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Tiger Woods The Rise And Fall

Jacques Peretti"s Tiger Woods: The Rise and Fall (Channel 4) offered a bleak vision of human nature in which almost no one emerged with any great credit. Tiger"s father, Earl, came across as an unpleasant psychotic who viewed Tiger as a project rather than a son; Tiger as a robotic shell, unable to relate to anyone, least of all the women he treated as objects; the agents from his sports management company as money men only interested in protecting the brand; the prostitutes and lap-dancers as desperate losers happy to be abused in exchange for bedding a celeb; and the hacks and investigators as sharks cashing in on Tiger"s demise.

Not that any of this was terribly revelatory, as few people"s lives have been picked over more closely than Tiger"s over the last year. But it was a notch or two above your average cut-and-paste job, and there were some breathtaking moments, such as Jocelyn, the lapdancer, saying that what she had learned from her three-year affair with Tiger was that she was not going to be exploited by men again – all the while posing in her bra and knickers for the camera.

You also got the feeling the lawyers had been crawling all over this film and that a great deal of the more sensational material had been left on the cutting-room floor. But it didn"t matter that much, because the film was as interesting for what people didn"t say as for what they did. The National Enquirer may have held off from exposing Tiger"s sex life for a year in exchange for getting a cover shoot to boost circulation on a sister magazine, but the clear message of the film was that Tiger"s behaviour had been an open secret for the best part of four or five years, and yet no one had said a word. It seems incredible. You can only wonder what deals were done to buy that silence.