Opening eyes and shedding clothes

Last night's TV reviewed: Ex-Forces and Homeless; How to Look Good Naked; Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts; Heather Mills: What Really Happened

Between 1986 and 1991, Davie Pascoe was a driver in the Royal Tank Regiment. These days, he reckons that “about the nicest place to sleep in London” is the pavement under Holborn Viaduct. And, according to Ken Hames in BBC1’s Ex-Forces and Homeless, Pascoe is just one of a thousand former servicemen sleeping rough in the city on any given night.

Hames himself spent 27 years in the Army before becoming a TV presenter, and here it seemed as if his initial plan was to go for a campaigning documentary about Britain’s shameful ingratitude to the people who once fought for us. In the event, though, last night’s material proved too complicatedly sad – and Hames too commendably honest – for that to happen. Pascoe, for example, clearly had problems that went well beyond the inability to afford a house, and was later sectioned under the Mental Health Act. The other participants included George Miller, who’d been a para (motto: Ready for Anything) during the height of the Northern Ireland troubles. Now, he’s alone in a hostel drinking cider.

In films, journalists are always being taken off stories because they have got personally involved, and our sympathies are always with the hacks because emotion is everything in drama. In real life, however, I have rarely watched any documentary that would not have been improved by less, rather than more, passion. As Lou Grant told the firebrand Joe Rossi in the first episode of the newspaper series Lou Grant: “You really hate guys. I can tell. I shouldn't be able to tell.”

Hames, a motivational speaker and TV presenter, proved Grant so right last night. Ex-Forces and Homeless was fatally torpedoed by Hames's own experiences in the Royal Marines and the Special Forces which, though undoubtedly distressing, have not, you will have already gathered, left him homeless. “I am sorry to keep interrupting your story,” he apologised to Dave MacLammont, a 62-year-old former Marine, although the real apology was owed to viewers interested in the story of a Falklands veteran who now roams Britain on a horse. “Like me,” said Hames, “he suffered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when he came back from the Falklands. Unlike me, he seems to have found a way of dealing with it.” Personally, I would have thought the TV presenter was living the more functional life.

Hames teared up during interviews with the machinegunner whom he met sleeping under Holborn Viaduct, a frigate gunner turned alcoholic, and the Glaswegian ex-Para who was, he reckoned, blocking out his PTSD with “libations” of cider. But what really interested Hames was his own PTSD and how it related to his childhood under an authoritarian dad. There were the makings of an insightful documentary about PTSD here, but someone else needs to tackle the shameful issue of what happens to our servicemen when they return from battle. I suggest a journalist be given the gig. Because in themselves, of course, all of these stories deserved to be heard. Yet, taken together, they soon presented Hames with the dilemma of how on earth to turn them into a coherent argument – a dilemma he tried to solve in two slightly contradictory ways.

At times, he broadened them into a general discussion of what it is about the services that might explain the difficulties of becoming a successful civilian. At others, he claimed to discover many parallels in his own life. Now and again, this second approach did run the risk of making Hames seem to compete with men worse off than he is. Nor did we ever learn exactly what he did that made him into the presenter of last night’s documentary instead of one of its subjects. (“I was lucky” surely wasn’t enough.) On the whole, however, he came across as a decent man struggling to understand how these people had ended up as they had. The result was a programme which, sternly judged, never really got anywhere – and which certainly didn’t have any suggestions about what should be done for homeless ex-servicemen. Even so, it did throw out plenty of troubling questions along the way.

By contrast, needless to say, How to Look Good Naked (C4) had no problems at all finding a coherent narrative – because it stuck to the one it serves up every week. Gok Wan duly found a woman with self-esteem issues, suddenly became her best friend and turned her from someone who hated her body into a woman who had “the best moment of my life” parading in her underwear in front of hundreds of strangers at Kent’s Bluewater Shopping Centre. As ever too, Gok’s tactics were fourfold. He assured Nicki Denbeigh that men like “curvy women”. He found the kind of clothes that disguised her curves. He attributed semi-divine properties to footwear. (“These shoes are going to help you feel more at one with your body.”) Finally, he showered her with so many compliments that before long she couldn’t wait to be starkers in almost any circumstances.

