TV REVIEW:Tonight with Craig Doyle RTÉ1, Saturday; Jamie Does . . . Marrakesh Channel 4 Wednesday; A Passionate Woman BBC1, Sunday; Spoilt Rotten BBC1, Monday; Fame: The Musical RTÉ1, Sunday
NO AMOUNT of carping from the sidelines is going to convince the commissioning bosses out at RTÉ that there simply isn’t enough material on our little island to sustain two weekend chat shows, even though the evidence (and that would include you, Louis Walsh) is staring them in the face.
The pop manager was one of Craig Doyle's guests in the first of his Saturday night chat shows, which replaced the depressingly similar old Saturday night chat show presented by Brendan O'Connor. Walsh was on O'Connor's final show, oh, all of two weeks ago, so either there isn't anyone else around to interview, or everyone else wisely said no. Or could it be that the producers of Saturday Night With Craig Doyle(it's an independent production with Doyle's own production company involved) think that Saturday night viewers are so dense or desperate they'd watch anything? Isn't staying in the new going out, or some such malarkey, so why not rise to the challenge?
Anyway, there sat Louis Walsh on the silver Chesterfield sofa – the set, with its orange background, is a visual nightmare – looking remarkably fresh faced ("what's your secret, Louis?" Doyle didn't ask), giving his usual spiel about being one of nine from Kiltimagh, Boyzone, Westlife, his fight with Ronan, blah blah. At this stage, Louis Walsh should be my specialist subject on Mastermind, except of course he couldn't. Because chat shows now are about what the guests want to say and not what anyone might want to hear.
You had probably heard it all or read it somewhere before.
Doyle's style is light and gossipy – titbits from The X Factor, about Simon Cowell's high heels, and Ashley and Cheryl's relationship ("and are you seeing anyone, Louis?" Doyle didn't ask), which is fine, but he'd want to actually ask some questions that yield at least something new and interesting. It would be a treat to see someone on an RTÉ chat show that we haven't seen on another RTÉ chat show in, say, the past year. And why bother farming the show out to an independent production company if it's going to be essentially the same – apart from replacing grumpy lumbering Brendan O'Connor with easier-on-the eye but cheerily bland Craig Doyle?
SUNDAY NIGHT'S glossy new prime-time offering from the BBC, A Passionate Woman, was equally disappointing and all the more so because it looked so good on paper. It begins in the 1980s with Betty (Sue Johnston) remembering an episode in her life in the 1950s when she was a trapped, bored young mother (Billie Piper plays young Betty) married to a dull, penny-pinching but steady husband. In this first part, the young couple live in what appears to be an Abbey Theatre set for The Plough and the Stars, such is the artfully distressed condition of the walls.
And then, before you can say, “is there room for any more cliches in this yarn?” along comes handsome Johnny foreigner, Alex (Theo James), who moves in downstairs and who is supposed to be Polish but sounds like Charles Aznavour. He has teeth that never saw a ration book, a sparkling white shirt and vest (we saw a lot of his vest) and a suit that could be off-the-peg Armani. He lures a willing Betty into great bouts of athletic sex in all kinds of locations in a weirdly depopulated Leeds. She, meanwhile, although poverty stricken, has an impressive selection of handknit cardies and retro-patterned dresses – all very Hovis ad meets the Cath Kidston catalogue.
The thin, predictable plotline barely stretched the hour and a half, and Billie Piper’s character was oddly ill-defined; though maybe in tomorrow’s concluding episode, with the brilliant Sue Johnston as Betty in the 1980s, the drama will go beyond just getting the period detail right.
MAKE WAY on the shelves for another Jamie Oliver cookbook and get ready to add cous cous to the weekly shop. In the first episode in this new food show-meets-travelogue, Jamie Does . . ., he spent two days in Marrakesh where his blokeish enthusiasm was as infectious as ever, though Moroccan food is a harder sell than drizzling Tuscan olive oil on some pukka crusty bread.
The first recipe, “tagine portable stew for single blokes”, involved sourcing the ingredients in a market (“it’s lamb, it could be the neck, it’s hard to say”), putting the lot in a tagine and heading down a dodgy-looking alleyway to a dingy room where it was cooked in embers and ash for four hours; followed by roast lamb with the frankly disgusting-sounding fermented butter and ending with “my snakey cake”, his cute name for a very complicated-looking effort involving Warqa pastry and dried rose petals.
Ever one for verbal tics, his new one, “Oh, my Lord”, said repeatedly in reaction to just about everything from eating a bit of cow’s udder to the sun-capped Atlas mountains, got a bit wearying, and even the blokiest cook on TV began to look way out of his comfort zone in the jostling all-male chaos of the city where women were invisible.
A WHOLE WORLD away from Jamie's larder was explored by Spoilt Rotten, a Panorama investigation into how preventable diseases in children are reaching epidemic proportions, particularly how diet is leading to obesity and tooth decay. And the problems aren't cosmetic or only impact on individual children; as the programme showed, they have major implications for the British health service (and it can't be too different here). At Alder Hey hospital in Liverpool, the busiest children's hospital in Europe, treating such problems is diverting £1 million away from the treatment of other, non-avoidable conditions.
There was five-year-old Leon who was as broad as he was tall and weighed 10st (63.5 kilos), as much as the average 17-year-old. His mother kept shovelling food into him, followed him around with a wheelchair in case he got tired and was convinced that there was genetic cause for his obesity (there rarely is, the boy’s very patient and non-judgemental doctor remarked calmly). When the reporter pointed out to the mother that maybe giving Leon three meals in two hours might be a little bit much, the mother’s defensiveness was a sight to behold.
The tots undergoing dental surgery were the hardest to watch, such as the three-year-old in for a general anaesthetic to remove several rotting teeth because, according to his mum, “he loves his lollipops, he does,” as if he toddled down to the shops to buy them himself. More than half the dental operations carried out each year in the hospital are on children under six. The doctors concluded the problems are mostly down to parental ignorance as to the implications of the wrong diet and an inability to say no.
Steve Ryan, the medical director at the hospital remarked, “people are starting to say that maybe this is a generation where children will be dying before their parents,” – and all from avoidable lifestyle-induced conditions.
Remember my name: The judges are the real winners so far in RTÉ's new search for a musical star
There's no fence-sitting in Robert C Kelly's gotta dance, gotta sing world. As a judge in Fame: The Musical, RTÉ's new search for a star (or two, as it happens) the musical theatre producer tells it as he sees it.
“You’re not singing the right notes, I don’t think you were singing the right words, you were nowhere at the beginning of it and it got worse as you went on,” – and the astonishing thing is, the teenage girl on the receiving end of this public dressing-down didn’t collapse in a heap and demand counselling. For wannabe entertainers, rude rejection is clearly part of the gig. West End pro and Billie Barry alumna Jacinta Whyte is another plain speaker (but a lot kinder and, like Kelly, she does sound like the voice of experience) and actor/director Simon Delaney completed the judging panel to find 12 candidates for their “Fame school”. It was all pretty predictable and formulaic, though bringing the auditions to London – where the standard was way higher than in Dublin or Cork – did show that any young person with real ambitions towards musical theatre leaves here early.
Kelly looked fierce throughout and it’s hard to see why because he should be laughing all the way to the bank. The TV talent show is a search for two leads for his upcoming Dublin production of Fame. It’s on telly for 10 weeks, which, by any measurement, is fantastic free (well, maybe not to the licence-payer) publicity for his show.
