Here’s the plot. Bill and Barb and Nicki and Margene live together in suburban Salt Lake City. They have many, many children, and three separate houses that back onto the same courtyard. The houses are neat, the lawns are clipped and Bill drives a huge, shiny, gas-guzzling estate. This is Desperate Housewives with slightly less despair but many more housewives.
Of course, the first thing you think of with polygamy is the sex. For men, polygamy is about three women sitting around a kitchen table and drawing up the intercourse rota. But the sex turns out to be just another complication for the polygamous husband. In fact, Bill’s life is so full of complications that he’s no longer up to the job in the bedroom. Which creates a further complication: the disappointed wife immediately wonders whether it’s just her, whether it’s okay with the other wives.
Bill’s biggest problem was first identified by that well-known marriage-guidance counsellor Abraham Lincoln. Bill is struggling to please all of the people all of the time, but he just doesn’t have enough attention to go round: not only for his immediate family, but also for his sick father, his wayward brother, the new business he’s setting up and his sinister father-in-law (Harry Dean Stanton). It is like watching the problem page of a glossy magazine unfold before your eyes. If you think you’ve got problems at home, multiply them by three and just imagine.
Lots of familiar problems were on parade in The Convent (BBC2, Wednesday). What a condemnation of modern life this turned out to be. Four women from the outside world have volunteered to spend 40 days and 40 nights in the Convent of the Poor Clares, West Sussex, where nuns rise at 5am for a day of disciplined contemplation. The four visitors were childish, badly behaved, rude and hopelessly self-indulgent. Some failed to get up in time — pretty basic, you might think — and two of them sneaked off to smoke roll-ups and sunbathe. The nuns, by contrast, were generous, sensitive, diplomatic and full of surprises: one of them took her vows after divorcing her husband on the grounds that he was a television addict. All in all, the nuns took a more enlightened view of the outside world than the outside world seems to take of the nuns.
As in all the best reality-TV shows, the cast had been skilfully assembled. There was Victoria, a poet whose so-called open marriage is clearly upsetting her husband; Iona, a troubled singer who gave up alcohol after a religious experience; Debi, a children’s entertainer, who was scarred by her parents’ early divorce and spent most of the first programme in tears; and Angela the workaholic, who wonders whether it’s all worthwhile. I think it was Victoria who described The Convent as Catholic Boot Camp, and it’s an apt description. As in The Monastery, a group of raw recruits arrives. They buck against the system but, under the influence of the firm-but-fair Drill Sister, they will surely make the grade. My favourite moment was when one of the nuns explained: “We are creatures of habit.” Sister, I do believe that was a joke.
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You don’t have to go into a convent to cure a troubled childhood. You could marry into the royal family instead, which was the preferred solution of the Duke of Edinburgh, whose life was considered by Philip and Elizabeth (Monday, Five). He certainly seems less grand when you learn he was born in a house called Mon Repos, but any repose for his family was mercilessly brief. A year later, his father was tried for treason in Corfu, and was saved from execution only by British intervention. The family settled in Paris, where Philip wore hand-me-down clothes. His mother suffered a breakdown and was taken to an asylum; his father went off to the south of France to live with his mistress. Philip, meanwhile, went to school in Britain and spent holidays with relatives.
Our guide was Gyles Brandreth, who doesn’t seem quite in tune with modern television. He has the air of a happy-go-lucky 1950s undergraduate. You half expect him to appear with the scarf of an Oxbridge college looped casually around his neck, and he’s surely the only person in the country who still uses the phrase “work hard and play hard” without blushing.
That said, as a friend of the Duke, he produced a balanced account and tackled rumours about Philip and other women. Katie Boyle, once the face of the Eurovision song contest, is supposed to have been a conquest, but looked genuinely distressed at its mention. She denied it convincingly, but rather ruined the effect by saying she’d have done so even if it were true.
There is a well-known link between Philip and the Chinese, but I am too polite to make it, despite the easy introduction it would make to China (BBC2, Tuesday), a documentary series about that huge country over which is scattered one-fifth of mankind. We all know that China is going to take over the world and steal our jobs, but what was so jaw-droppingly fascinating is how little it has changed. The Communist party’s grip is still almost total. New recruits would not have looked out of place on the Tory A list, but they sounded like PR officers for North Korea: “It is the goal of all progressive and healthy young people to achieve the goal of Communism.”
Judging from this first episode, the Chinese are personally friendly and welcoming, but also spectacularly bossy. The camera followed the deputy head of a street committee on his rounds — ordering neighbours to tidy up the street, to mind themselves up a ladder, to work harder. Then we saw a district officer in Tibet go into the fields to urge a Tibetan peasant woman, through an interpreter, to organise and strengthen political study, and to work harder to meet the targets of the women’s federation.
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What a study modern China would have made for the Enlightenment pioneers considered by Andrew Marr in Age of Genius (BBC4, Monday). Television is never very good with ideas, but Marr managed to set out the main points of the work of David Hume and Adam Smith while demonstrating the influence of 18th-century Edinburgh on the modern world. Marr waves his arms like a Dan Cruickshank impersonator, and there were too many men in wigs drinking in darkened rooms for my taste, but he has an engaging turn of phrase and an eye for entertaining detail. For example, Adam Smith was a mummy’s boy who was abducted by a gypsy woman at three. It’s a wonder he didn’t end up in the Convent of the Poor Clares.
AA Gill is away