Waking the reptilian dead

Last night's TV reviewed: Teen Mum High; The Dinosaur Mummy; The Truth About Property; Shrink Rap; Waking the Dead

Despite its title, BBC2’s Teen Mum High was a documentary set not in America, but in Stockport. (Admittedly, 'Teenage Mum Secondary' might have been less punchy.) There, Moat House School provides education for girls who, in their own parlance, have “fallen pregnant” ("the sort of teenager," as the head put it, "that most teachers in mainstream schools probably dread"). Along with the normal lessons, they’re taught about child development, parenthood and, perhaps belatedly, contraception. When we joined the school for autumn term, it had 11 pupils: six already mothers and five about to be. The staff proved a remarkably kindly bunch – although you didn’t have to be Dr Pamela Connolly to realise what might motivate the English teacher, Jane Thurston. Adopted herself as a baby, she knows only that her mother was a young teenager. Now, she wants not just to help girls in the same situation today, but to show the world that their babies are “worthy”.

A similar level of kindness was displayed by the programme itself, which was firmly in the recent tradition of documentaries that try to understand and sympathise with teenage mothers. There were passing references to the “problems” with truancy and crime that some of these girls had faced. On the whole, though, the aim was to show them in a favourable, almost heroic light. Several have had to resist enormous pressure from parents, boyfriends and boyfriends’ parents to have an abortion. All radiated a distinct maternal toughness, even when filmed amid the toys and teddy-bears in their bedrooms.

The makers of Teen Mum High probably didn't have the current debate about abortion law much on their minds when they dreamt this one up, but their account of life at the Moat House school made a powerful case for making a termination more difficult to obtain. That's right, more difficult, because these very young girls are just the sort of fodder for the abortion-on-demand industry that seems to have developed since the 1967 Act was passed, welcome though it was. Except these girls weren't going to be fodder and weren't going to be told what to do, even by friends and family, let alone some freaky feminist. As Becky, 14, put it, "I don't believe in abortion. I was determined I wasn't going to unmake a mistake for everyone else."

Because even a babe in arms doesn't override the education acts, these girls, barely past puberty, must still attend school. Their childhood may well have been stolen from them, but they didn't appear to be missing it. Their babies did bring them enormous joy. Like Becky, they were all startlingly mature in their outlook and the happy children who shared the corridors and playrooms of the referral unit surely had as much right to grow up as anyone else's foetus. Some 25 school-age girls fall pregnant every day in Britain, according to the programme's opening graphic. No doubt many are almost casually aborted, and others will indeed go on to blight their mothers' lives and, for good or ill, become teenage mums themselves. Soon, families with great-grandmothers in their fifties may not be unusual soon. But it is impossible to know any of that before an infant is born, and the teachers at Moat House and the mums themselves showed what positive experience motherhood, even at such an early stage, can be. For some, pregnancy often brought a return to full-time education and a determination to obtain GCSEs and a decent job, if only for the sake of their babies.

Most fall pregnant because of a mistake – contraceptive failure, ignorance or bad luck. At Moat House, the sex education is there to ensure that the girls don't do that again, and it is cringingly explicit. Some decades ago, the biology teacher at your average school used a film of the reproductive habits of the kangaroo to induct us young kids into the adult world, which admittedly led to a few problems later on. The artificial and fully operational penis at Moat House seemed a much more effective teaching aid, as were the "beer goggles" that demonstrated how tricky it can be to find and fit a condom while drunk. But I digress. According to their teachers, the gravest error these Stockport girls made during their short childhoods was to mistake sex for love. Many of us have made the same misjudgement, and when we were old enough to know better.

The teachers, meanwhile, were invited to speculate on why girls like this become pregnant in the first place, and generally offered the same answer: because they really want to. Certainly 13-year-old Kayleigh grew ever more excited last night as the time for having a baby drew near. Her periods had started at her stepfather's funeral (he had died suddenly at 31). She thought her coming baby would change the family's luck. She wasn't even scared about the birth. “My mum's done it - five times - nearly died twice.” The undeniably stirring finale featured a waterbirth in her own home. Kayleigh's obstetrician advised against it. Her mother said the neighbours would look through the window. She insisted and her midwife, like her teachers, was exceptionally indulgent. The small room filled up like the inflated pool with the TV crew and a swarm of female relatives. "It's like Shameless in here," said Nana Christine. Great-grandma, whose legs had given out, sat on a chair, smiling and waiting. Kayleigh's mother climbed in the pool with her and cuddled her. Cries of encouragement went up from the circle of assembled women. "We've all done it, babe, we've all screamed." "Swear if you want!" "Oh, look!" Kayleigh stroked her baby. Hands reached out to stroke her. With Molly there were now five generations of women in the room.

