The Model, The Poster

And 3000 Women

Channel 4, 10.45pm

Bollywood Star

Channel 4, 9.00pm

The Model, The Poster And 3000 Women purported to be saying something interesting and profound about the differences between image and reality, about human desire and human weakness. Instead, it told us a couple of tawdry things about factual programming as

conceived by Channel 4.

The plot-line, if you can call it that, was simple enough. In 1986, the model Adam Perry and the photographer Spencer Rowell shot a picture of a man and a baby as conceived by an Athena art director. The result, L'Enfant, charmed countless young women - a stronger word than ''charmed'' might be required - and gave Perry a bad case of mistaken identity.

The girls deluded themselves into believing that he was a strong, sensitive type, the ideal and idealised husband and father. Instead, by his own unabashed account, he was a promiscuous clown whose beef is that he got no royalties from the huge sales of the poster. A drunk, to all intents and purposes, who these days renovates railway arches, Perry, by his own reckoning, broke 3000 hearts and gave the documentary its only point and purpose.

Meanwhile, the photo-grapher went bust and into rehab; the art director, Paul Rodriguez, died of Aids; and the baby seemed to disappear. The programme's tiny triumph was to find the boy, now 17 and living on Cyprus and allow him to offer the only adult remarks in the entire film.

''Why bother sleeping with 3000 girls?'' young Stelios asked. He regarded Perry, acutely, as ''insecure of something'' and made the obvious point: ''It's not normal, is it?''

The model, as bright as industry standards allow, still maintains that he was living out every man's fantasy, even when that meant sleeping with girls who were under age. The programme's cheesy narration maintained that he had ''achieved iconic status'' as ''the ultimate heart-throb''. In fact, he is now a 40-ish single man who lives with his dog and struggles to pay child support for a baby he cannot remember conceiving.

If the film had any motive other than the flaunting of ''legendary'' promiscuity, it was to expose the myth of the new man. In the guise of Perry, he turns out to be have been the old man with a new chat-up line and the best promotional campaign ever devised. If the model's own recollections were anything to go by, he never once seems to have realised that he might have been a shade happier trying to live up to his image rather than exploiting it for sex that was, clearly, entirely meaningless.

Channel 4, though, did not care about that. The film-makers had lined up a series of women prepared to admit that Perry had ''used'' them, as though they had failed to notice both the absence of charm or humanity in their fantasy swain. Sexual stereotyping, it seems, is not the preserve of men alone. That's equality, of sorts, but it is also a recipe for misery.

Bollywood Star, in contrast, came up with a happy ending. Once we got past the

customary nonsense about ''emotional roller-coasters'', four aspirants remained in the contest to win a part in director Mahesh Bhatt's latest film. The winner was both surprising and deserving.

It has been clear all along that Reepack was the best actor in the bunch. It didn't seem likely, nevertheless, that Bollywood would go for a

34-year-old, 24 stone fire station clerk from Coventry. Yet while her rivals simply acted out movie star cliches, she turned on a performance that was absolutely rivetting. It must be bad enough to endure an audition, but to audition for a top director while being filmed and interviewed takes real courage.

Reepack, having conquered all the odds, was sincerely overjoyed. Sofia, Ricky and Heidi tried to put a brave face on their failures, but their eyes, full of bitter envy, told you why they had failed in the first place. Acting is pretence, but it has to be honest pretence. Reepack was an authentic star, stunningly truthful in her playing, who deserves a very long career indeed. Good

for her.