Women in a class of their own

Last night's TV reviewed: The Duchess in Hull; Class of '62 – from 16 to 60; Warship

Telling people they should eat healthier food and do more exercise is not all that complicated – or, in fact, very interesting to watch. Yet, thanks to the current epidemic of obesity programmes, television is stuck with the tricky task of trying to find entertaining ways of doing it. With The Duchess in Hull, ITV1’s latest ploy is to combine a celebrity vehicle with the kind of class contrast so often deployed by Wife Swap.

But the makers clearly had a spot of rehabilitation in mind as well. Since 1996, we were reminded, the Duchess of York has been living in America, where she’s become “a diet and fitness icon adored by the public”. Fortunately, she’s now realised that Britain needs her too. (“I haven’t forgotten you,” she assured us last night.) As a result, she’s taken on the challenge of finding out what “a typically unhealthy British family” eats, and getting them to stop it. Or, as she says, stop Britain blowing itself up. So, like a jolly red setter which has made a bit of a mess on the Axminster and been banished from the house, Fergie bounded back into our lives, not an ounce diminished in bounce and chumminess.

Before all that, though, we had a little PR film in which the Duchess confessed that she found it difficult dealing with the darkness in the morning. "Every single minute of the day I think I'm fat, ugly, disgusting, unworthy and nobody likes me," she confessed. "I've had 15 years of defamation of character." Hagridden by old headlines, she slumped on the stairs of the gym looking stricken but, after a dose of endorphins and a bath full of ice cubes, she was up and running.

Meanwhile, we were introduced to the Sargersons on their Hull council estate. Dad Mick is a disabled ex-squaddie with diabetes. Mum Tonia is unemployed with a bad heart. When we first joined them, they and their three teenage children were tucking into sausage butties and cigarettes. They did not know who to expect; clutching in their chubby fingers a little list drawn entirely from terrible TV: "Fern Britton, Nigella Lawson, Ricki Lake, Vanessa Feltz, Kerry Katonowa or whatever her name is and that bloke from Trisha Boot Camp." When Fergie arrived she demonstrated she had been away a little too long by saying, "It's not Oprah Winfrey! Did you think it was Oprah Winfrey?" Silence fell with a bit of a bump. "Oh my God, it's so sad! I just knew they wouldn't know who it was. All right, I married Prince Andrew. Diana was my sister-in-law." And, with increasing desperation, "You've heard of the Queen of England, have you? The Queen was my mother-in-law."

Once her identity had been established, Fergie’s main tactic was to claim instant empathy. “You and I could completely relate to each other,” she told Tonia, without fully explaining why. She then tried plenty of positive reinforcement (ie flattery), which when directed at Mick’s old dad provoked a cry of “Steady on, love.” I wouldn't say obesity was the Sargersons' chief problem. Only 25-year-old Terri (later arrested and released when a man was found dead in her flat) had a job. Only seven-year-old Olly (whom they were adopting) didn't smoke. Jim, hale, hearty and, appropriately, full of beans at 83, grew fresh food on an allotment that his family refused to eat. I must, however, hand it to 14-year-old Mikey for native shrewdness. He said, "She's all right, but I reckon it's just a publicity stunt. She's got a name for splitting up with Andrew so she's going to change it for 'I help fat people'. That's what I reckon."

Unexpectedly, Fergie proved to be a disciplinarian. When her mother left for the Argentine with a polo player, she was brought up by her soldier father. I remember that, when Ruby Wax rummaged, uninvited, through her drawers, she found Beatrice's and Eugenie's T-shirts folded and arranged by colour as if for a military inspection. At the end of the programme, She laid down some simple principles, which will be implemented tonight. Including - and she reached out to clip the ear of the youngest son - paying attention. From long practice he ducked. And that was about it really. Fergie said the usual stuff about food and exercise. She duly diagnosed several cases of low self-esteem. On the whole, however, yesterday’s first episode of two pottered along somewhat aimlessly – and certainly without the highs and lows, fights and reconciliations that this sort of programme is supposed to guarantee. All of which made what happened when Fergie bade her farewells feel distinctly odd. Maybe the programme was just badly edited, but surely nothing we’d seen justified the Sargersons suddenly breaking into helpless tears of gratitude.

Class of '62 – from 16 to 60 (BBC2) was the latest film by Marilyn Gaunt about her former classmates from a Leeds secondary school. She has filmed the lives of six of her friends for 25 years, sticking with them limpet-like over the years and over the miles. Given its subjects’ shared working-class background, Gaunt’s documentaries may lack the range of similar documentary series. Yet, by way of compensation, we get a powerful reminder of how the great social trends of the past few decades haven’t perhaps been as widespread as the media often seem to think.

