HE was in his late twenties, she was in her late teens, yet Channel 4 happily swallowed the proposition that they were father and daughter and commissioned the documentary Daddy's Girl. In the nightclub scenes they danced like lovers, while her ''boyfriend'' kept a platonic distance. On the way home, the taxi stopped so that father and boyfriend could fight in the street. Fifteen seconds later both men got back in the car and resumed their journey. Even the Channel 4 commissioning editor had his doubts about this, but was reassured by footage of the teenager vomiting.
If the sick was kosher, he reckoned, the rest of the documentary had to be real . . .
A couple of decades back the BBC was hoaxed by the IRA. The corporation reacted with stricter guidelines and a determination that the offending film would never be screened again. Today we live in an age where the gulf between truth and falsehood can be bridged by the word ''postmodern'', an age where the desperate drive to fill the schedules counts for more than journalistic integrity. Channel 4 just had to salvage something from the Daddy's Girl debacle, and so they gave Victoria Greetham and Stuart Smith -
if that is his real name - the opportunity to hoax us all over again. Only this time the responsibility for deciding when they were faking was handed to the viewer. Cutting Edge: Who's Been Framed? (C4, Monday) was a documentary whose sophistication veered awfully close to cynicism.
''I haven't had a chance to learn my lines,'' Stuart protested when ambushed by the cameras at what was meant to be a preliminary discussion. But, rehearsed or not, he proved remarkably inventive. There was the pub he was running behind a front licensee (his criminal record rendering him ineligible); the scam he was operating to cheat the brewery; the meeting with an ''ad man'' to promote the place to waterskiers (Stuart was quite unable to keep a straight face here); his career as a cowboy damp-proofer; the call he took from a Channel 4 researcher looking for unusually well-endowed men; the documentary he was making about a ''judge'' who turned out to be another hoaxer; the class friction between himself and Victoria, the #4000 debt he ran up on her gold card, her mother's disapproval of him (if it was her mother); the break-up of their relationship at the end of the film.
Was any of this for real? Possibly the odd detail. Or, just as possibly, none of it. Stuart presented himself as a fantasist on the run from depression, who had all but lost the ability to distinguish between truth and lies. A faker who discovered what it was to love a daughter by playing the father of his own girlfriend. A conman who, having invented a boyfriend with his own name, involved in hopeless business schemes identical to his own, adopted a false persona to vent his hatred for this character. Who's Been Framed? seemed to be saying that life is like this: true lies, impossibly entangled; how could television hope to avoid getting caught in these coils? Except that there were ways of taking some of Stuart's and Victoria's more outrageous claims and testing them on camera, if only the film-maker could have been bothered. In the absence of anything so old-fashioned as laborious proof,
the editorial voice that came through was Stuart's, remarking of Edmund Coulthard, director of Daddy's Girl, ''He wanted to believe it.'' And Victoria's, saying, ''After all, nothing on TV is real, is it?''
Of course television is an artificial medium. Of course familiarity with its conventions influences the way its subjects behave on camera. But there remains a difference between the reporting of a hard story that already exists and the gathering of footage in the hope that a human interest story will emerge. And the ever-open maw of multi-channel television means that the latter style of programme-making - with its vulnerability to hoaxers on both sides of the camera - is becoming increasingly common. The one detail no-one seemed to find worthy of comment was how Coulthard found Victoria Greetham in the first place. He contacted a model agency.
When the hype industry awards are next handed out, Channel 4 should get a trophy for the way it has promoted Sex and the City (C4, Wednesday). The show itself is hugely disappointing. The men are fortysomething, ''gorgeous'', and work in investment banking; or twentysomething, dweeby, and overly fond of their computers. The women are anorexics with improbable cleavages who roam Manhattan semi-naked, hoping for a steamy night with Mr Right. At least, that's the premise, though food seems to be the real p*rnography. Almost every scene shows Sarah Jessica Parker and her pals eating. In restaurants, at parties, in their apartments, on the street. Scoffing sushi, sandwiches, canapes, chocolate cake, ravenous as greyhounds.
In so far as this series holds any interest at all, it is as an anthropological study of a bizarrely alien tribe. Older men (''toxic bachelors'' and/or ''modelisers'') hold all the power. Professional women in their thirties sit around discussing how they hate their thighs/noses/chins. Everyone is on the lookout for sex at all times. This tends to limit the art of conversation, since most verbal exchanges boil down to ''how's about it?''. Falling in love is an impossible exotic concept. Marriage is referred to as ''closing the deal''. Presumably this is satire, not documentary realism, but for satire to work it is necessary to recognise the world that is being sent up. Long may we fail to do so.
Hitherto Bosnia has tended to crop up in television dramas as a shorthand for unimaginable trauma: the dark secret in the past of the maverick hero or the sinister pedigree of the cop show psychopath. Shot Through the Heart (BBC2, Sunday) attempted to get to grips with events in the former Yugoslavia from the perspectives of a Serb and a Muslim living in Sarajevo. An honourable project, even if it failed to deliver any real insight into how a fun-loving Olympic sportsman ended up as a Serb sniper picking off women and children
on the streets of a neighbourhood
he once called home. Where the
film succeeded was in capturing Sarajevo's transformation from
prosperous cosmopolitan city to bombed and barricaded war zone. And if it could not explain how
the Sarajevans reclaimed an approximation of normal life in a setting where every breath could have proved their last - well, maybe some things are inexplicable.
A good idea following too closely on the heals of The Young Person's Guide to Becoming a Rock Star is Boyz Unlimited (C4, Friday) is and executed with about a quarter of its predecessor's flair. Considering the playful scope of the idea - a spoof rockumentary about the creation of a boy band - the execution is ploddingly straight. There was one delightful scene were an A and R woman signed the band after ticking off their details on a pre-printed questionnaire, but mostly the jokes were laboured and the visual
pastiche underplayed.
