TV Review: The Chair

LAST NIGHT

There is a certain perversity in the application of psychoanalytical techniques to the television interview. Because where the classic Freudian talking cure puts the premium on what is (and isn't) said, TV has a natural prejudice in favour of visible signs. The first gives pre-eminence to the ear as an instrument of diagnosis, while the other favours the eye. You can see this operating in The Chair (BBC2), which appears to be a television variation of Anthony Clare's successful radio series, In the Psychiatrist's Chair.

In this case, the unseen interlocutor is Oliver James, a psychologist who remains offscreen, rather tentatively guiding his subject (client? patient?) through a variety of diagnostic theses. The single camera remains fixed on the guest, the only expressive variation permitted to it being zooms and withdrawals. As well as being a visual analogy for undivided attention, that rigid formal discipline further emphasises the sense that viewers should keep their eyes peeled for clues to a discrepancy between what is being said and what is being felt. When Vanessa Feltz, the first guest, began to talk about the recent death of her mother, the frame slowly closed in on her eyes, ready for the first welling of tears that might authenticate her account of grief. Tears are the gold standard in such programmes, a kind of solid value which underpins the paper currency of described feelings, and the programme has reportedly displayed its solvency in this respect by squeezing some out of the notionally dehydrated figure of Peter Mandelson.

He will turn up in two weeks' time, but the series began with Feltz, a decision which struck you as mildly perverse, because she presents her own afternoon therapy show (yesterday's subject was slobs), and might be expected to be impenetrably practised in the language of psychoanalysis - as fluent in denial as she would be in confession. And so it proved, at least initially. There was a certain glibness about the way in which she pleaded guilty to James's hesitant suggestions. Did she, perhaps, envy her mother's relationship with her father? "Yes," she said, without any of the equivocation that would accompany the first emergence of such a thought. She has been practising for this, you thought, either in the privacy of a consulting room or every afternoon on ITV. "I feel I'm related to Freud I know him so well," she said with a laugh. "I was the Electra complex incarnate." She also offered little fables of psychological revelation which were perfectly turned for the occasion - such as resorting to the fridge for comfort shortly after her mother's death and realising for the first time that food wasn't up to the challenge. And while this didn't strike you as false in any way (she wasn't making things up to look good), it seemed a rather glib kind of truth.

But after a while, the unaccustomed opportunity to look at one face without turning away did begin to pay off. Without ever securing a bonanza crack- up, James did begin to get beneath the cosmetic exterior - a life lip- glossed into shape. Feltz's description of herself as a "good girl" whose only rebellion lay in her eating habits, sounded a genuinely aggrieved note, as though the list of her virtues ("I write to deadlines, I'm never late, I'm not rude... I've never been unfaithful") was actually a tally of deprivations. And when James suggested that, despite her account of a happy childhood, she had felt "neglected... sometimes", her smooth assurance faltered. "I couldn't possibly comment," she said, a phrase that has become a well understood euphemism for "Yes, but don't quote me". This glimpse of an unresolved privacy was never going to make headline news, in the way that Mandelson's moistness had, but it was intriguing nonetheless, and suggested that the series will be worth keeping an eye on. It also made you think of that afternoon's show - in which she had relished the feckless and untidy lives of others - in an entirely new light, as a therapy for the presenter rather than the cheerful specimens she places beneath the television lens.