Spacing out

Just where will reality TV draw the line?
Dermot Bolger hazards a guessI make it my business not to be judgemental about any unusual sexual preferences among my regular readers (thank you both for your Christmas cards, incidentally), but I have good and bad news if your particular quirk is watching grown people being forced to roll back and forth while wearing nothing except a white body-stocking purchased from a fetish shop and an oversized incontinence nappy. The bad news is that if you missed last Saturday's Space Cadets (Channel 4, 9pm, every night) then you've missed out on your fantasy. The good news is that – trust me – it really wouldn't have been worth your wait.
One suspected that the contestants on Space Cadets felt that they were being made to look ridiculous as they were earnestly encouraged to urinate into these nappies underneath their fetish body stockings – but then again, at least in retrospect, they will be able to console themselves that they looked ridiculous at all times.
As I write this on planet earth, the sturdy contestants believe that they are in intensive training in a hi-tech Russian base (they are actually in Ipswich) to become the first television space tourists. Whittled down from a host of entrants, and carefully selected for their total absence of cop-on, the show's sole purpose is to see whether they wise up to the fact that the programme is an elaborate set-up or whether they continue to swallow the outlandish lies being fed to them, even to the extent of imagining that they are about to lift off into space.
Exciting? Innovative? Exploitive? A neat cocktail of postmodern irony? An invitation for couch potatoes to feel even more smug as they watch the bewildered contestants grow more bewildered? It seems to me that Channel 4 should forget all this foreplay and cut to the ultimate quick of reality television: rounding up a group of wanabee contestants, giving them the date rape drug, sticking them on a bus, staging a mock multiple car crash and having them wake up convinced that they are actually dead. Then, in between the ads, we can all sit back and take bets on how long it takes the suckers to figure out that heaven is actually in Ipswich and God is played by an actor who once had a minor role in Eastenders.
This week RTÉ also got on the bandwagon of playing with reality in their new show Anonymous (RTÉ 2, 10.35pm Monday) where hometown “celebrities” pass themselves off – with the use of make-up and hidden cameras – as people who do something useful. This week Samantha Mumba passed herself off as a Zambian nun. This is not as hard to pull off as it sounds because we know, by and large, what nuns do. A more interesting scenario would be to get a nun to pass herself off as Samantha Mumba because I suspect that, like me, such hardworking figures of public ridicule might not have a clue about what so-called celebrities actually do.
We know what Paul Williams does, and it takes considerably more courage to know that there might be a bomb underneath your car than a few photographers following behind it. Williams was the latest guest in Gerry Ryan's generally excellent series of interviews, Ryan Confidential (RTÉ 1, 10.15pm).
In the week when Gardai found a bomb being transported at the M50 toll plaza, Williams was as straight talking and impassioned as ever in recalling the attempt by criminals to blow up his family. Nobody in Dublin seems too worried about the current fad for criminals murdering criminals, but as Williams pointed out, if they are allowed to kill each other it is only a very short step to them taking it upon themselves to extend that right to casually kill night-club bouncers, policeman, journalists or else one else who crosses them. Ryan Confidential is easily the best television vehicle Ryan has had, with his interview earlier in the year with Paul McGrath making for harrowing and fascinating television. Long may the series continue.
Ryan is not as long in the tooth as Michael Parkinson whose talk show, Parkinson (UTV, Saturday, 10.10pm) goes back to the days of black and white television and possibly to the days of Neolithic cave painting too. It was (almost) worth sitting through an interview with Michael Flatley to see a rare interview with Peter O'Toole, who was plugging the Irish made version of Lassie, produced by Ed Guiney between episodes of Pure Mule. The film has all the trademark quality of its director Charles Sturridge, is beautifully shot, and as befits a good Christmas film, has a villain for children to hiss at. Bizarrely, it shared a shooting headquarters in Clancy Barracks with a fleet of Dublin clamper vans who kept crossing the set between takes. Alas, no clampers made it into the finished film or parents would have a few villains to hiss at too.