Family values

10:32am Friday 11th April 2008

My Family (BBC1, 9pm); Unreported World (C4, 7.35pm)

DON'T be in any doubt. I have tried, believe me I've tried, to like My Family. Series eight begins tonight so I've given it another go, especially as the Radio Times previewer hints that it's saucier than before.

Perhaps, I thought, they've upped the smut factor to compete with the gloriously unclean Benidorm on ITV1 at the same time. Alas no.

Whatever they've done, they haven't raised the number of jokes that make me laugh.

The Harpers are a family that you wouldn't want living next door or even in the same county. You certainly wouldn't want an idiot like Ben (Robert Lindsay) to be your dentist.

This is a man who goes into orgasms of delight at watching his neighbour's 49-inch plasma television.

Wife Susan (Zoe Wanamaker) is just as bad.

"A mother is proud of their child no matter how big a failure they are," is her way of comforting upset offspring.

Their daughter, Janey (Daniela Denby- Ashe), is a single mother who's called her son Kenzo, which could scar him for life.

Their equally unlikeable son, Michael (Gabriel Thomson), is at university, still lives at home and has got his girlfriend pregnant.

When his sister admonishes him for being careless, he responds with brotherly love by calling her "my wonderful sister whose legs have two different postcodes".

Ben responds in his usual juvenile way too, making jokes about this very serious matter.

How amusing, he says, that the pregnant girl's parents are called Baker and she has a bun in the oven.

When his son asks to borrow £1,000 to buy an engagement ring so he can ask Nikki to marry him, Ben doesn't like the idea. "That's the kind of money you spend before you sleep with them," he says.

I won't bother you with the talk about sock drawer secrets, stuffing a duvet into a duvet cover ("please tell me that's not code for something"

says Michael to his parents) and Janey's attempt to woo a single father and his young son.

My Family is up there on the most embarrassing list alongside Prime Minister Gordon Brown's appearance on American Idol's fundraising show with a promise to buy 20 million mosquito nets for malaria-hit countries. Will he be going on eBay to purchase them?

If you want to know why malaria is on the increase in South America, you need only watch The Amazon's Golden Curse, Jenny Kleenan's report on Unreported World.

She points out a link between the world financial crisis and the rise in cases of malaria among the indigenous Yanomami people of the Amazon.

With the price of gold reaching an all-time high, people are putting their cash into gold.

The result is a new gold rush with people mining illegally in Brazil.

While they profit by selling the gold, the victims are the tribes not only exposed to diseases from the outside, but also mining leaves the area with water-filled craters that are breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

It's estimated there are 30,000 self-employed miners working illegally in the rainforest.

The jungle terrain makes it easy for them to hide from the authorities in an area the size of England and Wales combined.

Kleenan joins the air force on a special mission to deliver medical supplies to the Yanomami people and hears how they fear their way of traditional way of life is being eroded by outsiders. They worry they may go the same way as other tribes that have been killed off completely.

The federal police say they only do anything when illegal mining is reported. They claim not to have the information that the air force has told Kleenan they've supplied. "Sounds to me like everyone is passing the buck," she says.

With plans by the Brazilian government to legalise mining, tribespeople fear the worse.

Kleenan goes over the border to see a legal mining town. She calls it a "seedy, threatening place" full of brothels, drunk miners and prostitutes.

This could be the face of things to come, developments that would see the traditions of tribes like the Yanomami destroyed forever.

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