It’s the bossy season again on Channel 4. This week we’ve seen the return of Jo “That’s not acceptable!” Frost in Supernanny, Kim and Aggie in How Clean is Your House? and the joyless Gillian McKeith treating another carb-heavy family as war criminals in You Are What You Eat. And last night the channel gave us its latest “I know best” expert, an American addiction specialist called Tracey Towner, in Intervention: We’re Coming to Get You.
Her specialty is a technique whereby addicts are unwittingly lured into a confrontation with their loved ones and given an ultimatum: go to rehab or never see us again. To this end we were introduced to Richard and Anna, a couple from Huddersfield with a £1,000-a-week heroin and crack habit. While they thought they were being filmed for a documentary about their addiction, Towner prepared their respective mothers for the confrontation, which involved forming teams (Richard’s best friends, Anna’s sisters and divorced father) to read letters of love and admonishment.
There was no one to challenge this controversial technique — some drugs charities have branded it “gimmicky” and “unethical” — as the programme was too busy trying to be Supernanny with needles and bongs or Honey, We’re Killing Ourselves. The way the growing nerves of the mothers were detailed as the big meeting loomed was like an X Factor audition. Towner’s authority was established through filming her like some glossy TV cop, all shiny hair and declamatory soundbites (“We do not choose the day we quit!”) with the camera swirling round. And the climactic meeting was shamelessly milked. Richard and Anna, heads in their hands having heard the pleas of their nearest and dearest, were repeatedly asked by Towner in what is destined to become her catchphrase: “Do you want to take the treatment?” We then cut to the commercial break, as if Chris Tarrant had just accepted a final answer for a possible £1 million.
Richard and Anna did agree to go into rehab and it was heartening to see the colour in their cheeks when they came out. But for all the teary moments, the programme’s reductive reality-show spin made it seem too straightforward. And anyway, tears have become a devalued currency on television since everyone is weeping buckets, whether it’s about going under the knife to get a bikini-worthy body or opening a box in the company of Noel Edmonds. Huw Edwards will be blubbing through the news next.
The most striking aspect of the sensitively handled drama- documentary 9/11: The Twin Towers (BBC One) was that it resisted showing the tears of the testifying survivors of September 11 and the relatives of the victims. It was a sudden pause or a crack in the voice that told you how the pain and grief hadn’t gone away. Yet these moving testimonies were augmenting dramatised scenes detailing the human stories unfolding within the World Trade Centre. It was like watching the Sealed Knot re-creating the events of five minutes ago, something so recent and vivid as to make any re-enactment redundant.
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More interesting is how, over the years, 9/11 television has not only multiplied — because the global consequences of that day have been so great — but also become tougher. Two years ago we got The Hamburg Cell (daringly entering the minds of the plane hijackers), which would have been an impossible commission for the first or second anniversaries.
Last night’s programme included stinging criticism from government and safety officials about what had gone wrong politically and structurally to cause such fatal security breaches. But did seeing the second plane rip through the southern tower from within the building add anything to such a well-documented and picked-over event? Not really.
Equally overfamiliar was the US cop drama Criminal Minds (Five), which revolves around a group of FBI criminal profilers trying to deconstruct the psyches of evildoers to derail their violent track records. It’s led by an inevitably brilliant but emotionally unstable maverick who name- checks Nietzsche, Samuel Beckett and Joseph Conrad to contrive a smart air of dark social underbelly. But it draws on too many other cop series on Five, such as CSI, House and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, for its visual style, character tics, mind games and the ability to find the truth in confounding evidence. Tracey Towner would have fitted right in as most of the agents spouted textbook soundbites and were the kind of ridiculously attractive types that US TV executives still imagine we want to see. It may be a post-9/11 world, but some things haven’t changed since Charlie’s Angels.