Beauty is a good bet

When Liv Tyler was chosen to play the lead in Stealing Beauty (World, 9.30pm) her best claim to fame was that she was the daughter of Steve Tyler the lead singer with the hugely successful heavy metal outfit Aerosmith. Since then, she has appeared on practically every magazine cover worth appearing on, snapped up Joaquin brother-of-River Phoenix as a boyfriend when he co-starred with her on her latest movie Inventing the Abbots and been hailed by the whole movie industry as the next big thing.

When director Bernardo Bertolucci hired her to play Lucy Harmon in Stealing Beauty he must have thought the Look and the experience of growing up in a musician's family would be enough to see her through, and he was right.

Stealing Beauty is the story of a young American girl visiting her late mother's old friends who live in a farmhouse in Italy. Sinead Cusack and Donal McCann play the sculptor and his wife who have assembled a group of like-minded souls for the summer, and into their life of endless mealtimes, sleeping in the garden and passing around the joint and gossiping appears Lucy. Lucy has two aims: to find out who the man was her late mother was in love with, and to lose her virginity, and luckily there are plenty of men around who can help her with both questions.

Tyler is supposed to be 19, and somehow she seems younger. She is all long legs and big, uncertain eyes, stirring up all kind of passions without really understanding what she is doing. Sometimes it is hard to watch her, she drinks too much one night and throws up in the crotch of the Italian boy she wants to seduce, in another scene she overhears the adults talking of her virginity as if it was a liability and she hurtles away, mortified.

But even when it is hard, it is hard to take your eyes off her. Bertolucci's gamble paid off.

Media Watch is back tonight, (World, 6.30pm) in a slightly earlier time slot. While the excellent Claudia Mo has been a steady presence throughout, the show has gone through at least four male presenters in the last four years. Not all of them seemed comfortable with the show's mix of irreverence and insight but Tim Hamlett has survived to series two.