Get Your Act Together With Harvey Goldsmith Tuesday, C4/E4
Arts Lives: Waiting For Colgan Tuesday, RTE
One Naked Camera Monday, RTE Two

THE first episode of Get Your Act Together With Harvey Goldsmith was really difficult to watch.

Goldsmith is the UK's top concert promoter, and a bit of a svengali figure. His first task for C4 was to get the music career of Samantha Mumba back on the rails. You'd think it wouldn't be too hard a task. Mumba seems to have it all in place. She's easy on the eye, and she has an excellent, rich singing voice. Whenever you see her on chat shows, she seems charismatic and charming. On Get Your Act Together we saw another side to her though.

Again, she was never anything less than nice, but it was a patently shallow niceness on display here.

You know someone is shallow when they kiss another person twice when greeting them, and make a "mwah, mwah" noise and look over their shoulder rather than at their face while doing it.

Most revealing of all was Mumba's disgracefully casual and wasteful attitude towards both her own talent and the rare opportunity she'd been given in having someone such as Harvey Goldsmith bat for her. Goldsmith said near the start that he'd heard "she's a bit of a diva" . . . and he must have met a few in his time . . . but even his primadonna-hardened patience levels seemed to be tested to the max by Mumba's flighty antics. What could Mumba, who's been out of the limelight for so long, have possibly been doing that was more important than turning up on time for business dinners with Harvey Goldsmith?

Apparently, being indulged by a string of bullshitters in the LA music and film industries. The camera swooped on one such encounter, in a movie agent's office, in which the agent was heard telling Mumba that "the horror genre is really successful, the movies do really well". Eek . . . he's obviously never heard about the Mumba-starring zombie flop Boy Eats Girl.

What made the show particularly cringeworthy was that you knew it was building up to Mumba's now-infamous comeback non-gig in Dublin's Vicar Street.

The extent to which Mumba contrived to humiliate herself over this fiasco beggars belief. When she was told that only 26 tickets had been sold for the gig, she decided . . . against Goldsmith's advice that the gig should be pulled quietly . . . to still go ahead with it. Cue a round of frantic publicity; the embarrassment, three weeks down the line, of discovering only a further six tickets had been sold; and the gig having to be cancelled anyway.

There was an epilogue over on E4 later, in the form of a live discussion by a studio audience of what they'd just seen. By now, it seems, Mumba and Goldsmith are good pals, even if a record contract has failed to materialise. The former pop singer Michelle Gayle said "forget the record deal, that was the show to introduce Samantha back to the UK public".

But these reality shows, in which failed celebrities prostrate themselves in front of the public and hope that mere exposure will be enough to kickstart their careers again, are 10 a penny nowadays. I'd be surprised if anyone who'd seen Mumba last Tuesday night hadn't forgotten about her again by Wednesday morning.

I mentioned how irritating I find people kissing other people on both cheeks, although somehow the salutation didn't seem half as annoying in the context of Arts Lives: Waiting For Colgan, as seen performed, copiously, by the Gate theatre's artistic director with his many luvvie friends. Maybe because the programme's subject more or less admitted that it's impossible to separate the impresario from the man, it was easy to accept that all the little niceties of the theatre world have become ingrained in him as normal, unconscious behaviour.

Surprisingly for one whose life is so consumed by the theatre business ("I don't go on holidays"), Colgan came across as a down-toearth, affable man in the one-onone interviews, despite inquisitor David Blake Knox's best efforts to rile him up. Not that he needed to make too big an effort to prove himself on this particular stage; he had Harold Pinter, Michael Gambon, Ralph Fiennes and Atom Egoyan to provide glowing references. When was the last time you saw a cast of talking heads such as that on an RTE documentary?

Damn it, I haven't left myself enough space to rave about Naked Camera, back for a third series.

Last Monday's episode was one of the funniest ever in the funniest home-produced comedy ever on RTE. It finally dawned on me too what Naked Camera's magic ingredient is: everyone involved, including the members of the public, are lovely people. It's not just a comedy show: it's a showcase for how helpful and good-humoured the average Seosamh Soap is.