TV REVIEW:AROUND 10PM on Tuesday, just as the credits were rolling for Come Dine with Me Ireland(TV3, Mon-Fri), I like to think that Helena Crowley Hayes was in her lovely home in Cork doing an impersonation of an Edvard Munch painting – pausing only to rhythmically bang her head off the nearest wall as she cursed her friends who encouraged her with their "ah, go on Helena, sure you're a hoot, go on the show. It's on TV3, no one will see it. It'll be great gas."
And indeed Helena was great gas – in the toe-curling tradition of that low-key reality show. Watching it this week – especially on Tuesday, her day to play host – the middle-aged Cork mammy will have learned the hard way just what an editor can do with all those hours of footage shot in her home.
Highlights included her rambling I-was-so-drunk story where she recounted how she once ended up face-down in the cat’s litter tray, or her introduction to her rather messy-looking dessert: “Mash it up and pretend it’s partially digested.” Yum! And you’d need to channel the spirit of the entire Carry On team to fully capture the double entendres that were flying during her after-dinner game, in which she invited the guests to blow on a hunting horn. Is that really an after-dinner game?
Come Dine with Mehas already been such an international hit that most will know the concept: four or five amateur chefs host a dinner party for each other on consecutive nights. Each competitor rates the host's performance and whoever gets top marks wins €1,000 at the end of the week.
The Irish version was always going to be a ratings winner – and so it proved this week – because there's the outside chance in a country this size that you'll see someone you half-know up there on screen making a twit of themselves. TV3 have kept the formula of pitching together five different types of people who don't know each other but clearly fancy themselves as great hosts and overlaid the lot with Dave Lamb, who does the voice-over on Channel 4's version of the show – though, despite the hype, he's not nearly as caustic and funny as Derek O'Connor's script on Celebrity Salon, also starting a new series on TV3 this week.
The main difference so far between Come Dine With Me Irelandand its UK counterpart is that by day two on Channel 4 there's usually a vicious undercurrent of hatred running between at least two of the diners and an outpouring of bitter, sarky comments. Here, the five Corkonians got on splendidly. even though the director gave them provocation in the shape of Luisa, a whiny, deeply humourless vegetarian who unwittingly undermined her hard-core preachiness by declaring, "I'm so hungry, I could eat a baby" (that's meat, you know, Luisa), and scarfing Helena's gelatine-filled cheesecake (mmm, melted-down pig bones). Helena won, by the way, and so she should have. She was by far the most entertaining host – without her it would have been very flat.
TV THIS WEEK was demanding, time-wise at least. Come Dine with Me Irelandwas on for five consecutive nights, as was Injustice(ITV, Mon-Fri), the superb Anthony Horowitz-scripted crime drama starring James Purefoy as William Travers, a criminal barrister living with his wife (Dervla Kirwan) in rural Suffolk and recovering from some sort of a breakdown, who is reluctantly drawn into defending a friend in a murder trial.
It made for five hours of absorbing TV, with complex plotting that stitched in enough twists to last the five days and provided a different take on the idea that justice will prevail no matter what the law says, with Travers as a sort of posh truth avenger – Dirty Harryin a wax jacket.
Despite the superb acting and directing, it was difficult to buy into the idea that Travers, with his beautiful life, would risk it all by murdering two people just because his courtroom skills got them off when they were guilty. And the final plot twist came so far out of left field, it just didn’t add up. Travers discovers that his friend did kill the girl because she had discovered child porn on his laptop. So far, this psychological thriller had murder, suicide, oil industry conspiracy, animal rights, domestic violence and police brutality – quite a checklist – and then, out of nowhere, child porn comes in the mix. Worth sticking with for the five nights, though.
THE CLUE to the tone of Fiddling the System(TV3, Monday) was in the title. Reporter Alan O'Connor set out to expose the scam artists defrauding the welfare system, or, as O'Connor rightly put it, stealing. The facts were blood-boiling enough without O'Connor's occasional lapse into the shock-jock tones that are so often such an irritating feature of TV3's investigative documentaries. And there were curious editorial choices: while O'Connor explained how scammers sometimes justify ripping off the taxpayer by saying they feel ripped off by politicians and the system, shots of Bertie Ahern and Charlie McCreevy filled the screen. Why only them?
The interviews, with the half-dozen scammers, were good – though maybe the editor went a bit heavy on the voice-disguise machine, as it was sometimes difficult to make out what they were saying. Getting money for nothing seems to be the easiest thing in the world to do, and getting caught doesn’t seem to be a big deal – the conviction rate is tiny. Even if you scam social welfare, you won’t get cut off from the system; you’ll still get your dole money.
The most blatant rip-off was the young guy in receipt of job-seekers allowance who took himself off to Australia for a year. “The government is setting a bad example for us, because they’re robbing us,” he explained. While he was away he still claimed his €800 a month social welfare, amounting to €10,500, to fund his jolly in Oz. His pal simply went into the dole office with his dole card and then sent him on the money. “And does your friend even look like you?” “Similar. Eh, no. Yeah, a bit.”
The Minister for Social Protection, Joan Burton, talked of the importance of stamping out welfare fraud, which is costing untold millions (and that’s another of O’Connor’s points – no one seems to know how much), by investing in new computer systems. But shouldn’t the person at the dole office hatch have copped that the guy whose photo was on the card wasn’t the same guy who was making the claim? Over an entire year? Do you a really need a fancy computer system for that?
GET STUCK INTO
Friday night chat shows (Channel 4 and BBC1): Alan Carr is back for a new series of Alan Carr: Chatty Manon Channel 4, competing with Graham Norton (right) on BBC1. Remote at the ready to jump between Cameron Diaz (Norton) and Jennifer Lopez (Carr).
tvreview@irishtimes.com