Of course, the programme’s admiring approach won’t have been to everybody’s taste, and there was a definite sense that we were only getting part of the story here. Even so, it was a part that, in the end, seemed both interesting and true. It is impossible to get from a show called Teen Mum High to one entitled The Dinosaur Mummy without some dreadfully cheesy link, so I'll just get on with it. I write as one who likes dinosaurs and the hadrosaur is a favourite of mine. I was enraptured by Jurassic Park and enthralled by the advanced computer graphics and science that gave us Walking with Dinosaurs. As a hadrosaur fan, personally I can't get enough of duck-billed ornithopods on my telly screen, but this documentary seemed to slip a little too easily into the cliché of the dinosaur-find-as-detective-story, a sort of reptilian Waking the Dead.

It was, let it be said, an amazing find. A 16-year-old boy, fossil-hunting in the badlands of North Dakota (a state which has gone badly downhill in the last 67 million years), saw a back rising above the wilderness like a whale. It was the complete body of a duck-billed dinosaur. This was real skin from a hadrosaur that had somehow became mummified. Extremely rare. Its skin had alternating bands of large and small scales, suggesting it was striped and possibly orange or pink. A CAT scan of its vertebrae showed we have underestimated the length of dinosaurs by at least a metre. And its musculature indicated it could hit 40mph and outrun a Tyrannosaurus Rex, where previously it has been portrayed a rather slow beast. As a locomotion biologist said (this sort of programme invariably introduces you to new and implausible careers), "It was running for its life. The T Rex was just running for its dinner." All very interesting, but it was just a bit samey. Dino-docs need some fresh thinking. They start promisingly ("this is something you have never seen before") and always end up slim pickings; possibly because palaeontology is a slow process and television can't wait that long.

Elsewhere, it was a fairly typical day of property porn telly: on BBC One Homes under the Hammer, To Buy or Not to Buy; on BBC Two Escape to the Country; on ITV1, 60 Minute Makeover; on Channel 4 A Place in the Sun; and on Five, Put Your Money Where Your House Is - daytime fare, wishful thinking for stay-at-home parents, pensioners and shift workers. But then, at 8pm, once the serious mortgage payers had arrived home, came a dose of reality. Andrew Verity, a property journalist, and Jenny Scott, an economist, delivered the first of an excellent two-part report (the second's tonight), The Truth About Property. It was on BBC Two but I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't give Panorama on school testing and ITV1's Tonight on cheap food a run for their sub-primes.

Verity thought property was still over-valued. He was renting, waiting for the moment to buy. He had a hunch that despite the horror headlines, most people were rather pleased at the price falls. Scott was more conventionally minded: she believed people whose notional wealth was based on the property escalator wouldn't wear it. So they asked around and then they commissioned a poll. One in five wanted properties to rise in price, a quarter wanted it to fall and nearly a half craved stability. So what's the panic? The panic, they explained, was for the 500,000 mortgage-payers who have borrowed so much that their homes will dip into negative equity with a 20 per cent fall in prices. If they stopped spending, the economy really would be heading south.

There was certainly panic, and understandable panic, in the Sawbridge household in Sheffield where Andy had a £400-a-month mortgage he had been paying off with a £300-a-week job until he found himself out of work. Abbey, his obtuse mortgage lender (it wrote him letters addressed to “Sheffield, South Glamorgan”), was sending frequent threats to repossess, which did not cease even when his wife, Sarah, explained that she had just found work herself and would soon be paid. They had 36 days to find £400, and, as Sarah tearfully said, nowhere to go. Flash John London was looking pretty sick, too, having financed a champagne and Jacuzzi lifestyle by taking equity out of his house with every notional price rise. Irony of ironies, he was one of the 4,000 estate agents who had lost his job this year. His Audi Quattro had a For Sale notice in its windscreen.

