Dr David Orentreich, a dermatologist for Clinique, said that advance orders were already coming in for the company’s “HDTV kit”, which includes a “pore minimiser”, “colour correctors” and an “antioxidant rescue serum.”"HDTV is a real issue for performers,” said Dr Orentreich. “An analogy would be that seeing skin through a standard format is like looking into a regular mirror. Seeing it through HDTV is like looking with a magnifying mirror. It exacerbates the appearance of redness, scars, pigmentation irregularities and shows every line, pore and discoloration.”For some, simply patching over the cracks is not enough. Mel Braham, chairman of the Harley Medical Group, a chain of plastic surgery clinics, said a number of unnamed television personalities had been in touch, eager to take precautionary measures against the technology.”There are people already coming to us who are very concerned about their complexion and how it will show up on the screen,” he said.Other presenters are reported to be requesting “Botox budgets” on their expense accounts and contributions towards facial peels.

They are doing so largely as a result of what has happened in the US. There, celebrities ranging from Desperate Housewives actress Teri Hatcher to pop star Britney Spears have been slaughtered over their “real” appearance. One commentator, Phillip Swann, has become a pseudo celebrity in his own right for highlighting HDTV horrors on his cult website, www predictions .Technology experts are predicting a new boom for television as a result of HDTV’s launch. Sky will be the first major broadcaster to make the transition, on an unspecified date next month. The others will follow soon.It is more than twice as sharp as DVD and cinema footage, and offers four times the clarity of standard television. It also offers more vivid colours and greater depth of field, bringing everything – including background scenes – into focus.Sky estimates that 2.1 million HDTVs will have been sold in the UK by the end of this year, compared with 700,000 at the end of 2005.Despite consumer groups’ complaints about the £300 cost of Sky’s decoder boxes and the suitability of some TV sets that were sold as high-definition-ready, a massive surge in demand is predicted. Television manufacturers such as Sony are scrambling to meet it.Jonathan White, general manager of Sony’s TV and home-video group, said: “There are two big things that have happened in TV in the last 50 years – one is the change from black and white to colour, and the other is the change from mono to stereo .. High definition is like rolling the two together.

This is the next logical step.”For those who will appear on it though, he had few words of comfort. “Should presenters, actors and actresses be worried? Yes, it will … show up more details of their faces, but that is in order to bring an added level of detail and realism to the viewer.”. Teachers are being driven out of their jobs and into ill-health by headteachers who bully them with repeated inspections of their lessons, a teachers’ union conference heard yesterday.

The annual conference of the NASUWT voted unanimously to condemn headteachers who were using changes in Ofsted inspections as a way of persecuting their staff. Under new Ofsted rules, schools are required to show visiting inspectors how well they can evaluate their own strengths and weaknesses.
But delegates told the conference in Birmingham that many heads were using this repeatedly to “inspect” lessons themselves, often with little warning.Brian Cook, a teacher from Wolverhampton who proposed the motion, told delegates that a number of heads were acting like “dictators and tyrants” and seemed “unable to treat teachers as people”.* Ministers were accused of a U-turn last night over a pledge made during Tony Blair’s second term to provide all nursery school classes with a qualified teacher. A new consultation paper makes it clear that classes can be staffed by a teacher or by another adult qualified to degree level.. Patricia Hewitt’s intentions are admirable, and she deserves congratulations for her plans to shift the emphasis of NHS treatment for depression from drugs to talking. There will, of course, be those who have their doubts about psychotherapy, some of which are legitimate. There are some kinds of mental illness that are not treatable by dialogue, and there are some forms of therapy that do more harm than good.

Seroxat, for example, is a drug that allows many people to lead fulfilling lives, and those people are unlikely to be helped by any kind of analysis. Equally, it is plausible that, in some cases, ill-directed therapy can reinforce introversion, or worse. That said, however, there is something plainly unhealthy about a nation in which one million people take Prozac and nine out of 10 GPs say that they prescribe anti-depressants when what their patients really need is someone to talk to. Professor Richard Layard, who has done more than anyone to make the study of happiness a serious academic discipline, also deserves warm applause for his role in persuading the Secretary of State for Health to change direction.