Last night's TV: Beauty in the eye of the beholder

Published on Thursday 29 May 2008 20:37

Painted Babies Growing Up, BBC4 Without A Trace, More4

THERE'S an interesting trend in programmes at the moment of revisiting the subjects of old documentaries. What Happened Next updated the stories of a rock band, people who recreated an Iron Age village and autistic children from the 1970s. And now Jane Treays has followed up her 1995 film Painted Babies by returning to see what became of the junior beauty contestants now that they are 17.

The original documentary was unforgettably weird, with little Asia and Brooke dolled up in thick make-up, posing as they sang unsuitable songs tunelessly and parading with knowing gestures that they had been taught. Clips from that piece have been used to illustrate items about child pageants ever since. The obvious question was how much these experiences had screwed them up – and the surprising answer found in Painted Babies Growing Up was "not particularly".

True, they're still quite young, but both girls insisted they'd enjoyed the contests and didn't feel exploited. Brooke, the tot with the scarily fixed smile who was crowned Miss Southern Charms in the first film, had retired aged seven, having won $20,000 (about 10,000). She was burnt out, she explained, and a younger brother with disabilities was born and took up the family's time.

Now a confident boarding-school student with posters of High School Musical's Zac Efron and the Dalai Lama on her wall ("He's hot … in a Dalai Lama kind of way"), Brooke's smile was natural now. She seemed to have been untouched by the pageants, which is good for her but didn't make for fascinating TV.

Runner-up Asia, meanwhile, was now a bonny teenager who resembled a young Britney Spears and was still competing, as she'd been doing since she was nine months old. Her less wealthy family pushed her in a never-ending round of primping and costumes, now trading on her figure in a more overtly sexual way.

These competitions are peculiar for many reasons, but particularly because the girls are parading to near-empty rooms. For obvious reasons, no spectators are let in, so it's usually just the panel of judges and a couple of mothers, while the rest are get their own daughters ready. Meaningless and self-perpetuating, they're like a little closed system of American flag dresses and hairstyles as frozen as their smiles. And yes, they're still quite sinister.

After three days of non-stop teeth and eyes, poor Asia and her younger sister came away with just $125 each (about 62) and I wondered why on Earth they bothered. Unlike Brooke, Asia knew nothing else and was determined to keep trying and trying to win approval.

The recent poll of British actors who do the worst (and best) American accents voted Marianne-Jean Baptiste's in Without A Trace as the tenth best. It is good, but unfortunately she's delivering the programme's leaden dialogue. It feels as if someone's carefully cut out anything resembling real speech and just left in the bits where people exchange information to further the plot – which in this episode was about the abduction of an African child adopted by celebrities.

But since no-one on screen seemed to particularly care, it was hard to see why we should. James Marsters, from Buffy and Torchwood, turned up, but didn't get to do much either. After a number of scenes of cardboard people talking at each other, a flashback to the horrors of the Sudanese civil war was thrown in. The cardboard people all pretended to be sorry about it, but were much less convincing than the accent.