review

Spare a thought, this New Year, for Kee Chaun. Twenty-nine years old and an Oxford graduate, this active participant in the world's sharpest economy, Singapore, is getting desperate. "Yes, I'm a virgin," he says. "I feel absolutely normal because I'm not from Western society where there can be a stigma attached to that. But I'm desperately looking for a wife." And there is one major problem exacerbating Kee Chaun's desperation. According to his father, who, on all available evidence appears to be a shrewd judge of these things, Kee was "born ugly. Very ugly. No woman would look at him."

Fortunately for Kee Chaun, in Singapore, a country where the government likes to make sure nothing is left to chance, even a face reminiscent of a reversing accident involving a fork-lift truck should be no obstacle to marriage, provided its owner is a graduate. In an attempt to upgrade the local gene-pool, the authorities there are making sure no brainy spermatoza goes to waste in the great dash for economic world domination. So they have established a state dating agency to help the reticent play their part. Called the Social Development Unit, or SDU for short, this quango is better known on the island as "Sad, Desperate and Ugly".

The somewhat nervous part poor Kee Chaun - clearly S, D and U - played in helping his country's development was exposed in Under The Sun: Singapore Singles (BBC2). Jenny de Jong's film traced Kee Chaun, plus Madeline and Rosemary, two others on the Singapore shelf, through their efforts to get hitched. It has been done before, following folk through the dating agency game, but the strength of this film lay less in the process, than in the details which emerged about a very confused society. For someone with, frankly, limited goods on offer, Kee Chaun set himself high standards in a potential mate: "I want a nice-looking girl with long hair, carries herself well and is a successful career woman."

The latter might have been designed to increase his chances with Rosemary and Madeline, successful career women both, who found that, unlike Kee, Singapore men in general were terrified of clever females.

"Men expect women to be beneath them," said Rosemary, a mistress of the unintentional double entendre. "They are worried by my education, but I'd be more than willing to submit to my husband."

Madeline, too, had experienced a panicked look in the eyes of men she had met, though this may have been a reaction to certain conditions she laid down: "Being a Christian," she said, "I won't get up to these hanky-pankies."

You couldn't help feeling relieved as you watched Rosemary sort out her menagerie of cuddly toys, Kee Chaun obsessively tidy his desk, or Madeline giggle uncontrollably and describe herself as "a little crazy", that the state takes an interest in their future. Although, even then, you wondered how successful they might be when you saw the SDU in action.

"My ideal man is Rock Hudson," said the woman in charge, a choice, it might be thought, which wouldn't have got the enterprise very far in its procreative aim.

If only to be as cool as the characters in ER (C4), the brilliant American medical drama beginning a new series. In a week boasting a couple of bad British stabs at doing an ER, it was worth being reminded how good the original is. Two deaths, a victim with multiple gunshot wounds, a patient being thrown off the operating table to make way for another emergency, evidence of at least two affairs, and the introduction of a potentially explosive new character, and that was before the credits had stopped rolling. ER is a drama of passion, power, speed, and extras - the sense of emergency is enormously enhanced by the numbers of people dashing around in its background, the kind of expense beyond the budget of British television. Best of all, none of them appeared to be S, D or U.