TV REVIEW:THE OPENING shots of TV3's much-hyped new series Dublin Housewives (Monday-Thursday) features five women in spangly evening dresses wiggling like they've ants in their pants and pouting like porn stars, so from the off this series was never going to be about dragging the Hoover around the house, thinking what to do for the tea and putting a wash on. Now that would be reality TV.
This version of the hit US reality show The Real Housewives of New Jersey features five women who aren’t close friends but know each other, in a mwah-mwah air-kiss sort of way, from Dublin’s “glamorous social scene”. Except it doesn’t look all that glamorous: there’s a lot of standing around in high heels at PR events and astonishingly dull-looking parties, screeching “you look amaaazzzing” and meeting up for bitchy lunches.
The not-so-famous five are Virginia Macari, a new mum and swimwear designer; Lisa Murphy, a beauty-salon owner who is also known for being engaged to the solicitor Gerard Kean; Danielle Meagher, a Botox specialist; and the socialites Roz Flanagan and Jo Jordan. Meagher fancies herself as different from the others, being a self-made businesswoman.
She’s also the only single one, on the lookout for a man, “a Nirp” – non-Irish international rugby player – and she says all this while straight-faced. Although, what with her fondness for Botox, it must be hard for her to say anything any other way.
As the week progressed it all got a bit Mean Girls, with potty-mouth catfights and fallings-out. “Jo called and told me you called me a knacker,” sniped Macari to Meagher. There’s nothing classy about any of this.
It’s not obvious why we should be interested in following these women – except maybe to marvel at their make-up routines. (They’re so camouflaged by layers of slap that they could be any age from 40 to 60.) Above all, though, Dublin Housewives seems old-fashioned, like an episode of Reeling in the Years. You want to tap them on their shoulder pads and tell them it’s not 2006 any more.
THE CAMP FASHIONISTAGok Wan, in his new series, Gok Cooks Chinese (Channel 4, Monday), spoke the language the Dublin housewives could understand. His tofu dish, he said, "is better than sex, shoes and handbags". The man who made his name giving makeovers to women has turned to cookery because his dad – "poppa Wan" – owned Chinese restaurants and Gok's a dab hand with a wok.
Other than that it’s a bit of an uneasy experiment; imagine if Gordon Ramsay presented a fashion programme or Louise Kennedy did a cookery show with top tips on crubeens and tripe.
The first episode featured a worrying lack of bowls, with fried red rice being served on a cabbage leaf, a prawn concoction on a manky-looking chopping board, and something else on a bit of slate – arty-looking, maybe, but not very appetising. Crockery appeared in this week’s episode, but the whole thing isn’t very convincing, what with Wan’s new catchphrase, “Wok on,” and his habit of bragging how quickly he can cook each dish – “Only three minutes in the wok: faster than a takeaway” – without mentioning all the peeling and chopping that preceded it.
WITH LAST WEEKEND'Snews bulletins filled with horrific images of the massacre at Houla, in Syria, this week's Dispatches: The Real Mr Mrs Assad (Channel 4, Monday) was timely. On paper the glamorous couple looked like modernisers – he trained in London in ophthalmology; she's a British-born former banker – the sort of people the West, "desperate for a friend in a turbulent region", thought it could do business with when Bashar al-Assad took the reins of power after his despotic father's death, in 2000. They were, as one contributor described them against a backdrop of archive clips showing meetings with Queen Elizabeth and Tony Blair, "reassuringly British".
But since he came to power, civil-rights observers have estimated that 10,000 civilians have been murdered or tortured by the secret police. The documentary mined Assad’s private emails, published in the Guardian, to suggest that he must have known about some of the events, such as the massacre at Homs, and that the chain of command systematically and brutally cracking down on the uprisings must, because of the structure of power in his regime, lead back to him.
It packed a lot into a half-hour programme, including shocking footage from Houla – barbaric images so at odds with the slick, sophisticated image of themselves the Assads presented to the world.
E4 WAS FIRST INthis week with Revenge (Monday), the US summer schlockbuster due to be shown on RTÉ. Set in the chichi summer resort of the Hamptons, the drama sees a young woman, Emily (Emily VanCamp), infiltrating the moneyed set to seek revenge on the people who destroyed her father, with an icy social linchpin, Victoria (Madeleine Stowe), topping her hit list. The poor getting revenge on the rich: a classic postboom theme if ever there was one.
If you saw the hilarious season finale of Modern Family (Sky1, Friday), which incorporated a Mexican soap opera into the plot, complete with histrionic dialogue and woeful acting, you’ll have an idea what Revenge is like. Camp and corny, but fun for the summer.
A BRIEF WORDabout Mad Men (Sky Atlantic, Tuesday) and the best episode in an already strong season. Called The Other Woman, it saw every single relationship shift in response to two key plot lines: Peggy handed in her notice to move to another agency, and Joan agreed to prostitute herself so the agency could win the Jaguar account.
Peggy, sick of being sidelined in favour of her male colleagues, finally realised her professional worth.
Joan, now a single mother, agreed to sleep with the client in exchange for 5 per cent of the agency and a secure future. With just a half-hour in a hotel room, she got what copywriter Peggy, who grafted hard for so many years, could never get: a stake in the business. It was surely an Emmy-winning performance by Christina Hendricks as Joan.
Did both women bloody-mindedly get what they wanted or did they have a choice in the misogynistic 1960s prefeminist workplace? That’s the strength of this extraordinary series: it serves up deliciously dense plot lines and leaves the viewer to untangle them.
Get stuck into . ..All in the Best Possible Taste (Channel 4, Tuesday). From flying ducks to best china, the Turner Prize- winning artist Grayson Perry presents three programmes on British taste and how class affects it.
