The perils of friends in high places

Last night's TV reviewed: The World’s Tallest Women and Me; Gordon Ramsay’s F Word; Abortion: the Choice; The Truth About Property: A Solid Investment?; What Happened Next?

Future historians specialising in TV humbug of the early 21st century could do worse than to make a careful study of The World’s Tallest Women and Me (Channel 4). At the start, presenter Mark Dolan had the nerve to say “In the 21st century, you’d think the freak show was dead” – which only goes to show that he hasn't watched much television recently; since countless programmes still bring the dubious joys of the geek show and the carny into our living rooms, including Balls of Steel (presenter, one Mark Dolan). Of course, Dolan knows perfectly well that the freak show isn't dead and that he's done more than most men to keep its thrills alive. But he needs to position himself rather carefully for what he's engaged in now, which is tracking down extraordinary people in the privacy of their homes and pretending to care about their problems while the camera gets some clear shots for the gawpers back home. It's sort of freak-stalking, and having to show his face while doing it makes Mark so uncomfortable that the series might better have been titled "Travels with an Uneasy Conscience".

There's nothing wrong with a bit of gawping among consenting adults, of course, provided the gawpees are treated with respect, as they usually are in the proliferating TV freakshow genre. But few things could have been less respectful than Dolan's fatuous insistence that he had "different motives" for staring at these women's limbs. He began with very tall women, partly, I suspect, because he's very tall himself and so reckoned that his suggestion that this is an exercise in fellow feeling might be a little more plausible. At any rate, he alternated between giving us the chance to stare at these women, claiming to have misgivings about this, and claiming to have banished those misgivings by realising his interest wasn’t voyeuristic but deeply caring. And just to add a more minor level of humbug, he also did that weird telly thing of pretending to set off on his “journey” without knowing where it might lead or whom he might meet along the way.

Dolan began by dropping in on a convention for the Central Arizona Tall Society. There, he arrowed in on Ellen Bayer, who at 6ft 10in was able to indulge him in what he claimed was a long-cherished dream: to be able to hug a woman taller than he is. Other men want more than hugs, it seems. At the same event, Dolan met a man who claimed he made around a million dollars a year with a website devoted to Amazonian woman. Ellen, a teacher, makes some extra money by posing on such sites. Dolan, of course, didn’t approve of such fetishism. In order to make sure, though, he spent quite a while at one of her photo shoots, and showed us some racier examples of the same tragic exploitation of tall women. Ellen agreed to take Dolan shopping for very big clothes. What she did not agree to, however, was the sight of his cheeky face peering over the door when she was in the middle of getting changed. "I'm not looking south," he grinned. She struck some innocuous poses for him in the racks of the local outsize-garment store, suggesting that there must also be a fetish niche for homely giants in beige cardigans.

Ellen wasn't really what Dolan was after, though, huggable as she was. She was tall, but not the tallest, so after a brisk pantomime of on-the-spot research, he travelled across country to pester Sandy Allen. He apparently heard of Sandy for the first time in Phoenix – even though she’s been trading as the world’s tallest women for years, and has appeared in several TV documentaries. "I want to get to know her, and hear her story," he told us, on his way to meet 7ft 7in Allen, who uses a wheelchair and suffers from depression. So as he headed off Dolan duly went for some more pseudo-agonising. On the one hand, he definitely wanted to get to know Sandy as a person. On the other, he couldn’t deny that he wouldn’t be interested in getting to know her as a person if she wasn’t seven-foot seven. “I guess I’m going to have to live with the guilt,” he concluded (which, I suspect, won’t be an enormous struggle).

Unfortunately his charmlessly ingratiating manner - like a young gambler buttering up his rich, dying granny - got him nowhere. "Now where's the leggy blonde?" he trilled, on entering her hospital room for their second meeting. "Hello darling! How are you?" Then he kissed her (Dolan kisses everyone, whether they like it or not) and wheeled her out to answer all his questions about how unhappy she is. To be fair, Sandy, notionally the world's tallest living woman, didn't look as if she really minded being pestered, visits from gauche British comedians being about as good as it gets in terms of male attention. The loneliness of all these women gave Mark another opening for a bit of face-saving solemnity, though you couldn't help but wonder whether Sandy hadn't set her sights a bit high. She wanted, she said, a man whose shoulder she could lay her head on, which narrowed the field somewhat when it came to prospects.

Then Mark jetted off to China, where he delivered a pair of handmade shoes the size of a baby's bassinet to De-Fen Yao, a Chinese woman who turned out to be a bit taller than Sandy. Again, Dolan pretended to have heard of seven-foot nine-inch woman purely by chance. Again, he was “very conscious” that she might not want to be visited – before visiting her. "I couldn't help but feel that we'd created some kind of sideshow here," muttered Mark, as De-Fen's neighbours lined up to stare when she was coaxed into the open, with the help of a £800 sweetener, for an upright photo-opportunity. “They’re just looking at her like some bizarre object,” he tutted. (So, what did he think last night’s viewers were doing?) Yet, instead of, say, taking her back inside, he then fitted her with her new shoes to the entirely predictable titillation of the gawpers. One hopes that Sandy doesn't find out about her demotion, incidentally, since the one silver lining in her rather bleak existence was the belief that she was a living superlative. The only thing worse than being the world's tallest woman, on the evidence of this stubbornly melancholy film, would be being the world's second tallest.