But it was good news for buyers. If you are trading up, the fall in your place's value is less, in hard cash, than the fall in your next place's. Or you could go to Florida and join the foreclosedtour.com bus ride through an estate vacated by sub-primers. There you could pick up a luxury pile for $189,000. It was in Florida we caught up with Raj, a Brit who five years ago lived in a rented room and now has an £8 million property portfolio. Raj is one of those guys who stuff leaflets through your door offering to buy your place for 80 per cent of its value. You can then rent it back off him. What happened if Raj could no longer get his mortgages and went bust was a question left uneasily in the air. Alicia Arce's lively programme was meant to be reassuring: Abbey eventually turned merciful (Andy Sawbridge celebrated with a Mohican hairdo) and London got a job (as, uh-oh, a mortgage consultant). It was actually very scary.

In the latest Shrink Rap (More4), the aforementioned Dr Pamela Connolly soon got down to her usual business of striving to make her guest feel much more miserable about his life. This time, the guest was Salman Rushdie, and Connolly’s main tactic “as a psychologist” was to remind him how his drunken father had tried to force young Salman to fit in with his unshakeably fixed expectations. A dad like that, she further explained, is bound to make anybody too eager to be liked. Of course, a less courteous man than Rushdie might have pointed out that she was here trying to force him to fit in with her unshakeably fixed expectations. Luckily for Connolly, however, he proved quite eager to be liked. Even when she argued that his enemies during the fatwa were “like a mass embodiment of your father”, Rushdie murmured only “I guess” (although not very convincingly).

Towards the end, mind you, there were clear signs of a mischievous revolt. First, Rushdie threw in the heretical suggestion that real grown-ups possibly shouldn’t keep blaming their parents. Next, he remembered a therapist who some years ago had said to him, “That’s what you think, tell me what you feel” – as if the two can be separated. “I said something similar earlier,” said Connolly nervously. “I know,” replied Rushdie. So unlike Tony Curtis, who kissed her hand, and Joan Rivers, who thought her awesome, Rushdie took a refreshingly lemony view of Connolly. "What are people going to tell you," he asked, "that you don't know about yourself?"

Rushdie described a session with another psychiatrist. It hadn't gone swimmingly. "I felt, 'You're an idiot!' I felt total contempt for the person who was doing it. He was, like yourself, a person of Australianess. He had a sort of bouffant, blond hairdo and sneakers. He produced a pink, plastic baseball bat and a little pouffe, a sort of beanbag, and he asked us to hit the beanbag with the baseball bat and to say who we were hitting, and why. I declined." Pamela Connolly, wearing her long, blond hair over her shoulders like a veil and an air of almost unnerving sanctity, said she had been taught that, if patients described a previous psychiatrist, they were probably talking about her. So, what had it been like this time? "It's been quite weird," he said, laughing so much he wheezed.

Finally, Waking the Dead (BBC1) is well named. Short of the Somme there has been nothing like it for noise. Loud swushing sounds, claps of thunder, sudden shrieks and doom-laden, dialogue-drowning drumming. The dead who were not awake at the end of this deserve the Brent Scowcroft award for sleeping on duty. Brent Scowcroft, America's National Security Adviser, is remembered solely for being photo-graphed sound asleep at some cerem-ony. His sought-after award is given only to people who go to sleep in the most embarassing situation possible.

I hope you won't cross-question me too closely about the story. Everything, I hope, will become perfectly pellucid tonight. A corpse is found in an underground tunnel. In life he had suffered both osteoporosis and erectile dysfunction, so perhaps death was a happy release. It seems that he and his chums were playing Red Indians in the woods (you can hardly play native Americans) and it went, officer, a bit wrong. They buried him according to Navaho ritual to stop him haunting the living. As ghost repellents go, it doesn't seem to be working too well.

Boyd was his customary sensitive self with the dead man's friends: "This is a picture of a decaying corpse. Have you ever seen this corpse before?" But even he can be taken aback. "You're boiling a body?" "Only part of it," said Eve, the forensic scientist, huffily.