Wearing the trousers

TV Review:Skinny and Gymkhana ride again! The fabulously fatuous fashionistas, Trinny and Susannah, like a conjoined "tell-me-that's-Armani" fairy godmother, are back on the box, sprinkling their elegant fairy dust over unsuspecting members of the British public in Trinny and Susannah Undress the Nation.

This week, the girls - Trinny, the swaggeringly aristo, bony one (all sulky jaw and vicious elbow, with a high-maintenance pout and a penchant for footless tights), and her rather more warmly slovenly partner, Susannah (who, one suspects, might occasionally fall into bed with her make-up and kitten heels still on) - decided to turn their attentions to men. Males, apparently, are the world's "forgotten shoppers"; politicians, peacemakers, warmongers, mechanics, the boyos don't know their assets from their asses, it would seem. Hence, the "male dress code", a kind of Green Cross Code for shopping, which the girls dreamed up, rather mystifyingly, after visiting a slate mine in Cumbria (no, I have no idea why either) and, more relevantly, after observing surly men and their snappy wives bickering in department stores over ugly V-necks.

All males are "types", spat Trinny, as she peeled nylon sports shirts from hairy abdomens, the knuckles on her claw-like hand looking indecently well fed compared to the rest of her. The types are "short-legged", "beer-bellied", "man-boobed" and "skinny" - and if you are all of the above, don't bother getting out of bed in the morning, you are in a class of your own, mate, one which the girls discreetly shunned.

The sartorial solution to Trim 'n' Sin's hyperbolic problems involved a men-only shopping day at an Oxford Street department store and the proselytising pair hanging out of open-topped buses with megaphones, threatening to tongue the few well-dressed men they spotted from atop their float. Culminating in a bunch of weary and embarrassed blokes, "live mannequins", standing in the shop window looking like they'd rather be eating their favourite old trainers than casually asserting their masculinity in a pair of bottle-green suede moccasins, the entire exercise seemed almost poignantly futile. Nevertheless, there is something hypnotically fascinating about watching this duo make a living.

It may be that their popularity is due to the absolute veracity of their vacuousness. Trinny, for example, managed to overcome her claustrophobia in order to tunnel into the slate mine and nab a couple of beefy miners, but was genuinely panic-stricken when the pit manager, taking account of the underground temperature, ordered her into a fleece.

"Fascinating, isn't it?" she breathed, back in her comfort zone (an airless London dressing room), as she hung a scarf around the neck of a big bloke with small glasses, transforming him from a big bloke with small glasses to a big bloke with small glasses and a scarf. Indeed it is, Trinny; mind-numbingly fascinating.

'IF ANY QUESTION why we died/ Tell them, because our fathers lied." In 1915, the war propagandist, patriot and fervent believer in a benign, paternalistic empire, Rudyard Kipling, used his not inconsiderable influence to have his only beloved (and chronically myopic) son, John, train as an officer in the Irish Guards and go off to fight in France. There, on his first and last foray "over the top", the boy became, according to the statistics in My Boy Jack, one of the 385 English officers and their 7,861 men to have died in the mud during a single day, that day being the one after John Kipling's 18th birthday. "How could I condemn my son to oblivion?" Kipling snr finally asked himself.

Actor and writer David Haig's moving film chronicled these events, with Haig playing the beleaguered and spiritually lacerated writer (to whom he bears a startling resemblance) and Daniel Radcliffe the earnestly determined young John, giddy for adventure, saturated with responsibility and seemingly impervious to the finality of death. Filmed in Ireland and partly funded by the Irish Film Board, the drama included a plethora of Irish actors (among them Peter Hanly, Nick Dunning, Laurence Kinlan, Rúaidhrí Conroy and Bosco Hogan) in a largely excellent cast.

Fittingly, in a low-key and resonantly personal film (most of the action took place within the manicured domesticity of the Kiplings' country home), Radcliffe, an actor who carries the weight of the world's most famous wizard on his thespian shoulders, was suitably understated.

Soap star Kim Cattrall, however, who played John's American mother, Carrie, had the alarming diligence of an actor who is trying too hard; sans eyeliner and douche bag and with her platinum head sombrely brown, she nonetheless looked like she'd just stepped out of her trailer, all spruced up to do some serious acting.

Engrossing though it was, the film, which focused on Kipling's search for information about the fate of his missing son, felt somewhat curtailed, possibly falling short of exploring the depth and extent of Kipling's disillusionment. A gallant and affecting piece, however, and a gloomily beautiful reminder, as the poppies were fading on the newsreaders' lapels, of the desperate suffering of an entire generation.

I HAVE TO admit to being entirely bamboozled by RTÉ's new consumer . . . (here I hesitate) . . . game show? Talk show? Use-up-that-big-blue-set-that's-been-hanging-around-the-scenes-dock show? Highly Recommended is a strange hybrid dedicated to highlighting the anomalies and inconsistencies that face consumers on our patchy home turf.

Presented by J-o-o-o-o-e Duffy and featuring a three-person consumer panel (businessman Ben Dunne and journalists Conor Pope and Barbara McCarthy), the show invites members of the public to convince at least two of the three heads in the plastic chairs of the viability of their money-saving schemes, and thereby trot home with a couple of grand in the pocket of that new jacket they bought to wear on the telly.

First up was a bellicose woman with a holiday apartment in Turkey who'd delighted in having some nice, new, pure-as-the-driven-snow Turkish crowns planted in her happy gums, without having to re-mortgage or hock the family silver.

She'd paid her Turkish dentist about €400 per tooth, as opposed to the GNP of Uzbekistan (although that probably wouldn't quite cover it) she would have had to fork out for the same treatment here. She got the panel's dosh.

Then a neatly pressed farmer advised us to burn oats rather than oil, explaining how throwing bags of cereal into his burner had saved him a small fortune in heating bills (the point being illustrated by footage of neat-if-sheepish farmer up to his manly oxters in a bubble bath). He got the dosh too.

The panel attempted to squabble among themselves, Ben Dunne lamely attempting a populist muscularity like a kind of avuncular iguana, but really the three heads were like puppies with a rubber budgie. The more insightful comment or analysis came from the floor, as careful dentists recommended caution (and flossing - well, even if they didn't, they would have) and environmentalists without neckties, or reliable barbers, debated the pros and cons of burning "God's pellets". Quite where this particular party is going, we will see - but listening to Duffy on radio (a medium where he is superb) during the week, the dental issue came up again, and, in the more fluid (sorry) environment of the radio phone-in, the debate was more lively and informative.

'IF I CAN'T have the virginity, can I have the box it came in?" RTÉ2, spiritual home of the Irish stand-up, has added another half-hour to its overloaded tree of withering comedy fruit. I Dare Ya, the new bud on the branch, is different from the usual grimly self-satisfied fare favoured by the current crop of TV comics. While entirely forgettable and often flailing in the same morass as its contemporaries, it has one unique selling point: the two comics, Andrew Stanley and Damian Clarke, invite their audience to inflict pain on them. Real pain.

Dared on their inaugural programme either to have their nipples pierced or to have Pete Sampras's panting visage tattooed on to their lily-white comedic flesh, they opted for the piercing, and - fair play, lads - we got to see four little rosebuds of vestigial pap pucker under a deadly serious needle.

In less voyeuristically satisfying stunts, they were also dared to swallow other people's pints and hit on other people's girlfriends (hence the opening gag). Worth a watch if you like to see your comics' blood, sweat and tears.