Erectile dysfunction and tissue market penetration

Last night's TV reviewed: Viagra: Ten Years on the Rise; My New Best Friend; The Apprentice; Desperate Housewives

"I can, hand on heart, say I've never had a tofu experience," said a journalist called Jenny Davis in Viagra: Ten Years on the Rise. Jodie Marsh had, though, and she recalled it in terms of wondering bemusement, a moment when her ability to induce turgidity had momentarily failed her. They weren't talking about food but responding to an unusual piece of equipment intended to help doctors gauge the precise extent of their patients' erectile failure. It consists of a small rack containing a cucumber, a banana, a peeled banana and a square of tofu, each of which the sufferer is invited to compare, in terms of rigidity and resilient bounce, with his own sluggish organ. The cucumber struck me as cruelly redundant, frankly, given that only men with a problem are likely to encounter this diagnostic kit. It protruded at the end as a grade-four erection, a mocking green reminder of lost glory for those still haplessly mired in the territory of the grade one (tofu) and the grade two (a peeled banana). But who knows, perhaps it offers hope as well.

In the old days, there wasn't a lot of hope around. Getting the salad- days crispness back in your erection was a laborious business involving pneumatic pumps, self-administered injections into the penis (even the female narrator gave an audible squeak at that point) or full-blown surgery. But then a pharmaceutical company testing a new heart drug discovered that their male guinea pigs were unusually reluctant to hand back the surplus pills when the trials were over – and Viagra was born. To celebrate its 10th birthday, Five had glued together this loose assembly of anecdote, innuendo and television cliché with a script that sounded as if it was sidling around a bedroom in a rubber nurse's uniform. We got saucy talk about lead in pencils and descriptions of how combat pilots had been given the drug so that they would have "better control of their joysticks". We got reversed film of factory chimneys being demolished. We got stripper jazz on the soundtrack and soft-focus reconstructions involving improbably toned models. We even got that old trope of interruption: the gramophone needle skidding across the grooves. I think the whole thing was supposed to do for our attention span what fluffers used to do for male porn stars before Viagra made them redundant, but I'm afraid it just left me with viewer's droop.

Not as much as My New Best Friend (BBC Four), though, a new series about children making the transition from primary school to secondary school that, on the evidence of the first episode, could successfully be marketed as an aid for insomniacs. I can't work out why this is, because there's nothing inherently dull about the lives of children and the subject here – the fraught diplomacy of playground relationships – is a perfectly good one. It proved to be a very long haul, even so. This first episode followed Daisy, Nanae, Annabelle and Lydia, four girls taking up places at Cheltenham Ladies' College, and there was the odd flicker of class tourism in watching them pack their tuckboxes and trunks for the start of term. Of cousre, friendship is hard enough without the distorting prism of boarding school. Cliques, isolation and homesickness all affected the girls in different ways. Lydia had the most circumspect approach – “You don’t want to become someone’s personal stalker”. Daisy felt betrayed when her first close friend started to ignore her. Nan felt only a “semi-Cheltenham girl” because she was a day pupil. Why their friendships flamed into life, burnt brightly, then died the girls couldn’t express – but all seemed privileged and confident so it will probably all work out.

The real problem, as any parent will know, is that 12-year-olds aren't very forthcoming when questioned by adults about their inner feelings. "What does making really good friends mean?" one girl was asked. "I know them a bit more than I did and I play with them a lot," she answered, less than enthrallingly. "And how do you sort things out when things go wrong?" the off-camera voice inquired of another. "Well, in the end we just do, I can't really explain it," she said. I suspect that if they'd left the camera and removed the grown-up from the room – as video-diary films have successfully done with children in the past – they'd have ended up with something a lot more satisfactory. Someone we assumed to be the headmistress said at assembly that she wanted her girls to learn the value of “compassion and tolerance”. The Apprentice contestants must have missed that assembly.