Last night's television made for particularly depressing viewing. The new series of Gordon Ramsay’s F Word (Channel 4) served to confirm a strange fact: the man is now so established as a “character” that he only has to be rude to somebody for them to fall about as if they’d been on the receiving end of an epigram by Oscar Wilde. (Examples last night included “Get the fuck out of my kitchen” and the particularly witty “You look like a sack of shit.”) Where his language and tantrums in Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares are work in a noble cause- the improvement of provincial restaurant cooking- this show, back for a fourth attempt to identify a coherent format, is a horrible programme, gratuitously ill-mannered, chaotically assembled and obsessed with celebrity, particularly the chef's. “Now shove off out of my kitchen,” he didn't quite say to fellow-camera hogger Geri Halliwell in the obligatory, generally unpalatable celebrity love-in slot.

Halliwell and her truly nauseating Spanish meatballs were the guests and Ramsay, whose emotional age descends towards single figures in these shows, was keen to prove that his own recipe was superior and received its vindication among the diners at his notional restaurant with anything but magnanimity. "I like writing and creating," said Geri, wrist-deep in mince and sherry. She said at Christmas her family competed to see how many they could eat. “So how many balls at one time have you had in your mouth?” he asked. She threw a gobbet of meatball at him. Nonetheless, Gordon’s attempts to be jovial are still more convincing than his attempts to take an interest in people. Last night, Halliwell had one sentence to explain how she’d conquered her years of bulimia. “By being honest about it,” said Geri. “That’s amazing,” replied Gordon in a voice firmly suggesting he was already bored with the whole business. Her moving confessional took 20 seconds. Then she fucked off.

Halliwell is a B-list celebrity and presumably glad of the gig. The C-list Peters family, whose members include a Corrie chippy and a Shameless barmaid, looked pleased as punch too to be ordered about Gordon's kitchen, although their weakest member, Kenny, was bullied so much he ended up doing a Frank Spencer impression to pacify his master. He tried his inadequate best, with the rest of her family, to make souffle, rose-water cream and spiced monkfish for 50 people. "Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!" Gordon explained to him patiently after another cock-up. "Burnt potato! Not good enough!" Poor Kenny took Ramsey's obvious scorn for human weakness rather well.

Janet Street-Porter, who once had credibility as a journalist, was rechristened Janet Street-Pensioner and made to rear some calves as punishment for not having had children of her own; “Expectant Mother” flashed a caption as she went to market to buy them. But saddest of all was seeing James Corden, Smithy in Gavin and Stacey, playing the celebrity game, eating, blindfolded, unidentified cuts of Chinese food (ooh, er, chicken feet) and spewing them into a bucket before his overweight family. This is Gordon Ramsay's C Word - as in celebrity for one thing.

If the BBC had set out to make a season of anti-abortion documentaries it could not have done much better than with the Bare Facts season currently running on BBC Two. On Monday night in Teen Mum High we visited a school for pregnant schoolgirls each of whom was opposed to abortion and seemed to be blossoming under the twin demands of motherhood and academe. Last night's Abortion: the Choice showed all the emotional trauma of having a termination and precious little of the gift of life it can give back to women.

In interviews with the women the documentary followed, guilt, shame and denial all came up like boxes to be ticked. The one woman, a 25-year-old middle-class actress, who claimed to be at ease with her choice, failed to convince us. A sequence at the end showed a woman in great distress being counselled post-operatively, although it was obvious her real pain concerned her unresolved grief over her husband's death five years before. The session was followed by a sequence of a beautiful balloon being let go over a park. Flying up to heaven to join all the little foetuses, I suppose.

Elsewhere, more gloom about the housing market. The second part of BBC Two's canny The Truth About Property titled A Solid Investment? concluded that it wasn't. To demonstrate the point our presentable presenters Andrew Verity and Jenny Scott interviewed a gloomy woman in Newton Aycliffe scraping the walls of a house worth less than she bought it for, an English couple whose luxury villa in Spain was about to be bulldozed to make way for a railway, and a desperately sad husband and wife in Skipsey whose house had fallen into the sea.

In a reworking of Dragons' Den, Scott took a thirtysomething called Lucy into a warehouse to pick apart her decision to put £20,000 down on a buy-to-let flat that would one day be her pension. Wodges of cash were slapped in front of her and then taken away again (capital gains, inflation etc.). The nest egg might end up worth all of £142,000. In the long run, we were told, shares will make you more money than property. But where, pray, are the perky programmes about the stock market?

Finally, What Happened Next?, in which the subjects of past fly-on-the-wall documentaries are revisited, was beautifully summed up in a late remark from George, the ex-driver/manager of the Global Village Trucking Company, a hippie rock band whose communal life in a Norfolk cottage gave the viewers of 1973 something to tut and marvel at. "At the time, I thought of myself as being not particularly good-looking but very, very clever... and then looking back at the film, I had the opposite impression. I thought, 'Oh... I was better looking than I realised at the time, but so stupid.'" You and me both, George, and a lot of others besides, I suspect.

Not that the film was bitter or disillusioned. Indeed, much of its pleasure lay in the way that most of the members of the band had diverted their youthful idealism and contempt for the Man into far more conventional channels, even, in the case of Jeremy Lascelles, into becoming the Man himself, as CEO of Chrysalis Records. Some had stayed true to hippie ideals – Kanga, the roadie, now lives at the Beshara School of Intensive Esoteric Education – while others had simply given them a good scrub up. Dave and Danielle, last seen sitting naked in a bath in a cottage with mildewed walls and a scrofulous thatch, were interviewed in a glacially white modern kitchen, but plausibly suggested that their life with their children was a commune by other means. You might not envy them for having to live like that in the first place, but having memories this fond and unperturbed is surely a gift.