Miriam O'Callaghan's home is a clam in the middle of the sea or possibly "the cloud" or possibly Rivendell in Middle Earth or possibly a large bay-windowed house in south Dublin. RTÉ's One to One with Miriam O'Callaghan, a four-minute web-only promo video for Saturday Night with Miriam, is seemingly filmed in her home and frankly it could be any of those aforementioned idylls.
In the video, a casual, barefoot O’Callaghan wanders around a pristine white space while the cameraman asks a succession of increasingly more random questions like a demented three-year-old.
“What is the secret to everlasting love?” he asks, and “Do you believe in heaven?” and “What’s in that tin [marked ‘Miriam’s treats]?’” (That last one sounds particularly ominous).
Of course, these are questions we’ve all wanted to ask Miriam O’Callaghan. The answers are “just be nice to each another”, “I actually do, yeah” and “rose petals and dolphin tears”. (Actually, it’s “digestives”.)
There are satisfying answers. We also meet her familiar, a cloud-shaped dog named Chance, who declines to speak but probably can. And she mentions her eight children (I’m just guessing the names, but . . . Artemis, Hermes, Athena, Poseidon, Thor, Marty Morrissey and Facebook), largely because, as she explains, everyone else does. Then, after four minutes, she banishes us from her presence for she must slumber and feed before returning to Montrose in triumph.
It’s mesmerising. O’Callaghan is so inherently reassuring that I watched this video once and then immediately put it on again with the sound down so that I could tell it all of my problems. And then I put it on once more so that I could pretend I lived in Miriam’s house, which is paradise, and could work out where to put all of my stuff (largely packets of digestives).
Our television future
In the future, all television will be like this – four million people having individualised one-to-one chats with celebrity avatars via Snapchat or Friendster or whatever young people will watch in the far future.
Until then we must make do with Saturday Night with Miriam (Saturday, RTÉ 1), the seasonal RTÉ offering that emerges at midsummer when Ryan Tubridy and Ray D'Arcy, grown weak from their eternal struggle, retreat from view, and the happy, clappy, slightly dazed studio audiences that flock to RTÉ need somewhere else to go.
Saturday Night with Miriam is designed to be reassuring. She never quite goes for the Twitter-baiting jugular of her talk-show host colleagues. She doesn't need to prove herself, for her hands are already coated with blood from the killing floor of Prime Time.
O ’Callaghan largely sticks with the familiar and cosy, although there is a sweet and sad interview with RTÉ’s Colm Keane and Una O’Hagan that touches on the death of their teenage son.
This week’s other guests include a collective of craic-dispensing Irish football fans (“ole ole ole!” they sing at key moments, as is their wont), some contemporary Riverdancers (“tap, tap, tap” they dance) and country’n’Irish diva Philomena Begley (“twang” she twangs).
It’s as though all the truest representatives of the free peoples of middle Ireland have been gathered by our future ruler to articulate the state of the nation (“Ole!” “Tap!” “Twang!”), or possibly to take an enchanted ring to Mordor in defiance of a big googly eye on a pillar (the RTÉ Board? Irish Water? Denis O’Brien? Theresa May?).
Is it Brexit?
On E4, I observe chaotic scenes as rioters and looters mingle with heavily armoured police, bodies are thrown on to burning pyres and people generally scream and panic and cough up hunks of blood. Brexit's really not going well.
Then I remember I'm actually watching Containment (Wednesday, E4) a new dystopian melodrama about what happens when lots of people feel poorly at the same time or, if you want to be sciency about it, there's "a pandemic". It is very silly.
Still, if you've been hankering after a programme in which a hard-bitten cop says "screw protocol", or a doctor says "we just have to trust the system, follow the rules and everything will be fine" moments before coughing up blood, or a hunky cop and a hot teacher are cooped up together in sexy quarantine, or one of the extras is credited as, simply, "screaming rioter woman", then Containment is the programme for you.
The plot is simple and quite xenophobic. Thanks to a pesky Syrian refugee, a deadly disease is spreading disastrously across Atlanta and the Centre for Disease Control must set up a Cordon Sanitaire (that sounds a little bit French to me).
But are we sure it's wise for a group of people to separate themselves from the rest of humanity because of a fear of Syrians? Actually, maybe Containment is about Brexit.
Just the job
The Job Interview (Tuesday, Channel 4), on the other hand, is explicitly about the subjugation of the labour class by capitalists in post-Brexit Britain. I was hoping this fly-on-the-wall programme about job interviews would be sweet and humane like First Dates, but I was naive, forgetting about the intrinsically unequal relationship between employers and prospective employees.
No matter how “funny” someone’s character might be, or how much the soundtrack sets candidates up to fail (jaunty music) or be rooted for (sad music), it feels deeply creepy and slightly bullying to be chuckling along with a successful business owner at the perceived foibles of someone who just wants a job.
Anyway, I hope that someday I turn on my television to see a fly-on-the-wall documentary series called A Return to Collective Bargaining or, better still, When the Revolution Comes.