In the original, US-based version of The Apprentice (BBC1), Donald Trump is in charge; one writer said he was playing the part of God. In our version, Alan Sugar plays the part, not of God, but of money - or possibly mammon. Here, Sugar is money. Everybody wants to know where he is, what governs him, and how to get as much of him as possible. Like money, he is ruthless, judgmental and, in the end, incomprehensible. If money could speak, it would speak with Sir Alan's sneering finality. If Big Brother reflects, and condenses, the world of slackers, The Apprentice does the same thing for aspirational people. And it turns out, of course, that these business-heads, with all their sharpness and life-skills, are just as hollow as the contestants on all the other reality shows. I say, of course, because that's the point of reality shows - they are anti-talent contests. Is there one for aspiring politicians? If not, there should be.

We are just over halfway through the series now, so we're down to the serious contestants - human beings who want, above anything else, to turn themselves into money. This week's show concerned tissues - the task was to create a brand of nose-wipes, and make that reliable source of Apprentice hubris, the TV advert. The fact that the product was anti-bacterial tissues might have struck some people as a bit unsexy – but not Raef. As project manager of his team, he excitedly greeted Claire Young’s suggested brand name of “I Love My Tissues” as “fun, all-embracing and slightly cheeky”. His main interest, though, clearly lay in directing the advert itself. After all, he’d done some amateur dramatics in the past. He and Michael reminisced about their love of performance and musical theatre: “I played Sebastian in Twelfth Night,” Raef said to which Michael offered a few bars of Fagin: “Can a fella be a villain all his life?” From not knowing what a kosher chicken was, Sophocles celebrated “one of the great Jewish characters”.

Raef's first decision was to cast weather forecaster Siân Lloyd- principally known for losing her freaky MP boyfriend to a Cheeky Girl- as the mother of a small boy who, once his own nose had been safely wiped, would later give a tissue to a little girl crying on a school bench. How he knew the process of booking celebs was one of those gaps you occasionally get in the Apprentice narrative, but here the real mystery was why he’d booked this one. Certainly, Siân was baffled – what with her not being a mother, and the advert having nothing weather-related about it. “They’re using me for my acting skills, not my weather symbols,” she noted. But the boys didn’t care. Raef and Michael were happiest wiping yoghurt off each other’s noses.

Lucinda, wearing another killer beret, wound up Alex (the other project leader) and Lee by suggesting they shoot a gay-themed advert for their tissue, “Atishu”. The two men whinged they would never buy a tissue if gays advertised it. Despite Lee (his “That’s what I’m talking about” was in abeyance) pleading for the team to unite, Lucinda scolded Alex, the ineffectual heart-throb, with a “Naughty naughty naughty” when he offended her. She couldn’t understand why they had put a picture of a woman blowing her nose on the cover of their box of tissues. “It’s quali-eeeeeeeee,” Lee replied.

In the meantime, Raef had soon disappeared into some sort of a parallel universe in which he was a major film director. Strangely, he didn’t opt for jodhpurs and a riding crop, but he did stalk about dispensing lordly advice on the whole business of film-making. “When you’re dealing with children, it’s about simplifying,” he explained. “In the bench scene, everything is done through gestures.” Admittedly, Michael’s sense of proportion wasn’t much more developed. (“Plenty of passion,” he urged Siân before she went for her crucial piece of maternal nose-wiping.) Nonetheless, as project manager, it was surely Raef’s fault that in the final ad, you couldn’t tell that the mother was Siân Lloyd – or what product was being advertised. Raef said he was aiming for a “nonWoody, DiCaprio-esque” style, focusing “on gesture and action”, while Lee, Lucinda and Alex oversaw a hideously wooden family trio (scary dad, singsongy mum, devil child with runny nose). Lee delivered a thuggy presentation to a group of advertising experts about “Atishu” being aimed at something called the “female genre” and “the muvvver communiii-eeee”.

