ArtShock: The Pervert's Guide To The Cinema (C4); ArtShock: What Price Art? By Tracey Emin (C4): Cast your mind back to the scene in Alfred Hitchcock's thriller The Birds in which hundreds of the feathered fiends fly down the chimney and attack a family in their living room.

You probably thought you were watching a horror movie in which people are pecked to death. Apparently not. That avian invasion was an "explosive outburst of maternal super-ego".

The birds were "raw incestuous energy" caused by the leading character's mother wanting to get rid of her son's new girlfriend.

As for the Bates house in Psycho, don't even go there. It's built on three levels with the ground floor representing the ego, the first floor the super-ego and the id in the cellar (which sounds worst than rising damp).

By the time Marx brothers Groucho, Chico and Harpo were being touted as the super-ego, ego and id, I was feeling a complete id-iot.

The fourth contribution in the ArtShock season had philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek examining cinema in a way that Barry Norman never does.

I can follow what they say, but Zizek was a different matter as he told us that "if you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions that regulate it, you lose reality itself". Or a load of symbollocks, in other words.

I'm assuming the presenter is for real and not a joke, although using phrases such as "autonomous partial object" and "immortal in its deadness" made you wonder.

The best thing was a wonderful moment involving Zizek himself as he took a boat out into the bay featured in The Birds. He had trouble steering and the boat zoomed off the wrong way. "I got this spontaneous confusion of direction," he said.

Much more informative was in the previous night's ArtShock programme with Tracey Emin wondering why women artists are still so undervalued, both financially and artistically.

A survey showed that of the 30 most powerful people in the art world, only one was a woman - and she was a collector not an artist. Paintings by women sell for considerably less than those by men. A Sothebys expert said that "historical impact" meant they were marketed for less. Women may have made advances in other areas but not art sales, it appears.

Emin met a woman wearing a gorilla mask, one of The Guerilla Girls. They're professional provocators determined to remind people there are still issues to be raised.

But British painter and sculptor Maggie Hambling told Emin that she thought being a woman was irrelevant. She quoted Picasso saying that we're all male and female and have to bring them together to make a work of art.

"He was a sexist, misogynist git half the time," suggested Emin.

"But he did some quite good work from time to time," Hamblin reminded her gently.

Published: 17/03/2006