Television Review

THERE IS a long tradition of the broadsheet press recycling the most salacious titbits they can glean from the tabloids under cover of righteous disapproval; and I don't intend to break with it now.

Following in the footsteps of Channel 4's memorable documentary Sex, Lies and Aliens, Back to the Floor (BBC2) last night visited the offices of the Sport newspaper. But where the earlier film emphasised the comic sleaziness of the whole operation, "The Write Stuff" performed what you would have thought was an impossible job, arousing your admiration for the professionalism and good taste of the paper's reporters.

David Sullivan, the porn'n' property magnate who owns the Sport, spent a week at the paper's headquarters in Manchester, trying his hand at being a reporter. He began - as the series' egalitarian premise virtually dictated he should - with a blithely dismissive assessment of the job he would have to do: reporters, he felt, didn't have a hard job, didn't have to face much pressure. After a couple of interviews, from which he failed to glean much in the way of quotes, and a disastrous outing as a football reporter (it hadn't occurred to him that you have to be able to watch the pitch and write at the same time), he was convinced that they were a splendid, hardworking bunch. Mind you, I didn't spot him offering any pay rises.

The episode that demonstrated most clearly Sullivan's incompetence and lack of basic human restraint involved a story about two Blind Date contestants who had had sex with one another. Having interviewed the woman involved ("I'm not being awful, but I couldn't go out with anyone that wasn't either a footballer or a DJ. They're just, like, not on my wavelength, at all."), Sullivan was taken to task by the editor, Tony Livesey, for missing important aspects of the story: "Was he well hung?"

Sullivan then tried to elicit supplementary quotes from Cilla Black. When she refused to speak to him, he left a message asking her to relent, ending by expressing the worry that he would be forced "to resort to things which aren't very nice for you and aren't very nice for us". Later, London Weekend Television wrote to the paper complaining that he had threatened Ms Black. Sullivan was bemused: "All I did was leave the message on the answer-machine."

The programme would have been more morally satisfying if the commentary hadn't taken such satisfaction in Sullivan's discomfiture - there was an undeniable note of smugness in its statement that the Sport's circulation hovers around the 200,000 mark.

Still, there was plenty of sleaze to enjoy. We got the "Blind Date Sex" contest, in which a blindfolded man and woman were introduced to one another and left to get on with it. In debriefing, the woman said her partner had failed to achieve an erection. He claimed that they had had sex for "about half an hour, something like that". And there was the woman who said Elvis had fathered her four-year-old child: he had come to her in a smell of whisky, a blinding light, and a heaving of the bed. You couldn't make it up, as they say, though somebody obviously did.