TV review: Shanghai Tales | Big Meets Bigger

ASSEMBLED over six years by Chinese filmmakers Guo Jing and Ke Dingding, Shanghai Tales is a three-part documentary series exploring different aspects of the city.

If the first instalment was anything to go by, the aim is to present Chinese culture in as harsh and ruthlessly ambitious a light as possible. Or perhaps they didn't actually intend this startling depiction of the Chinese Circus School to represent the country in microcosm. But if the school's sternly uncompromising coaches are representative of the Chinese work ethic, then no wonder their fortunes are growing so rapidly.

Eschewing narration in favour of fly-on-the-wall-bars verit, the programme was tacitly critical of the punishing treatment afforded to vulnerable child acrobats. The camera lingered on scenes of children being verbally abused by adults, principal among them Principal Cheng, who ran the school like a despotic fiefdom. Aggressively insistent on success at all costs, he put coaches and pupils under ridiculous pressure, at one point reducing a staff member to tears for her inability to teach three children the simple task of balancing vertically upside down on top of each other.

The soundtrack was essentially one long torrent of hectoring demands, as virtually silent children - clearly they must be seen to somersault but not be heard -were forced to contort their bodies into painful configurations. The sight of a tiny nine-year-old girl staring forlornly at her feet, as an adult berated her for her perceived lack of ambition, is not one I'll forget in a hurry. By the time she fell off a flying trapeze and almost broke her neck, I was all but convinced that this was child abuse.

The kids were told constantly that if they didn't succeed as acrobats then their lives were over. Their parents pay for them to endure this torture, seemingly in the belief that it's their only chance of survival. But there must surely be easier, less physically and mentally taxing ways of securing their future than basically robbing them of their childhoods. When we did eventually see the children perform in public, I was willing them to succeed, if only because the consequences didn't bear thinking about. A closing caption revealed that the trapeze team were crowned champions at one of China's biggest acrobatic events. Frankly, they didn't have a choice.

I've always said there just aren't enough TV shows featuring fat people being paraded for the edification of strangers, so thank God for Big Meets Bigger, a reality series in which overweight Brits attempt to lose weight by spending time with fatter Americans. The lesson was that if you eat loads of fatty food, you'll put on weight and have health problems. Fancy that.

Despite having perfectly understandable accents, the obese African-American women were accompanied by subtitles.

Further dogged by patronising narration and formulaic to a fault, the programme contained all the tearful vows and perspective-altering proclamations you'd expect. Like most ventures of its kind, it also struggled to conceal its prurience behind a veneer of concern and medical fact-ticking.

Shanghai Tales,

BBC4

Big Meets Bigger,

BBC3