The trouble with lightweight TV

Published on Monday 18 May 2009 18:49

TV review

The Trouble With Working Women BBC2

Tears Lies And Videotape ITV

WHAT is The Trouble With Working Women? Maybe that we have to put up with programmes such as this, which treat such an obvious fact of modern life – actually, scratch that modern bit, since the vast majority of women have worked in every culture in history – as a quirky curiosity.

The weirdness of having such a massive, intrinsic issue dealt with in a two-part BBC2 special stuck out a mile, like having a documentary called Everything About Food, or The Meaning Of Life.

It adopted a chirpy tone, with presenters Sophie Raworth (head girl) and Justin Rowlatt (jokey blokey) sharing awkward banter. Raworth was there to do the empathy bit, sharing her own experiences as a working mother, while Rowlatt played the faux-naive chap wondering, Professor Higgins-like, why can't a woman be more like a man?

Together they oversaw experiments, pitting schoolgirls against boys in a race and competing against each other on the stock exchange, neither of which proved much at all.

Raworth met a lecturer who gets up at 5am to write her lesson plans, before dressing and feeding her four kids and cycling them to school, while Rowlatt met a female employer who refuses to hire child-bearing-age women in case they take maternity leave. Pointless vox pops with people trotting out the most blindingly obvious thoughts padded out the programme.

Presumably, the cheery approach was to draw in those dopes who think we all live in a post-feminist world. And, I suppose, perhaps it was worth pointing out some of the statistics which disprove that – such as, that while medical students may be roughly equally divided, 93 per cent of consultant surgeons are male; that men on average earn 369,000 more than women over the course of a working life; that so many careers stall and never recover after childbirth, while there are constant mixed messages about the responsibilities of being a mother.

But this lightweight programme (which concludes tonight) didn't really do more than skim the surface of the subject, which was too big and too vague. In trying to cover everything about working women, it didn't really say anything.

Anyway, it's not what you say, it's the way that you say it. Tears, Lies And Videotape (surely in the age of digital, it is time to retire that hokey formula for titles?) was a triumph of hindsight. With her statements slowed down, her face zoomed in on and her language carefully analysed, it's so very obvious that something was wrong with Karen Matthews' pleas for the return of her "missing" daughter Shannon. But no-one spotted it at the time, or at least, not exactly.

A body language expert, Professor Paul Ekman, pointed out tiny indications – her shoulder slightly rising as she addressed the cameras, momentary beginnings of half-smiles.

Perhaps, subconsciously, we registered them, too, but didn't want to believe it.

In some cases, we do want to believe and end up reading signs that aren't there.

There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face, as Shakespeare knew (and yet we still yearn for his perfect portrait, as if that will explain him somehow). But how can we help trying?