Young, Posh And Loaded (ITV)
When TV Gets Tough (ITV)
YOUNG, Posh And Loaded was the title. Young, Posh and Totally Irresponsible might be a better title. It was impossible to feel sorry when Donatella lost her handbag, Alexander failed to find a bedmate and Gavin forgot to write his newspaper column.
Would it be too extreme to say that, by the end, I could cheerfully have lined them all up against a wall in front of a firing squad? On second thoughts, that would be too kind. Far better to take away their money and make them work for a living instead indulging in their sex-and-shopping lifestyle.
The arrogance of youth, especially youth with loadsamoney, was never better illustrated. Talk about more money than sense.
At 18, Donatella is a shopping diva, who thinks nothing of spending £395 on shoes she'll wear a couple of times, or £1,000 on three T-shirts. When her party turned into her disaster and her handbag went missing, I could have cheered.
Jules was even worse, spending most of the time drunk. Preparing to go "on the prowl for young ladies", he downed half a pint of vodka and Red Bull for starters. No wonder he didn't score.
Playboy prince Alexander also likes to have "fun with the ladies", reckoning to have had fun with about 1,000 in mainly one night stands. He hits the town in his stretch limo, gets a female friend to select potential ladies at the bar, buys them champagne and asks them up to see his bank balance. How pleasing to learn he slept alone the night the film-makers watched him in action (or rather, not in action).
Then there was Gavin, a multi-millionaire journalist - something of a contradiction in terms. He's a social diarist for The Sunday Times, spending all of an hour a week writing his column, which is then "tweaked" (ie, re-written) by sub-editors. He hangs out with the rich and famous, then writes about it. "It's not exactly rocket science, but it has to be done," he said, so busy partying that he forgot to file his copy.
How different life is for proper journalists. When TV Gets Tough might well have been called Reporting Assignments From Hell or Reporters' Ten Greatest Hits - that's hits as in getting thumped, as TV crews put themselves in the firing line.
They were shown being punched, verbally abused and dodging objects being thrown at them. Reporters know that anything can happen, but are still taken by surprise. Like doorstepping investigator Paul Kenyon, knocked out when the man he'd cornered hit him with a briefcase, or Bernard Levin getting thumped on That Was The Week That Was by a man angry about a review.
Less dangerous, but no less entertaining, are verbal punch-ups. It was good to revisit John Nott storming out of a TV interview, and Jeremy Paxman as insistent on repeating the question as Michael Howard was in avoiding giving an answer.
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