Worst programme on TV? Caso chiuso

Last night's TV reviewed: Inside the Medieval Mind; Sex, Lies and the Murder of Meredith Kercher; Come Dine with Me

If you believe the camera on Inside the Medieval Mind, life in the Middle Ages was a weird and scary trip: the invisible men shimmering around the place, the dog-headed people lurking in the shadows, the women in glowing white robes popping up behind you when you're trying to play chess with your doppelgänger. The Renaissance must have come as such a relief.

I don't believe the Middle Ages felt like that at all; actually, life probably was scary, but in banal ways. Most people were too worried about hunger, cold, disease, the fact that everything was damp and smelled funny, wild things making noises in the dark, and the prospect of being beaten or maimed by their fellow human beings to give much thought to dog men. Still, it's not often that my main problem with a television programme is that it's too interesting, and I'm prepared to overlook the colourised, glossy look inflicted on the scenery on the grounds that they've left Professor Robert Bartlett alone. He is a large man who looms at the camera, and he is, if not dishevelled, not exactly shevelled. He projects a reassuring impression of a man who's been asked to do this because he knows about it and has interesting things to say.

The theme of this programme was the emergence of rational thinking from a world of superstition. The thing that distinguishes our minds from medieval ones is that we are more likely to ask questions and look for evidence. In the Middles Ages, knowledge was, essentially, received. If it was in the Bible, it had to be true; and if you heard stories of green children emerging in Suffolk from a marvellous underground country, of wild fish men being caught at sea, of far, distant regions inhabited by men with faces in their chests or giant feet they could use as umbrellas, well, given that you hadn't heard any different, you might as well take those to be true. Professor Bartlett quoted a report by the abbot Ralph of Coggeshall, about the netting of a fish man, who refused to utter a sound, even when hung upside down and tortured for information. For Bartlett, what was disturbing here was that Ralph worried less about whether the story he'd heard was true, than about what category this creature fell into (did it have a soul? In which case, ought it be converted to Christianity?). For me, what was disturbing was the casual mention of torture as a means of extracting information. Didn't they even have the decency to pack them off to a friendly power to get the torturing done?

There was quite a lot of entertainment in this vain: stories about people chucking spears and arrows at the moon during an eclipse, or about beavers, who would fool the huntsmen after them for their scent glands by biting off their own testicles, then cocking a leg to show off the blank space. Similarly, medieval bestiarists pointed out, we should be biting off our own vices, so that the Devil can see there's no point hunting us. Why doesn't David Attenborough give us useful stuff like that?

Sadly, all this picturesque counter-knowledge was being slowly picked apart by advances in thinking: Thomas Aquinas promoted reason, so long as it was compatible with the Bible (Bartlett got in a good story about his parents trying to dissuade him from the clergy by locking him up and sending in nubile young women); Roger Bacon promoted experience as the measure of knowledge; the conquest of Moorish Spain gave Western Europe possession of Aristotle's philosophy, as well as Arabic numerals – so much easier to calculate with. Meanwhile, travellers such as Marco Polo were establishing that the Eastern fringes of the known world were not inhabited by dog-heads – in fact, the Easterners assumed that the dog-heads all lived in the West. Occasionally, Bartlett left gaps that needed filling. His account of the invention of the mechanical clock implied an impressive industrial-technical infrastructure, with metalworkers who could make complicated and precise components. Clearly, there was something he wasn't telling us. But there are another three hours to go, and I'm looking forward to looking back.

Talking about rational thinking... Caso chiuso, or case closed, the Italian police trumpeted less than a week after the murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia last November. Three suspects were in custody, accused of forcing the 21-year-old to engage in drug-fuelled sex before cutting her throat. Anyone following the lurid early press coverage, lapping up the sensationalist stories of sexual perversion and out-of-control students in the ancient university town, could be forgiven for thinking that would be that. Unsavoury perhaps, but straightforward.

Not so, said last night’s Cutting Edge documentary Sex, Lies and the Murder of Meredith Kercher (C4) which revealed that, six months on, the circumstances surrounding the homicide remain very much open to question. The principal thrust of the programme was that the police case has never been anything like as convincing as was claimed, and that they have repeatedly struggled to make the facts fit a theory shown at every turn to be flawed.

Now it should be noted that broadcast journalism has a disease. When a news programme or documentary can’t find anything original to report, it fills time by asking other journalists or “experts” to pass comment on – or analyses “the media”, as if “the media” wasn’t anything to do with them. Reports of a high-profile murder or football signing or entertainment event will inevitably include a reporter talking about the reporting of the event. This was most evident at the height of the Madeleine McCann drama, when reporters reported on reporters; and the media noted the activities of the media.

Last night’s documentary began most loftily, and with Cutting Edge’s august lineage behind it, why not? The media had descended on Perugia in Italy after the British exchange student’s death and – shoving a camera in a student’s face – Cutting Edge reported how the media had shoved cameras in the faces of students. The image of Perugia was, we were told, “Dante by day and Inferno by night”. All this hyperbole about hyperbole came furnished with a soundtrack better suited to a Hammer film.

The investigation’s initial hypothesis – that Kercher was murdered by her 20-year-old American flatmate Amanda Knox, Knox’s Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito and Congolese club owner Patrick Lumumba – was proved wrong within weeks when Lumumba was released after providing an airtight alibi. When another suspect, Rudy Guede, was then detained after fleeing to Germany (he admits being with Kercher at the time but denies murdering her) the investigation’s desperate efforts to link him with Knox and Sollecito, as portrayed here, bordered on the farcical.

