It's nice when we beat the Americans at their own game. It doesn't happen very often. Eccentric British professor builds rocket from old Morris Minor parts in garden shed and reaches moon before Nasa ... Nope, it never happened. Harlow Globetrotters inflict humiliating defeat on New York basketball team with similar name ... Likewise. But Georgia Davis, a 15-year-old-schoolgirl from Aberdare in South Wales, has gone and done it. Go girl.
Everyone knows that the fattest teenagers in the world are in the States, right? Wrong. Because Georgia's gone over there, got up on those scales, and whupped their collective (and considerable) asses. And this is Georgia's Story - 33 Stone at 15 (BBC1).
Actually, she's gone to the States to lose as many of those 33 stones as possible, because they aren't doing her any good, and as well as being pretty handy at putting on weight, the Americans are also very good at taking it off (which is obviously impossible to do in South Wales). So Georgia is at this place called the Wellspring Academy in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, a kind of Eton for fat kids, where pupils pay £40,000 a year to be fed less.
She does brilliantly; the stones come tumbling off. And as well as being taught to eat less, she also learns the art of up-talk (rising intonation at the end of every sentence, as if it's a question), and to insert "like" between every other word. Georgia's poor mum - when her daughter left Aberdare she may have been seriously overweight, but she was a nice, shy Welsh girl, and she's getting back, like, Phoebe from Friends? Well almost ...
Anyway, Georgia's very nice, and this is about as responsible as programmes about overweight people get - no underwear shots, gratuitous wobbling, putting them in with skinny people or slicing them open - but I'm still not convinced by weight loss as TV. I know I'm the only person in the world who isn't: you just need to glance at the schedules. We're a nation obsessed with food and eating and weight and, most of all, with fat people.
Look, here are more of them, in The Hospital (Channel 4). It seems Georgia needn't have gone all that way and spent a whole year being reprogrammed by Americans after all. This Birmingham surgeon, Paul Super, could have fitted her with a gastric band instead - for just £6,000, a lot less than a year at the Wellspring Academy.
It's pretty shocking, and symptomatic of our quick-fix culture, that the three people in this film want to have serious operations that will leave them unable to eat normally ever again, in order to lose weight. One of them wants one so that she can look better in her wedding dress. Who cares that she'll only be able to eat baby food, through a straw, for the rest of her life; at least there'll be a nice photo of her on the mantelpiece.
Super has an interesting theory about food - that it's naturally colour-coded to signify danger, beige being the colour to avoid. So bread, pasta, crisps, biscuits etc - all beige - will kill you and are to be avoided. And presumably redcurrants, blueberries, greengages, white truffles and yellow-fin tuna are all very good for you. What about porridge though, Mr Super? That looks beige to me, certainly tastes beige. But my girlfriend says it's good for me, and makes me eat it every morning. Huh! No longer, take the death-porridge away; from now on it's a big slice of Black Forest gateau, and a bar of white chocolate, washed down with a Red Bull. Mmmmm.
Ah, Drinking With The Girls (BBC3), that should be less depressing than eating with them. Cherry Healey, who's not averse to the odd tipple herself, wants to know what drives other women to the bottle. So she hits it with a whole bunch of them, of varying ages, from teens to grannies.
And it seems they do it to forget, or because they are bored and lonely. Hell, it's just as depressing. They get knocked down, but they get up again, you're never going to keep them down, pissing the night away, pissing the night away ... literally, I'm afraid, in one instance, on the pavement.
Ladies have no manners any more.
Not even the ones who are TV presenters. I mean, hats off to Cherry for throwing herself into the job and everything, but she ends up on the bathroom floor, with her head down the loo, retching. Charming.
