TV review

Drastic Plastic (five)

Pissed On The Job (C4)

IN part two, how to lose your labia and get a new vagina". The Drastic Plastic documentary about extreme plastic surgery left nothing to the imagination as women underwent surgery to achieve their idea of perfection.

It was not a pretty sight. Not the women but the operations, shown in grisly flesh and blood detail. They looked like out-takes from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Bottoms are the new boobs. Americans spent $10m on bum deals last year. The patient we saw wanted a bottom like Kylie's and was prepared not to be able to sit down for two weeks to get it. Another woman went for a total body makeover.

One surgeon sells the "ultimate sex aid" - a new vagina. This procedure was no more watchable than the visit to dominatrix Mistress Madeline's home, with its dungeon and operating theatre.

At least, we didn't see her drink at work. She needs a steady hand when operating on private parts. Doctors, train drivers, nannies and teachers also need their wits about them but those in Pissed On The Job admitted to charges of drink-working.

This was a salutary lesson for us all. A couple woke up in bed in the morning. The woman asked her bedmate: "How did we get home last night?". Drink had clouded her memory. Nothing much wrong with that, you might think, as many people get wrecked from time to time.

Then the woman was revealed as a hospital doctor in a programme offering dramatised accounts based on confidential interviews with real people.

Equally worrying was her relaxed attitude towards her drinking. Work, she declared, was "much more entertaining and thrilling for me when I've got a hangover". The cuts and bruises she regularly received from falling over when drunk weren't a problem, she said, as she wore trousers to cover them up.

She also got behind the wheel of her car after drinking, insisting: "I can drive quite well after a few drinks". A police breath test showed her alcohol level was so high that they were surprised she was alive.

The nanny featured should have been charged with being drunk in charge of children, as should the teacher who reached for the can of lager on his bedside table as soon as he woke up.

He blotted his copybook by throwing up in front of his class. His way of dealing with the situation was masterful - he blamed it on a curry, put the vomit-covered paper in the bin, and carried on teaching.

A London Tube station manager told how he needed a drink occasionally to calm his nerves. Eventually, he was helped by London Underground Alcohol Addiction Programme. That such a thing exists is a cause for concern, so are figures showing more than 50 employees a year are treated on the programme.

Most of those featured have had treatment for alcohol dependence, although the programme did little to pinpoint the underlying causes.

But one of the few sober voices heard - a doctor from the British Medical Association Ethics Committee - made the valid point that drinkers aren't the only ones who need to recognise the problem. Their colleagues must also do something about it and not deny it like the drinker.

Geneva, Newcastle Playhouse

WE begin with a lecture on mountaineering. A woman standing in front of a screen on which are projected pictures of people and mountains as she recounts their remarkable stories.

Then, after 20 minutes or so, a blackout. The screen rises and we might be dreaming. A woman climber dangles on a rope. The floor in front of her is aglow with dozens and dozens of light bulbs. Images flash on and off on the television screen in their midst.

Newcastle's Northern Stage and Manchester's Quarantine have combined to produce a mesmerising, hypnotic theatrical experience about - to quote the press blurb - "love, mountaineering and hallucination".

The title refers to the Geneva Spur that starts at 24,000ft, just before the summit of Everest. We learn this and more from lecturer Jane Arnfield, a passionately enthusiastic speaker, as she tells tales of the people who climb. Many accounts resulted from interviewing people she met during a trip to Everest Base Camp last year.

So far, so normal. In the second part, Arnfield takes an increasingly surreal journey as she puts on her summer dress and high heels to negotiate the blanket of glowing light bulbs. Video, sound, music, movement, light and dark combine to translate mountaineering into a visual and verbal journey.

Arnfield is the only performer - and a marvellously expressive and sympathetic one too - but this is no one woman show. In Richard Gregory's production the unseen contributors make equally important contributions in this stunning piece of theatre.

Runs until Saturday. Tickets 0191-230 5151

Steve Pratt

BEN AFFLECK

SPEAKS TO STEVE PRATT

See Saturday's Northern Echo