To its credit, How to Look Good Naked is a far kindlier show than its numerous rivals. (A more honest title would be "How to Not Mind Not Looking All That Good Naked" – which may be the best most of us can hope for.) Nonetheless, it’s hard to watch without imagining just how cross it would have made the feminists of the Seventies and Eighties. Last night, Denbeigh’s journey to female contentment began when a passing bloke assured her she had “great tits”. It continued when Gok got her to stand naked in an Oxford Street shop window and invited lots of men to ogle her bottom.

Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts is 'wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee' television, and delivers one of this fledgling genre's most important pleasures, which is that the coffee should be nasally administered with a high-pressure hose. So when Tara, Stacey, Richard, Georgina, Mark and Amrita were sent off to India to discover what underpins the fashion bargains on British high streets, the taxi from the airport didn't take them to an air-conditioned hotel for a couple of days of acclimatisation. It took them straight to a New Delhi slum, where they will be living alongside the garment workers whose lives and jobs they are going to share. "I'm not staying here," said Amrita, "we don't have immune systems like they do." Or a fraction of their courtesy and resilience, you found yourself tempted to add, after another 20 minutes of Amrita's unimaginative whining.

In a lot of respects, Amrita is an exemplary guinea pig: a British- born Asian who blithely announced that she is indifferent to the ethical pedigree of the clothes she buys. "I think cheap fashion's great," she said brightly before her departure. "It doesn't really affect me whether it's been made by a three-year-old or a 50-year-old." I think Amrita's too young to know that three-year-olds are really rubbish at producing a straight seam, but you get the idea. She doesn't really want to know how the costs are kept down as long as she can buy two tops for the price of one. In that, she probably speaks for about 95 per cent of British consumers, and the idea behind Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts is to make that blissful ignorance a little more difficult to maintain.

Our proxies in India had a relatively gentle introduction to global economics, being sent first to a huge modern factory that produces around three million garments a month for Western markets. In sweatshop terms, this was the Ritz, a place with a modern canteen and bright, clean working conditions. But the line-management style – pretty much any movement except breathing and stitching prohibited – didn't sit well with the new arrivals. Georgina got the hump with the supervisor, Mark got ticked off for talking and Amrita had a fit of the vapours. "It's like everything's closing in on you and you can't breathe," she said, before stomping out for a little cry on the roof. If the locals still harboured any illusions about stiff upper lip and imperial resolve, they were evaporating fast and presumably vanished altogether after Richard indulged himself in a foul-mouthed rant about the condition of the streets.

Richard believed anyone could work their way out of poverty and turned against India (“a fucking shit-hole”) big time. A preview of next week's episode had him philosophise: “I don't think it is that bad for them. I think it is fucking horrific for us.” I can't wait to see how this line of reasoning stands up on Judgement Day, or indeed by the end of the series. Meanwhile, it was getting difficult to tell what was offending Amrita most: the hard work, the fact that she turned out to be rotten at sewing or the price of roll-on deodorant (roughly a day's wage). “Yeah, man, factory work is so not my thing,” she concluded, as if it were anybody's.

Not everyone made you ashamed to be British. Stacey, a shop assistant, is a sweetheart, with a cheery "namaste" for everyone she meets and Tara, a fashion student, actually earned herself a place on the production line and a skilled worker's salary of around £1.50 per day. But in general, the sharp contrast between people who can't even endure an ordeal they have chosen to inflict upon themselves and people who have no choice but to endure one inflicted by circumstances, is chastening. Morale was very low by the end of the programme, with the group getting their first taste of what a real sweatshop looks and smells like, but there were signs that some of the arrogance and self-regard was beginning to flake off and be replaced with buyer's remorse.

