Where do people get the idea that old ladies are frail creatures who wouldn't say boo to a goose? I suspect it's from crime dramas - from The Bill up - in which they are only ever battered, burgled or chopped into little bits; a doe-eyed look into the face of the investigating officer often the only compensation for hours in make-up getting "bruised".
Working with Dinosaurs (Channel 4) set about disproving this received wisdom and demonstrating what many of us already know: old ladies are not to be messed with. A propos of nothing, this cheap-and-cheerful documentary followed 74-year-old Dorothy as she trained to become an air hostess: from exams on how to crosscheck for landing to sliding down the inflatable chute in readiness for an emergency. She dealt with customers, ran through a landing on water and generally behaved in much the same way as the other recruits, albeit with more wrinkles.
In one way, Working with Dinosaurs was extraordinarily mundane - woman trains to be air hostess, woman passes all necessary tests, woman has to deal with the desires of tourists on their way to Tenerife ("scratchcards anyone?") - but in another way, it was a most intriguing programme. Certainly, being 74 years old, she is no spring chicken, but the surprise exuded by Dorothy's much younger fellow recruits that she didn't speak in a foreign language or sleep hanging from the rafters was genuinely shocking. "She's fearless," one marvelled. "You've got spirit," another noted. What were they expecting? A toothless, wrinkly old husk of a person? Probably, which is a bit sad.
The final installment of the, not entirely pointless, Sex on TV (Channel 4) slyly managed to criticise the "quasi-educational sheen" of many a documentary about sex while all the time flashing nipples and buttocks. Meanwhile, tabloid television was masquerading as something worthwhile over on ITV1. Real Crime: Justice for Julie told the story of Julie Hogg, the (guilty) man twice acquitted of her murder and her family's campaign to get the 800-year-old double jeopardy law abolished so that justice can be meted out.
While this is a thoroughly admirable aim, there was something distasteful about Real Crime. Its ordinary working-class folks outraged at the inequities of the system; the gruesome details of the death pruriently kept quiet; a violent baddie; a forlorn motherless son; and police incompetence: this was the apex of trashy true-crime TV, complete with reconstructions and all-too-willing talking heads. In other words, it might have made you feel a little unclean, as if you had just waded through the dirty washing of someone you don't know. Which, in a manner of speaking, you had.
While The Experiment (BBC2) makes for excruciatingly uninteresting television, it tells you a lot about yourself, if you're prepared to listen. Rather than the prisoners skipping merrily about the prison without a care in the world (other than when they'll have their next cigarette, obviously), they'd all be bound, gagged and probably enduring Chinese water torture, were I a guard. It wouldn't be pretty and Amnesty certainly wouldn't approve, but it might well have made better telly than this current effort. Somehow, I don't think this is what the BBC had in mind.
Never mind a cut and blow dry, Cutting It (BBC1) put you through the wringer before it finally reached its "Don't do it, you mad fool!" conclusion, which saw Allie leave the lovely Gavin (who really loves her) for Finn. The most unsatisfying but simultaneously compulsive conclusion to any recent drama serial, I suppose it leaves events in Manchester wide open for series two. I really hate it when they do that.
