A touching portrait of how Rio rebuilt his family after tragedy
One of the surprises in last week’s compelling investigation into Michael Barrymore’s fatal party, The Body In The Pool, was how grotty his house was.
Despite the gates and the landscaped garden, inside it was furnished like a cheap seaside holiday chalet.
Other people’s houses, especially the homes of the wealthy, always exert a fascination. The makers of Rio And Kate: Becoming A Stepfamily (BBC1) knew it and, while the couple were talking, the camera often strayed over the decor of their Kent mansion.
We already knew, from Rio’s award-winning documentary Being Mum And Dad two years ago, that he has a full-size pool table in the games room. What ex-footballer hasn’t?
It was more gratifying to discover that he also has a barber’s chair, set on a metal plate by the patio doors, so he can recline in appropriate style while a hairdresser manicures his beard.
Rio talked with earnest honesty about his feelings, while his stylist, his personal trainer or his builders moved about silently in the background. Perhaps, like the aristocrats of country houses a century ago, he is so accustomed to having staff that he no longer feels inhibited in front of them.
The former england defender isn’t an especially articulate man: there’s a lot of ‘know what I mean’ and ‘yeah, sort of, innit’.
But he is remarkably open, with an unusual ability to intuit what people close to him are feeling.
Five years ago he lost his wife Rebecca, the mother of his three children, to cancer. Grief has given him a deep insight into his emotions: not the superficial TV type, all hugs and invisible tears, but the real wellsprings. He combines emotional intelligence with a rare courage. When his fiancee, reality TV celebrity Kate Wright, commented during a therapy season that she found it hard seeing photographs of Rio’s first wife all over the house, he listened and broached the subject with his children.
The solution was to display all the pictures in just one room.
And when he felt his father Julian was turning a cold shoulder on Kate, Rio addressed that, too — not angrily, but firmly. It’s a rare son who knows how to reprove his own dad without causing a rift.
Much of the focus was on Kate, facing the difficult predicament that many people watching will also have experienced: how to adapt to life with someone else’s children, and accept them as your own.
It’s an important topic, and one that is not dealt with often enough on TV. But the show avoided preaching or being maudlin. If you just wanted to see what Rio’s kitchen looked like, it delivered that, too.
Professor Mary Beard was preaching less in the second part of Shock Of The Nude (BBC2), her assessment of how art has viewed the human body.
Her perspective became wider: instead of simply fuming that dirty-minded men might be eyeing up the unclothed flesh — what she repeatedly and contemptuously dubbed ‘the male gaze’ — she acknowledged this time that nudes played a huge variety of roles.
A good many of them were dead, from the executed criminals whose bodies were nailed up to give art students lifesize models for crucifixion sketches, to the laminated corpses at the Body Worlds exhibition.
She was at her strongest when talking about the art of the ancient world. Immersed in Roman and Ancient Greek culture, she forgot to lecture us about modern gender politics.
A welcome relief.