The American way | 1 November 2012

To the Americas this week, and first to the land of the free and the home of the brave: Gay to Straight (Monday, BBC3) examined the practice of ‘gay conversion therapy’; Unreported World (Friday, Channel 4) investigated the political power of unregulated talk radio; and Inventing the Indians (Sunday, BBC4) explored the appropriation of the Native American Indian by American popular culture.

Gay to Straight was presented by someone called Stacey Dooley (no, me neither) on a channel called BBC3 (yes, but not very often). Dooley is a sympathetic, friendly, kindhearted soul, and even the most reticent of teenage boys would be willing to tell her his secrets. TJ is 19 and battling with feelings and urges that his therapist has advised him to call ‘same sex attraction’ and to think of it as a ‘treatable condition’. TJ is ashamed and confused and so are his parents: homosexuality (or ‘the one thing I would not tolerate’, as his father called it) is irreconcilable with the family’s Christian beliefs.