REMOTE CONTROL
Brian Donaldson finds a bunch of shows with families at war
Instead of mucking about in casinos and getting pointlessly on the nerves of the once-famous. Louis Theroux is back making the kind of show which forged his reputation in the late 90s. Within five minutes of The Most Hated Family in America (BBCQ. Sun 7 Apr. 9pm 0000 I. the old spark has returned as he confronts the Kansas-based Phelps clan whose views extend to hating homosexuals and believing that 9ft 1 was sent to punish America for allowing gays into the military while their activities amount to picketing soldiers' funerals and brainwashing their own children.
Should Theroux ever make a film about the most hated family in Britain. the Harpers and the Thatchers should sneak onto the shortlist. How on earth My Family (BBC 7. Fri 6 Apr.
8.30pm 0 ) ever survived past its first episode is beyond me. The fact that this garbage is now into its seventh series defies the laws of nature. logic and taste. You don't need to know the storyline of this 28 minutes of hell: you'll just instinctively know that it isn't right. Something else that outstayed its welcome was the reign of Dame Maggie. Mummy’s War (Channel 4. Thu 25) Mar. 9pm .0. ). marks 25 years
since the Falklands stramash (was it
really a war?) when those nasty Argies jackbooted into Goose Green. knocking dozens of penguins over to reclaim the Malvinas. Carol Thatcher drops in on the grateful Brits and. to her credit. meets some grieving Argentine mothers who lost their boys when the Belgrano was sunk while sailing away from the island. But was this really the PM's ‘darkest hour' or was it the moment when her fading Tory administration regained the public's favour to ensure a landslide election win in 1983? This question goes unanswered.
The key unanswered question with Wedding Belles (Channel 4, Thu
29 Mar. lOp/n .0 I is ‘why'? Or. more pertinently: ‘why. oh why?‘ Co- written by Irvine Welsh, this is self- parody gone haywire. There's plenty skag and shag with enough fighting and swearing to keep the writer's followers happy. but the twist of having a quartet of bridal-gowned females doing his bidding wears off mighty swiftly. Though I'll give him credit for appearing in a blink-and- you'lI-miss-it sequence as a transvestite (a blessing. perhaps) while it's not every day that you see Harry Potter's Meaning Myrtle stab Ba/a/nory's Edie McCredie in the chest with a crucifix.
You'd think that the institution of marriage would have been given enough of a hammering from Irvo and co. but the people behind Celebrity Wife Swap (Channel 4, Sun 7 Apr,
8pm 00 ) might well be aiming to stick the final nail into that coffin. Perhaps this isn't their intention: what would be the point in that? But then. the reason for this show's existence seems completely lost other than proving that no one at Channel 4 has learned any lessons from Shilpagate. Aren't we just a little war—weary of
Reviews
WAR DRAMA THE MARK OF CAIN Channel 4, Thu 5 Apr, 9pm .00
As the full weight of the war in Iraq continues to bear down on us, the related dramas and documentaries will just keep on coming. After Peter Kosminky’s The Government Inspector and Michael Winterbottom’s Road to Gauntanamo, here comes another of our right-thinking screen scribes with Tony Marchant laying into the subject. The Mark of Cain has all the standard Marchant qualities (anger, injustice, barbarism, official collusion) and hits most of its targets with an agonised certitude that will have you nodding in regretful agreement.
Focusing on a group of British squaddies based in Basra, we see the anxieties and traumas the more sensitive ones go through when defending themselves against insurgent attacks and keeping the group together by collaborating with ritual atrocities upon Iraqi subjects. While the film opens with a subtitled declaration that ‘extensive research’ has been conducted to make this film, it insists that The Mark of Cain is fundamentally a fictionalised account of warfare. Yet, the impact of the gruesome and anarchic torture scenes is dulled by the fact that all this seems just too familiar from the photos which leaked out of Abu Ghraib. If anything, this is a televisual representation of the mocked-up Mirror images which got Piers Morgan the sack; we are well aware what is in front of us is fake, but it’s still perfectly within the realms of possibility. Whatever the shape of future ‘Iraq’ dramas, their strength will come from being a little more than tacit confirmation. (Brian Donaldson)
the partying type and can’t cope when forced to host a radio show. while Feltz doesn't care for fetching Paul Daniels‘ socks or having a one- way conversation? With eight more grotesque mismatches to come it has to be assumed that somewhere there is a market for this vapid voyeurism. So. will you like this? Not a jet.
seeing people (celebs or not) at each other‘s throats in unrealistic situations which are manufactured in such a way that their sole purpose is to have people at each other's throats? So. when Debbie McGee and Vanessa Feltz swap places. how astonished are we really supposed to be on learning that the lovely Debbie isn‘t
29 Mar l? Apr 9007 THE LIST 87