KEY POINTS:
There was some legal fuss I didn't follow about Project Runway (somebody stole somebody else's really good idea for a dress made out of vacuum cleaner bags?) But, phew (or not, depending on your level of tolerance for programmes about people who make dresses out of vacuum cleaner bags) here it is again for another season.
I don't think I would have killed myself with a pair of dressmaker's scissors if the thing never aired again. But it is quite good therapy: it is shouting at the telly sort of telly. As in: "what the hell were you thinking?" Last week's episode was extremely therapeutic, featuring as it did a geezer called Jerry who made a raincoat out of a plastic tablecloth and teamed it with white meatworker's gumboots and yellow rubber washing up gloves.
"It's what you'd wear if you were killing somebody," said one of the judges.
Jerry was "out". The winner made a frock out of vacuum cleaner bags.
Blayne, who has an unexplained "ridiculous obsession" with tanning (it's unlikely there could be an explanation) wanted to make something "obnoxious". He succeeded. It was a sort of nappy getup. He couldn't explain that either so you can hardly expect me to have a go.
The other thing I like about Project Runway is that the host, supermodel Heidi Klum, wears such awful clothes, that's if you can call them clothes. I don't know how to explain them any better than I do the nappy getup but I can say that there's not a lot to them. Who's her designer?
I'd like to see one of the aspiring designers get bollocked for lack of taste and failure to actually use any material and then have them say their design was paying homage to Heidi's wardrobe. That is something that will never happen but the designers have their big dreams and I have mine, as tiny as Heidi's skirts though they may be.
Who Do You Think You Are? (Prime, tomorrow night) can be about dreams. Although why it would be some sort of comfort to know that while one is leading a dullish, poor-ish life of 21st century drudgery, one is descended from rich people who lost it all, or minor royalty, say, I don't know. Presumably if one is descended from major royalty, one would know it.
Of course the people who go in search of their roots on Who Do You Think You Are? are famous, rich people who are almost certainly more famous and richer than any of their ancestors. Nigella was on the other night. One of her rellies was a thief who fled to Britain. She seemed a bit put out by this and concluded that one "should live in the present". Well, she would say that, wouldn't she?
Tomorrow night Jerry Springer, the American talk show host who is often accused of manufacturing emotion, goes in search of his grandparents and great-grandparents. Like many of the few Jews who managed to escape Hitler's Germany, his parents never spoke to their children about what had happened. Springer knew his grandmothers were victims of the Nazis' Final Solution, but he didn't know where or how they died.
It is a very successful episode because it lets us watch (without making us feel like the voyeurs the Jerry Springer Show turns us into) somebody find out who they really are. Springer's is a very emotional story; there is not a manufactured emotion on display.
