Television Review

OF THE three Liverpool children preparing for their first Holy Communion in Everyman: Saints for a Day (Sun BBC1), it was appropriate that a boy called Joseph was sketched in most detail. In his communion suit, he looked less like a little saint than a trainee undertaker, with his dark features, heavy eyes and a fat, knotted tie, which reared up towards his chin like a big fist on the end of a forearm.

Were these children, then, aware of the import of the ceremony - the significance of accepting Jesus into their lives? Parents repeatedly avowed with varying tones of conviction that, indeed, they were. Joseph, sensible lad, seemed to view the whole thing as some kind of life assurance policy: "You get to take the holy bread and wine and that... You're, like, more special, one of the special people. Once you've done that, you're OK."

It was pretty clear where the film stood on the issue, and it poked easy fun throughout. The girls were seen at a martial-arts class where, in another symbolic white uniform, they rehearsed grown-up karate moves. Their readings from the Holy Communion handbook became a tangential commentary, and a point was neatly made about premature exposure to an adult world.

Other shots were less graceful. We had already been shown that, in Liverpool, "the big day is big business". We'd seen pounds 275 dresses, "my first communion" novelty balloons and pounds 95 communion cakes. But in case you'd been doing the crossword for the first 30 minutes, the point was made again with a simplistic juxtaposition of a shop window of framed communion photographs alongside a full collection of credit-card stickers.

Some scenes I didn't quite trust - such as the one where the family was eating a Chinese takeaway. The parents' discussion of the significance of the service was spliced with soft-focus shots of them - wait for it - drinking red wine.

"Like all Jews," seven-year-old Abby intoned, "he thanked God for the bread they ate and the wine they drank." It cut comically, on the beat, to Joseph giving an extra loud crunch of an unblessed prawn cracker. Cynics alive to the moral impurity of recent documentaries might wonder if the production crew supplied the takeaway to engineer this visual analogy. Not I, but cynics might.

In the first scene, Joseph stood in the outfitter's assessing the merits of his new suit. He liked the pockets, and the buttons on the trousers. What's more, he liked the stitching. In a nutshell, Joseph identified the film's weakness: one could see exactly how it was put together. The stitching was there for all to see.

In Timewatch (Sat BBC2), "Letting the Genie Out of the Bottle" explored the Danish parliament's move to legalise pornography in 1969, a decision intended to modernise the country's religiously inspired laws. Unfortunately, as is often the way with sex, Denmark has been feeling guilty about it ever since, especially as pornography is now mushrooming on the Internet.

However, screen-to-screen porn isn't the logical result of their decision: it would have happened anyway. Genies nowadays don't need to be let out of the bottle - they hook up to a modem, download some free software and set up their own website.