Cutting Edge: The Virgin Daughters (Channel 4)

You know what would really be shocking on TV? A documentary about an issue – the arms trade, say, or the NHS, or terrorism’s many tentacles – that involved a reporter, a real, live journalist, asking questions, raising issues and presenting them to us in an informative, energising manner. The kind of documentary where you felt nourished or fizzing with insight at the end, rather than one that left you feeling a bit like you had had an encounter with a lorry-load of slurry and come off the worst.

You hunger for such nourishment because TV has gone mad. Barking. Documentaries now seem to sprout from meetings in which, one assumes, the first question posed by the executive producer to the production team is: “Anyone found a freaky website?”

Perhaps this is a tad unfair on Jane Treays, the director of The Virgin Daughters. She famously directed Painted Babies, a documentary about child beauty pageants that revealed the shocking glamorisation of preteens. A lot of her work is nuanced and clever. But in Painted Babies Growing Up (a sequel to that work), her sly and revealing blade was blunted and in last night’s documentary you knew you could be outraged but it was just another bunch of freaky Americans behaving freakishly; this time dads who wanted to preserve their daughters’ virginity until they were married. Indeed, a lot of the daughters seemed to be saving the first kiss for their wedding night.

The centrepiece of the fathers’ crusade, and yes it was creepy and incestuousy in its vibe, was a purity ball, where the girls flounced around a giant cross, after making strange, cooing speeches to their seated fathers. Only once, near the end of the documentary, was the sexualised aspect of all this raised and even then only in passing. And sure enough, the dad who considered the accusation dismissed it and simply said he prized his daughter very highly and what a disgusting thing to suggest.

But Treays should have mined it further, because from the pretty dresses the girls were wearing to the omnipresent patrolling of their sex lives, the question to ask the dads was: Just what lies beneath this? Why not let your daughters make their own decisions? Why is your relationship with her so unusually close and possessive and so focused on her sexual nature? What is impure about sex and sexual desire? Isn’t it good for your daughters to be in charge of their own sexual lives? But they weren’t asked this closely and hard enough.

The dads all had a fairytale view of their daughters’ innocence, but their devotion – marked by long gazes at their daughters – was the kind of gaze you’d normally associate with a lover, not a father. This wasn’t purity, but a weird jail of enforced ignorance. The dads weren’t making their daughters better prepared for the world, they were ensuring they were woefully underequipped to make their own decisions about their sexual and romantic lives. The focus was less on their daughters’ welfare and more on “taking back the territory the enemy has taken”. Who was this “enemy”? The question wasn’t tackled.

Perhaps Treays would say that this lack of direct inquisition was part of the beat of a noninterventionist film-maker who likes to let her subjects reveal themselves. But this was an hour of primetime television, not a ranging, impressionistic Story-ville. She occasionally piped up, but her voice seemed remarkably weak and pliant with the agenda of the dads and their flaxen-haired angels. For a well-known “author” this film lacked authorship.

Treays found a young woman who had left the purity movement because she had had sex, she’d been pregnant, lost the child, and she’d rejected the man her parents had chosen for her. But she also had that American knack of turning a clearly traumatic experience into a perky “learning” one. And if her testimony felt empty or unconvincing, it reflected the directionless feel of Treays’s film. It was not as savage as it could have been, nor as insightful. It didn’t investigate, it observed almost without any perspective – as if the camera had no one holding it. A depressingly wasted hour.

Extraordinary People: The Million Dollar Mind Reader (Five)

To round off an evening in TV’s hall of mirrors, in Extraordinary People we met Derek Ogilvie who thought he could read infants’ minds. Mothers believed him and bought their children to him to be analysed, though he failed every scientific test of his abilities. He was a hesitant, defensive man who seemed plain scary as he murmured and gurgled around the children to gain access to their thoughts. He was insistent that he could genuinely read minds and could have won £1 million from one of his doubters, a dedicated antipsychic campaigner. Ultimately he received some comfort from the news that his brain exhibited funny electrical patterns which implied he did communicate in a “nonverbal” way.

By this point my own brain was exhibiting funny electrical patterns and I flailed, like a man in the desert desperate for water, for Late Book on Radio 4.

tim.teeman@thetimes.co.uk

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