backing of 100 other shareholders to raise his concerns at a company meeting. Unfortunately, all his efforts gained him nothing more than a matter-of-fact brush-off from a well-manicured media communications woman, but, regardless, this programme will have ruffled a few feathers and brought more Freedom Food converts on-side for the furry chef’s cause.

It all comes down to money. Fourteen thousand birds in a shed, with natural light and room to move, flap, peck, roost and do their chicken thing, costs 90p more per bird to raise, so for a euro or two extra per Sunday roast, we could all be eating chickens that look like chickens again. It really is that clucking simple.