Not many of these women, for example, spent the Sixties swinging away with flowers in their hair. That decade, as Larkin mentioned, arrived a little later than reported. Nor, when the Eighties dawned, did they instantly don large shoulder-pads and start making lots of money. Instead, they’ve mostly spent their time bringing up children, looking after aging parents and, in many cases, divorcing the husbands they married when very young. Only now, as they turn 60, can they talk of living for themselves – and then not always convincingly. No wonder that for all its warmth, and the likeability of most of its participants, last night’s programme proved quite a melancholy watch; the images and stories hanging about the street corners of your mind, refusing to be moved on.

The initial temptation, watching Marilyn Gaunt's engrossing film was to dwell on what it wasn't, rather than what it was. What it wasn't was Michael Apted's epic Seven Up!, a project that has chronicled the lives of 14 people from widely differing social backgrounds from the time they were seven years old in 1964, revisiting them every seven years, most recently in 2005. Apted was interested in class, and to what extent a child's future is determined by the accident of birth. He also wanted to test the old Jesuit maxim "Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man". But what was fascinating about Gaunt's subjects, whom we first met at a reunion to mark the 21st anniversary of the day they left their secondary modern in Leeds, was that at approaching 40 their futures were no more mapped out than they had been at 16. The vicissitudes of death, ill-health, divorce, financial hardship, but also happy second or even third marriages, the joys of grandparenthood, success in business, plain good luck, all lay in wait – springing out, in many cases, when they were least expected. It is as though a bucket of quicksilver was thrown on the ground in 1962 and shot off in every direction.

The homogeneity of what I suppose might be termed the "Gaunt Six" turned out to enhance the story, just as Seven Up! was enhanced by diversity. It showed that the conditioning factors in a woman's life are not, or at least not necessarily, gender, education and class. In a strange way, Class of 62 offered a clearer microcosm of all our lives than the Seven Up! series. Over the 24 years from 1983 to 2007, Katy's husband Norman, a man seemingly in rude health, whom she described as her "Rock of Gibraltar", got throat cancer and died; Denise, who had been a battered wife, learnt that one of her daughters was gay, got fed up with Britain's "nanny state", went to live in Greece, missed the NHS and came back; Margaret divorced her Swiss husband, met a nice Italian called Luigi, and took up painting; Dorothy found that her husband, her childhood sweetheart, had been having an affair, divorced him and continued raising their son Steven, who has Down's syndrome; Sally had a part in Crossroads, cared for a mother with Alzheimer's, became a novelist, and went travelling round Europe in a camper van; Gillian became a surrogate mother to her grandchildren, a surrogate mother to her mother, got a job cleaning the church, and went to bed with a different man each night in the form of a succession of Mills & Boon heroes. Somewhere in there, but for the grace of God, go all of us. Except of course to the Crossroads Motel, which closed a while ago.

What was striking was how the needs of relatives had defined the lives of some of these women. Gillian had been dealt an especially wretched hand, and was also the only one without a companion, albeit that Dorothy's companion was her son Steven. We saw Dorothy taking Steven to York to be fitted with some chain mail for the historical re-enactments in which he loves to participate. It was as sweet and funny a piece of television as I've seen for ages. And I suppose that's the point: the ordinary lives of six women can engage all kinds of emotions. From Katy, the image of Mehitabel, with her third husband ("I'm going to have fun while I've got the chance") to Dorothy with her perpetual child ("the most important thing is love") they all opened up like flowers because they were talking to a life-long friend. Only one was still with the husband she started out with. Two had had their hopes of a career blocked by a father. Three live abroad, and a fourth dreams of being "a little Greek man and a little Greek woman in our little Greek house. Thoroughly brown."

All had reached a plateau of some contentment, even Gillian, who has never had a life of her own at all. "Suddenly I've a bus pass and can go where I want in West Yorkshire." Since April 1 you can go anywhere in England, Gillian. So off you pop. The Book of Heroic Failures includes a TV programme about an Armenian woman on her 60th birthday, how she met her husband, her illnesses and so on. Statistically, nobody in the wide world watched it. You can quite understand why, but the world was probably wrong.

Class of 62 was also fascinating on a purely physical level: it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that the ageing process is accelerated dramatically by an excess of weight. The 20,600-tonne HMS Illustrious, launched in 1982, hasn't aged particularly well, either. It had to return to Portsmouth two days into a four-month tour of duty in the Indian Ocean because the fridge broke down. Then the engines failed. The Royal Navy, it rather worryingly appears, has a great deal in common with some of today's train operators. Also, the crew failed to show their battle-readiness, which was another reason to postpone the voyage. Warship is a six-part series, what used to be called a docu-soap, following these tribulations. I fear it might sink without trace.