Going to Extremes
Channel 4, 8.00pm
Six Feet Under
E4, 10pm
Craig Bishop is a doctor in need, if I'm any judge, of a doctor. You qualify as eccentric if you decide to cycle 1700 miles from Wicklow to Gibraltar. You count as a loony if
you choose to make the
77-day trip in winter. The word for what you are if
you undertake this expedition with four daughters,
one as young as seven, is probably defamatory.
For Craig, it was all a learning experience. For the girls it was proof that pop was a stethoscope short of a full-medical examination. ''I can see mega-negatives and they can't see any of the positives,'' he announced blithely.
''If we said no would it
make any difference?''
asked one daughter, getting straight to the point.
Craig was in the midst of one of those tedious mid-life finding-himself exercises and prepared to squander (pounds) 11,000, not to mention the affections of his offspring, to give
himself a bit of a buzz. His loyal wife, Annick, didn't
voice her opinions, but
her face showed a woman screaming inside. The word she was screaming was ''prat''.
Driving rain, freezing fog, thundering lorries and camping out in sub-zero temperatures: Craig thought this was life-enhancing. The reaction of his admirable daughters was more measured: ''it's crap'', one said. Pop was pedalling through gales, saying: ''You can't pay for experiences like this. They're incredibly lucky, these kids, and they don't know it.''
The kids could spot the biggest adolescent of them all. He never let up. Sixty kilometres a day, day after day, while he denied the obvious. His family were cold, wet, bored, irritable and miserable. ''I think if they were unhappy, we would know,'' said father. His idea of an afternoon off for three teenage girls was a trip to a war memorial.
When they reached the Pyrenees, a not inconsiderable piece of geology, a local explained their best route and advised: ''Don't show this map to your children.'' Even after snow fell, Craig was still itching for the ''challenging'' assault. When it came to making decisions he had a go at democracy before deciding that autocracy suited him best. When two of the girls fell
ill, their father, the GP, concluded that they could probably manage a few-dozen more kilometres.
The urge to throttle him was strong, so you can only imagine how the daughters felt. Back home, they had been embarrassed to be seen riding around with their weird parents. Here they were trapped in a documentary film for all their friends to see with no-one explaining why father wasn't living his life to the full on his own time, or why they were undergoing this ordeal
in December.
He insisted it was all educational and that they would be grateful some day. It was 15-year-old Lara, I think, who pronounced the obvious verdict after they had reached Gibraltar: ''I never want to see a bike again.'' Whether she wanted to see a compulsive film about her compulsive father was another matter.
Six Feet Under is a frustrating affair. It is intelligent and well-written, but almost entirely aimless, a series of barely-connected scenes that struggle to resemble a plot. It began last night with an excellent joke: a woman mistaking some escaped, floating sex dolls for the born-again ''Rapture'' and getting herself run over. After that, only truly dedicated fans
got a return for their
viewing investment.
Nate, the walking tragedy that is a bereaved funeral director, decided to quit the undertaking business. David's gay lover became a security guard. Bonkers Arthur became fixated with Formica, Rico was suckered into an exploitative affair and George the geologist struggled to fit in with a family still haunted, apparently literally, by a dead patriarch. So, you wondered, what?
Some of it was moderately amusing. If you are an undertaker who conducts
his business in the basement of the family home, for example, things can get
messy when the plumbing backs up. For me, nevertheless, the story of everyday embalming folk just doesn't,
as it were, come to life.
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