For a long time, I thought Raef's team would cruise it, because they had more taste. But I should have known better. The Apprentice is not about taste. It's about money. And that's why this show always has the capacity to surprise the viewer. As a stage villain, money is never predictable. It's always more diabolical than you thought it was. The winning team came up with a surprisingly plausible name for their product and then crafted a pack and a pitch that were so awful they made you want to crawl under a table. Raef, however, decided to let his inner luvvie out to play and went all theatrical, copywriting a touching little vignette of school-day tenderness in a baffling attempt to arouse feelings of attachment towards a product entirely defined by its disposability. Raef's advert could be watched without involuntary grimacing, but he'd forgotten that its purpose was not to get him a place at film school but to make money. He opted for the soft sell while his rivals chose the hard- garish packet and garish name. Fatally, he had forgotten that when it comes to marketing thrust, Sir Alan is a grade-four cucumber man all the way – tofu just won't cut it.

Their adverts may have been more garish, the other team’s more stylish, but as Sir Alan exploded at Raef and co (calm down dear!): “I do not know what your bloody advert is about!” To Lucinda, Lee and Alex: “You won! Your horrible ad, your horrible box threw it in people’s faces!” After Sir Alan had pointed this out, Raef bravely vowed to blame nobody but himself. He then blamed everybody but himself – including the entire modern world, with its mad insistence that adverts should advertise things. “If that’s what advertising’s about these days,” he lamented, in a manner reminiscent of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, “then God help us.” Later, when he was summing up, it was great to hear Sir Alan utter the words "Cheeky Girl"; this is a show that feeds the tabloids, and is, in turn, sustained by tabloid cruelty.

Raef tried to raise the tone of the final boardroom: he was determined it would not degenerate into a back-stabbing bearpit. Some hope. Snake Sophocles said that “everything good about the ad came from me”. The one very small part of me that still likes him does so for his unself-conscious way of calling people “dum dums”. Still, Sir Alan is a fan despite his mounting calumnies. Raef was too posh, too elegant and, according to the Gnome on High, full of “hot air”. This wasn’t true (all available evidence seems to suggest he is just kind and decent) and so not for the first time Sir Alan fired the wrong person. Despite being barbecued by Snake Sophocles, Raef said they were still friends.

So yet again, we sat back and saw capitalism in action. This was our system laid bare. This, I kept thinking, is what people do. Worse, this is what people aspire to do. In a way, The Apprentice gives us a clearer view of what the world is like than anything else on television. Here, the teams talked less about the tissues, and more about the boxes the tissues came in - the whole problem of capitalism, in a nutshell. Still, looking on the bright side, maybe Raef has gone off being a businessman anyway. As he’d said while cocking up a 30-second commercial for his bacterial tissues, “after doing this, I want to get into movies.” Raef: buy a Biggles flying scarf and keep The Quiff.

Meanwhile, over on Channel 4, another old TV favourite is also going from strength to strength. In last night’s Desperate Housewives, a tornado blew through Wisteria Lane – and this time it wasn’t metaphorical. No less uniquely, Mary Alice’s opening voice-over actually added to the action. With its usual mixture of lugubriousness and glee, it told us that the tornado was on the way – and that by the end of the day, one of the four main women would have lost a husband. Once we knew this, the ever-sparkling dialogue suddenly had a darker undertow, and the programme as a whole became an impressively teasing thriller. (Not so much a whodunit as a whowoulditbedunto.)

In fact, the CGI tornado that eventually showed up proved about as convincing as the supposed baby Bree (Marcia Cross) carries around. At first too, it seemed to have resulted in far too convenient a disaster. For one thing, the husband who died was only Victor (John Slattery) who received a white picket through his black heart. For another, impending catastrophe neatly managed to make friends of the most unlikely people – up to and including Bree and Katherine (Dana Delaney). But that was all before Lynette (Felicity Huffman) emerged from her own hiding place, saw that the house sheltering her family had been demolished and let out perhaps the best scream of horror in recent television. (Cue, needless to say, the closing credits.)