BBC Three, I sometimes think, has it in for its own audience, repeatedly sending representatives from it to sleep homeless, live among herbivorous tribesmen or watch their bacon sarnies being prepared in the slaughterhouse. It delights in pricking the bubble of complacent affluence in which we all live. So a few eyes were opened to something they haven't really thought much about before and that goes for the target audience as well. Your average British 25- to 35-year-old probably won't sit down and watch an hour-long documentary about sweat shops in South Asia, being a shallow individual who only cares about clothes, pulling and clubbing. But throw in a few people exactly like them, and they may take an interest. Well done, then. The programme itself, incidentally, is top-quality schmutter. They could have made it even better though. I'm thinking of serious penalties for holding up production lines. So it could have come down to a phone vote between Amrita and Richard at the end, and whoever lost could have been sold into slavery for ever.

Mr Mills hasn't seen his daughter for 20 years. She has always said he abused her. He says he didn't. It's his word against hers - a convicted fraudster's word against Heather Mills's. Quite tricky, then. Mr Mills finds all words quite tricky. A severe stroke left him partially paralysed. But, in Heather Mills: What Really Happened (Channel 4), he shows Jacques Peretti some old home movies: a little blond girl playing in the garden and sitting on a cannon at a Welsh castle. How did this happy looking child become one of the most vilified people in Britain? Ambition, her dad just about manages to say.

Mr Mills wasn't invited to her most recent wedding, but he sent the bride and groom a crystal bowl - engraved "Heather & Macca from Father". It was very expensive, he says. She's never rung. He's had to follow what she's up to in the tabloids, some of which must have been quite painful reading. Remarkably, he's not at all bitter. The opposite, even. His little girl went to London, landed a Beatle, and now she's got £24.3m. Good on her. He's proud of Heather, he says. There's something rather lovely about that. Someone's on her side.

Peretti presented his film as a counterpoint to the ex-Mrs McCartney's recent tabloid monstering. He would, he promised, talk both to people who liked her and people who didn't. When it turned out that one of her positive character witnesses ("She can be a very nice person") was also the woman who was claiming they'd worked together as "high-class hookers", you began to realise that balancing this narrative was going to be uphill work. Denise, Heather's old pal, says they definitely were prostitutes together, though Heather has always denied she was. High-end, mind, very high: Kerry Packer, Saudi royalty. So that's OK, then.

He speaks to Diana (most decidedly anti, and reportedly tipped the wink by McCartney's lawyers that they'd be happy for her to take part in the filming), sister of Alfie the dishwasher salesman who was also married to Heather, also briefly. And to Pam (very vaguely pro), who ghostwrote Heather's autobiography, Out On a Limb. He only gets as far as Paul McCartney's gate, and nowhere near Heather herself. But he feels their presence. Diana, the ex-sister-in-law, only talks when given the go-ahead by Paul's people. And Pam, the ghostwriter, has probably been given the nod by Heather, to counter the stuff that Macca has sanctioned. It's almost as if Peretti is a marionette, and out of sight above the screen, two sinister puppeteers, dressed in black, Macca and Mucca, are fighting over who's controlling the strings.

So Peretti never actually got anything straight from the horse's mouth, he just got to people who'd been authorised by the horse to reveal selected details. We learnt quite a bit about Mills's somewhat tenuous relationship with the historical record (a minor incident from her childhood had been blown up by her into a full-scale paedophile abduction), but very little about whether her claims to charitable endeavour are actually justified. And the programme ended with an oddly naive moment when Peretti showed you home movies of her as a child playing with her siblings and her father. "I hadn't expected to see such happiness," he said. "Watching these home movies, I wondered if this man really was the brutal father Heather has always claimed he was." Given that everyone smiles in home movies, the footage had all the evidentiary weight of an unsigned Christmas card. You sensed that a straw was being clutched at.

The picture that emerges from it all is not pretty. It's a huge vortex of lies and deceit, money and insincerity, whirling round and round, and at its centre is this tragic person, being sucked down by her own strange kind of ambition. Terrifying, but at least her dad is proud of her. To the gawping bystander, it's hard not be fascinated, though it's probably wrong to be.

A couple of small questions remain unanswered. Heather didn't have a house key when she was married to her first husband, his sister says. She had to smash her way in. That's strange isn't it, not to have a key to the house you live in? And why doesn't Pam the ghostwriter let Peretti into her house? Instead, the interview takes place on bales in the barn (she lives on a stud farm). Perhaps it all goes a bit Jilly Cooper in the hay when the camera is switched off.