TELEVISION Skin deep


Beauty and The Beast: Ugly Face of Prejudice CHANNEL 4


extreme facial scarring? That was the question asked by Beauty and The Beast: Ugly Face of Prejudice (2 February), a crassly titled documentary series in which the vain and the disfigured spend time together, compare notes, and come away a tiny bit wiser, in time- honoured TV fashion. Yasmin spends, the programme told us, 40


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days of her year in front of the mirror. A quar- ter of her salary as a civil servant goes on beauty products. “There’s really no excuse not to look glamorous,” she told us. “Unless it’s a life or death situation.” Cheryl Cole’s malaria, she allowed, was one example; Yasmin is also obsessed with celebrity. Leo, meanwhile, lives with terrible burns, the result of an accident when he was a teenager. Today he has badly deformed hands and a face that is a mass of scar tissue. Over the years he has had 120 operations, but peo- ple still stare at him or avoid his eyes. Leo would rather not have any more operations, and he takes a dim view of cosmetic surgery. Ideally, he’d like to see plastic surgeons spend- ing their time working on people who really need it: but that’s not how it works. Yasmin, though, is quite an enthusiast for the scalpel. Top of her wish list is breast reduction, fol- lowed by liposuction, new teeth and a nose job. The odd couple met in a room walled with


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wrapped around the pontifical shoulders. With news flowing in of the slaughter of 700,000 Polish Jews, and messages from the British and American Governments urging condemnation, the watchwords were safety first. “The evils will burn themselves away,” the Pope declared. The question was: would papal integrity and papal influence go up alongside them in this conflagration? The then British Ambassador to the Holy See, Sir Francis Osborne, took the nuanced view, admiring the Pope personally but deploring his “tendency to excessive fastidiousness” and chewing the fat with his American counterpart over the idea that he might be soft on Fascism or saw himself as a “hopeful mediator” in a war where the Allies wanted only total victory. His Holiness, meanwhile, was locked into a series of tense conversations with a Carmelite nun, Sr Teresia, who seemed to be paying noc- turnal visits to his rooms. A ghostly revenant from the death camps, in the form of a German Jew who had written a letter to his forerunner at the time of the 1933 Concordat with the Nazis, instructed the Pope to make a stand


24 | THE TABLET | 5 February 2011


hat does a beauty-obsessed woman of 20 have to learn from a man of 59 with


mirrors, where they seemed to hit it off straight away. Yasmin did not flinch, but looked straight into Leo’s “beautiful blue eyes”. He told her he was nearly 60, which amazed her, but as he explained “scar tissue doesn’t wrinkle”. By the end of this first meeting, Leo had set Yasmin a challenge: would she let him see her without make-up? The next day Yasmin gave Leo an insight into her life. After an hour get- ting ready (washing, drying and straightening her “natural” hair; brush- ing her hair extensions; applying fake tan, foundation, mascara and blusher; and fitting her false eyelashes) she took him to have a bizarre (but celebrity-endorsed) “fish treatment”, in which little fishes nibble away at the dry skin on your feet. Then they went for a consultation with a


cosmetic surgeon, who proposed a diet, rather than liposuction, and warned of the lifelong scarring that is concomitant with breast reduc- tion, a much more complex and dangerous operation than the more common “boob job”. After that, though, Leo got an insight into


why Yasmin wanted the op. Everywhere they went, people stared at her breasts and made loud comments about them. (For once, nobody stared at him.) When it was Leo’s turn to show Yasmin around, he took her to see a psych - iatrist who specialises in “body image”. There it became clear that Yasmin’s obsession with making up her face was a desperate attempt to divert attention from her breasts, which were making her painfully self-conscious. But would Yasmin rise to Leo’s challenge?


At first the portents were not good: initially, she offered to remove just her false eyelashes, leaving the rest of the ensemble intact. But television likes to get its own way, and in the end we saw her, with the psychiatrist in atten- dance, wiping the slap from her face and


during his papal Christmas message of 1942 – the point on which the play turned. A production of this kind was always going to incline to staginess: there is no other way of getting the procedural twists, let alone the human interest, across. Here the choicest line came from the Vatican eminence who wistfully enquired of Sir Francis: “Perhaps, when all this is over, we could go fishing together?” Elsewhere, though, the dilemmas of the papal position, hating the Nazis, but fearing the Russians, sympathising with both deported Jew and bombed civilian – he was a shepherd, he declared at one point, not a leader – were nicely conveyed. Like the Christmas message, everything ended with the feeling that there was more to be said. Hugh Ross was excellent as the Pope, while Nick Dunning made a tremendous fist of the admiring but steadily more irritated Sir Francis. The faint air of confusion brought to the role of Mother Pasqualina (who was Bavarian) by Stella McCusker’s Irish accent was swiftly overcome. Good taste was pre- served, but thankfully not at theatre’s expense. D.J. Taylor


Faces and values: Leo and Yasmin in Channel 4’s crassly named Beauty and the Beast


looking into the camera, younger, prettier, happier, more alive. Nine weeks later, the pair met again; the


make-up had stayed off, and Yasmin had decided to “get healthy and like myself the natural way before I even consider any sur- gery”. Another tribute to the magical therapeutic powers of television. Meanwhile, An Island Parish (BBC2, 4


February) bumbles along in its own sweet way. This portrait of the resolutely Catholic islands of Barra and South Uist in the Outer Hebrides provides a balm for harassed city dwellers and those seeking, albeit vicariously, a simpler, kindlier way of life. The first episode, three weeks ago, saw the new parish priest of Barra, Fr John Paul, arriving from the main- land and meeting his counterparts from South Uist, Frs Roddy and Calum. Fr Roddy showed us his chickens. Fr Calum, who is 83, smoked heavily and criticised the “suburban” blinds in Fr John Paul’s living room. And Fr John Paul struggled to master the steam iron. But that was a veritable action movie com- pared with the second episode, in which an old lady (“Scraggie Aggie”, she calls herself) gathered shellfish, Fr John Paul visited a fish farm, and his American part-time house- keeper, Sandy, busied herself making a detailed map of South Uist’s extensive grave- yard. Perhaps it was just a little nervousness at the leisurely pace of events that made nar- rator/producer Nigel Farrell promise, at the end of the episode, that soon “things would not be quite so straightforward”. So it was with bated breath that I awaited this week’s episode. Unsurprisingly, though, that hint of drama, or even a modicum of con- flict, was not fulfilled. Sandy filled in and posted an application for British citizenship; a fisherman went out to catch prawns and came back somewhat disheartened; and the priests joined forces to hold a penitential serv- ice and listen to a wave of pre-Christmas confessions. We are used to fly-on-the-wall shows in which crafty editing and direction create larger-than-life characters and startling inci- dents. An Island Parish, with its beautiful scenery, burbling Howard Goodall score and kindly narration, is the antidote to all that. Artfully composed to appear artless, it seeks to charm – and you may find it succeeds. John Morrish


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