“We still know nothing with precision. We have no motive and don’t even have a dynamic of the crime,” said Meo Ponte, chief crime correspondent of the Italian daily La Repubblica, who dismissed the scenario put forward by the investigating magistrate in Perugia as “fiction”. Ponte was just one of a number of critical voices featured here, among them Lumumba, Knox’s parents and a leading pathologist who insisted the murder was committed by no more than one person. Subject to this kind of scrutiny, much of the forensic evidence said by police to be rock solid also appeared to be flimsy. Only this week came news that the latest post-mortem examination results couldn’t even say conclusively that Kercher had been sexually assaulted.

The case is a contradictory tangle: Kercher was found in a pool of her own blood. Knox has been painted as an unfeeling party girl, and was filmed kissing Sollecito after the murders – Cutting Edge showed this footage while telling us “the media” had shown the footage. Knox’s tearful parents were interviewed and Cutting Edge also employed a famous Italian crime journalist to wander the streets of Perugia, unhelpfully noting that nothing could be proved or deduced.

And then, some pantomime: a wild-haired sociologist with opinions about this apparently seething town threw his arms around like Johnny Ball (with the bushy eyebrows of Great Uncle Bulgaria), exclaiming wildly about student behaviour. “They come to Perugia and they EXPLODE. You SMOWWWKE TOO MUCH. YOU DREEEENK TOO MUCH, there is group sex ACTIVITEEEE and then everything GETS OUT OF CONTROWWWL.” We may start calling this phenomenon Peston-itis, in honour of the BBC’s business editor who overexclaims every syllable.

Nothing yet is known for sure about the “sex”, “lies” and “murder” of Meredith Kercher, so in the vacuum Cutting Edge served up some talking heads, reheated salacious rumours and was just as grubby as any preceding news broadcast from which it tried to set itself apart. Were the Italian police too hasty in making arrests? Did they, along with half the world’s press and this documentary, pursue fantasies rather than facts? Nothing can be determined until the case goes to trial later this year. So far, none of the suspects, still detained and all protesting their innocence, has even been formally charged. By the end of this programme the only thing that could be said with any certainty about the death of Meredith Kercher is that it was anything but straightforward.

Having scraped the last layer from the barrel-bottom of fame for last week’s one-off “celebrity” series opener, Come Dine with Me (C4) settled into its new evening slot last night with a cast of four mere mortals at the culinary coalface, each hosting a dinner party for the others with a view to skewering the prize for best evening in.

It is a simple format that never seemed so offensive coming in short daytime bursts spread over a week. But the move to primetime and the new hour-long format really betray the show’s lowest-common-denominator origins: the cheap-laugh competitors, the bog-standard production values, the woefully unfunny “comedy” commentary, and the miserly prize fund of just £1,000.

Last night’s quartet from Newcastle comprised a gay man who collects Barbie dolls, a female boxer, an obsessive hoarder and a Conservative councillor (“Ooh-er,” went the voiceover). All were so clearly chosen for their foibles rather than their kitchen skills it was frankly pathetic, and the result was all too predictably cringe-making. Truly, Channel 4 must be feeling the credit crunch badly to try to pass off this cheap, tasteless tat as primetime-quality fare. Truly, I think I've just discovered the worst programme on television.

Lee (gay man who collects Barbie dolls), who's not very good at hosting, or dinner, or partying, is hosting a dinner party. He's not spectacularly and hilariously bad at those things, just not very good at them. The guests, whom Lee didn't know before, turn out to be as unspectacular as he is. There's nothing wrong with them - well, apart from Brian, who's a bit of an arse, to be honest. And a Tory. But not enough of an arse to be amusing.

Becky and Brenda I'm sure are very nice, but nothing about any of these people is convincing me they should be on television. There should be a reason for someone to get on TV - an expertise, a skill, a story, the ability to entertain or act or read the news. Or, to get on Five, an interesting medical condition, like a twin brother growing out of your forehead. But this lot have nothing interesting to say or do, no party tricks; their foreheads are sibling-free.

Lee and Becky try to guess how old Brenda is, but Brian won't comment on
a lady's age. Then, after a couple of glasses of wine, a little innuendo creeps
in. Brenda says she's very particular about what goes in her mouth. Ha ha ha. Lee gets a bit tiddly and drops a bottle of wine while trying to open it. By happy coincidence, the camera is focused right on him as he does this, almost as if it were staged. Anyway, the evening now has drama. The bottle doesn't break, but some wine is spilled on the floor and a cloth is required.

This show is not purely about entertainment, though - it's about food, too. So Lee's starter doesn't work very well. The breadcrumbs haven't stuck to the calamari. But it's not a catastrophe either. The Beef Wellington is better: phenomenal, says Brian. Brenda notices how often Brian says phenomenal. She won't eat the Beef Wellington, because she's very particular about what goes in her mouth. Ha ha ha. Becky doesn't say much at all. And then Lee's pudding, a raspberry and passionfruit mousse, is, wait for it, it's hilarious ... a disaster! Ha ha ha ha. But we can still go to the website to get the recipe! Ha ha ha.

So, basically, we've joined four unspectacular people for an evening of unspectacular food and chat. I haven't been amused, or entertained, I've learnt nothing about food or anything else. But, wait, that's not the end. Because - and this is the really clever part - we have to do the same thing all over again. And again. And again. Dinner round at Brian's place. Then Becky's and finally Brenda's. All four in one show. By the end, I'm so bored I'm angry. Who's responsible - whose idea was this? You're fired. Andy Duncan, head of Channel 4, you're fired. You're all fired.