Towards the middle of his month-long shift at the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kailahun, in Sierra Leone, Dr Javid Abdelmoneim notes that the Ebola epidemic has passed a milestone: 4,000 deaths. "The world only wakes up when a few white people are infected," says Abdelmoneim. "It bugs me that that's the nature of the world."
The exceptionally powerful documentary Panorama: Ebola Frontline (BBC One, Monday) follows the 35-year-old doctor as he leaves his London home and volunteers to work in the 96-bed clinic. His life is at risk every minute of his working day – not that he makes much of that beyond admitting an understandable fear. The dehumanising disease turns the patients into biohazards, and extreme caution must be taken. “One mistake and you are gone, but if we don’t do this job who will do it?” says an African colleague.
The country’s infrastructure is crumbling. Packed ambulances deliver 10 patients at a time – they walk tentatively on weak legs, whole families, adults and, most heartbreakingly, lone children directed along a path lined with the orange mesh used on building sites while, metres away, doctors shout questions as they try to assess them. “There’s no privacy here,” says Abdelmoneim. His patients look beyond caring.
Putting on and taking off protective clothing before and after ward duty – every inch of flesh must be covered – takes 20 minutes. The tiny camera attached to the doctor’s goggles, which makes sure we see what he sees, must be chlorine resistant, because, like everything else he wears, it’s dunked in the stuff several times a day.
And what Abdelmoneim sees is terrible. As in the best documentaries, individual stories come to represent the whole horrific situation. His professional detachment breaks down once, when 11-month-old Alfa dies. The baby is alone and can’t be picked up or touched. Abdelmoneim says that he looks in pain and frightened. Later he visits the baby’s grave in the remote jungle where other Ebola victims are buried – victims are most infectious when dead.
There’s no medical treatment for Ebola at the clinic; the idea is to be supportive, to boost patients’ immune systems so that they can fight the virus. There are rare happy days when there’s dancing and laughter as some patients are discharged.
Ebola is back in the news this week in a flashy, shouty, pop-star way – the scenes from the Band Aid 30 recording of Do They Know It's Christmas? are a world away from what we've seen in the the clinic – but Abdelmoneim and the fearless Panorama team show the reality.
The doctor’s-eye-view style is immediate and horrifying in a film that highlights the world’s failure to tackle the epidemic and the heroism of those prepared to get their medical boots on the ground and do their bit. It’s a terrific piece of work.
In the first programme of a new series of What Women Want (RTÉ2, Thursday) Maia Dunphy, an engaging, smart presenter, chooses the subject of food. It's a feminist issue, so it's reasonable to expect a substantial offering, not flimsy pick'n'mix. "In Ireland, sexual guilt has been replaced with a weird kind of gastric guilt," she says at the beginning. It's a clever line, and there is an hour's worth of TV time to explore it, but this is swept away by a programme that quickly becomes just another diet-focused offering.
Dunphy talks to a model and to dieters, women who have lost huge amounts of body fat. She tries a juice diet for three days, then spends a week living on low-fat processed meals.
We've seen any number of science-meets-sociology BBC programmes on food – it's quite the TV fashion – where presenters, notably Michael Mosley, live for months on end without meat, or with meat but no sugar, or on 600 calories a day, but in these documentaries a bevy of people in white coats are tracking the presenter's progress, with endless scans and measurements. Dunphy is wasted on this. The skimpy try-outs are more faddy than factual – a hint at a tight budget instead of a meaty offering.
Having been told as a teenager that she has irritable-bowel symptom, here she gets an allergy test at a smart Dublin clinic. The results show a long list of intolerances. Later a dietician pooh-pooh allergy testing. (And, yes, there is a section on the Bristol stool chart, and it’s a sign that I’ve seen far too many of these first-world worried-well food programmes that I can draw it in my sleep.) It would have been interesting to explore how allergies and food intolerance became, as she says, “on trend”.
It’s disappointing when a programme about food and women becomes mostly about dieting, especially when it promises more. “There’s an obsession with a new morality, a guilt shame and collective fear around what we eat,” says Dunphy midway through. It’s a sweeping statement, sure, but offers plenty to chew on. That’s a programme I’d be interested in seeing.
We're midway through The Missing (BBC One, Tuesday). The time-shifting drama about Tony's search for his missing child in France is still packing an emotional punch, every scene teasing out clues, not just to what might have happened to six-year-old Ollie, eight years previously, but how time has changed every one of the protagonists. And having initially wondered if Julien Baptiste, the local French detective (Tchéky Karyo), was a bolted-on character to tap into the instatable appetite for "foreign" TV crime dramas, I'm happy to be wrong.
His calm, methodical character is the perfect counterbalance to the barely contained explosive anger and frustration of Tony (James Nesbitt). Even how Baptiste got his impressive limp – Karyo hams that up a bit: The Missing isn't entirely flawless – is an oddly intriguing subplot of its own in this multistranded drama.
The shadow of guilt hanging over Tony has all but disappeared – The Missing is too clever to definitively rule him out – and the focus is now on a trafficking gang. And what a cliffhanger (spoiler alert) at the end of a slow-paced but tense episode. Tony discovers that Garrett, the amiable rich Brit benefactor who put up a reward (played by a chilling Ken Stott, quite unlike any other character I've seen him play), has connections to a known paedophile. As he's digesting this, and just before the credits roll, we learn that Garrett also disappeared at that time. Everything about The Missing makes the week too long between episodes.
tvreview@irishtimes.com
