Katie Piper's is an extraordinary story which two years ago was made into an extraordinary documentary by Cutting Edge – Katie: My Beautiful Face. It told how in 2008 Piper, a model and aspiring television presenter, was raped and badly beaten by a man she had been dating for a few weeks and who then arranged for another to douse her with acid. The attack blinded her in her left eye and melted that beautiful face. Surgeon Mohammad Ali Jawad rebuilt it in a pioneering operation – the first ever to use a skin substitute over the whole face as a foundation for a skin graft.
The programme – and its showcasing of Piper's extraordinary courage and powers of endurance – garnered a huge response from the public. In her turn, Piper has decided to harness some of that emotion and fellow feeling to found her own charity, the Katie Piper Foundation. It aims to create a support network for people coming to terms with disfigurement and to raise money for the kind of groundbreaking post-operative treatment she received in France. A new four-part series, Katie: My Beautiful Friends (Channel 4), follows her as she puts together the launch and recruits similarly disfigured ambassadors for the cause.
The heart sank when the first episode opened with Katie on the phone and floundering as she tried to find a champagne sponsor for the launch party ("Do I just say – 'We'd like some free champagne?'") and appeared to be setting off down the well-worn reality TV grooves of watching someone well-meaning but incompetent being well-meaning but incompetent for an hour. I suspect, from what we saw of the very basic advice Piper was still gratefully receiving from her board of trustees extremely close to the launch date, that there would have been ample material for such a programme, but thankfully the makers spurned the easy way out and it rapidly became something, if still not comparable to the original documentary, a great deal better than it had threatened to be.
The bulk of the narrative concentrated on 22-year-old Chantelle who since birth has suffered from a disorder of the veins and arteries which has given her a furiously red, bulbous nose, a lifetime of being bullied and has now developed into a life-threatening condition. Her soft voice and cowed demeanour attested to the power of the prejudice that faces the aesthetically abnormal and made you wonder anew at Piper's own resilience.
It was a resilience tested when she took a call from her lawyer informing her that the man who organised the attack on her was beginning his third appeal. She took a few moments to regroup and then set to work again. Let's hope the charity's success is matched by the appeal's failure.
Supersize Vs Superskinny Kids was the latest outing for Channel 4's ubiquitous (that's Latin for "wears clothes a size too small") Dr Christian Jessen. Every night this week he and dietician Ursula Philpot are taking a cursory look at child obesity and anorexia. One child in six suffers the former condition while cases of the latter have nearly doubled in the last decade.
Part of the solution, apparently, is to put samples from each camp into a feeding clinic for a week and film them for television. Last night, it was 15-year-old Ieuan from Newport, who weighs twice what he should and 15-year-old Jess from Bristol, whose diet of chicken fried rice with barbecue sauce and the occasional tuna baguette has left her two stone underweight.
Dr Christian has the answer. The adults in houses across Britain need to take back control. "You need to stop being a pal and start being a parent." Which is undoubtedly true, but hardly the whole of it. Mixed in with the usual arse/elbow experiments (blind tastings proving that children can like the taste of fruit and veg if they don't know what they're getting!) were . . . well, I'd use the word insight, but this would raise expectations for follow-up action of which there seemed to be none.
Ieuan's mother Kay acknowledged that she had grown up in a household where she had literally to beg for food "so I've just fed him and fed him and fed him", Ieuan was told off for using this to wheedle more chips and then he and Jess were bunged a three-month diet plan and sent back home. On their return, Jess had gained and Ieuan had lost a nugatory three pounds – a result that reflected poorly on all, not least the programme makers who decided the exploitation of unhappy children and their parents was worth this shallow and meretricious effort.
