TV REVIEW:HERE'S HOW to get rich. Start the day by rubbing your ear lobes with a sort of constipated look on your face, chant "I am a millionaire, I am financially free" and go to seminars in stuffy hotel function rooms where you get to high-five complete strangers while shrieking "you're going to be rich" at them. No? Well, you just don't want to be a millionaire – not like Janet, Rhys and Sarah, whom we met in Money(BBC2, Tuesday) a fascinating look at the big-in-the-US, now-on-this-side-of-the-pond-too wealth-coaching industry.
Sarah and Rhys are 18 and already deeply in debt – £4,500 – because of how much they’ve invested in wealth coaching. Rhys has just come out to his parents as a boy more interested in making money than going to university (they didn’t take it well), and Sarah has shelled out for shelves of how-to-get-rich books and attended pricey seminars that are like hysterical revivalist meetings where you learn about developing a “millionaire mind”, ear rubbing and the rest.
In their quest to become rich, the teenagers – “I find the whole idea of having a job quite ridiculous,” said Sarah – have even taken on a one-to-one wealth-coaching mentor at £1,500: we know where he’s laughing all the way to.
When interviewing Robert Kiyosaki, the king of this industry and author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, in his palatial home in Arizona, the off-camera interviewer sounded dubious, as if she was treading carefully in case she slipped on some snake oil.
The film, the first in a three-part series about money, was gentle with the dreamers who so desperately want to be rich while subtly making clear that although the charismatic wealth coaches may have made some of their fabulous wealth from clever investments and their “millionaire minds”, the poor saps who are prepared to buy the DVDs and books and attend high-priced seminars also contributed rather a lot to it.
ANYTIME A COMICfetches up on screen presenting a programme there's a sneaking suspicion that someone thought the subject was so boring that having a funny man in the picture would liven things up. So last weekend we had Colin Murphy half-heartedly trying to inject a bit of life into Tracks and Trails(RTÉ1, Sunday), quite the most tedious travel programme to be on TV for some time (or maybe ever), and Neil Delamere exploring our Viking heritage in The Only Viking in the Village(RTÉ1, Tuesday).
The reason Tracks and Trailsis so much like a corporate video, complete with plinky-plonky music and the sort of stilted voiceover that was in vogue about 20 years ago, became clear at the end, when the logos of the programme's many sponsors, which included several county councils, appeared like pebbledash on screen.
All, presumably, had to have their say, which is fine for them if that's how they want to spend their money, but it doesn't make for a quality – never mind entertaining – prime-time programme. And, anyway, RTÉ's Nationwidedoes this sort of pottering around the country so much better and without making it look like a penance.
Murphy said nothing remotely amusing during his tour around the lakes and byways of Cavan and Fermanagh, though you couldn’t really blame him, as he was mostly head to toe in rain gear – never a great look.
Delamere is a giddy sort of chap, on for sailing up the Liffey, standing on a longboat in full Viking kit, making Viking bootees out of smelly cowhide, dying fabric for his Viking shirt with his own wee – and helping a blacksmith make a sword that in Viking tradition he named the not-so-Danish Fidelma.
He wandered around Dublin with the historian Pat Liddy, exploring Viking sites (that was really interesting), and debunked some myths. Their helmets didn’t have horns and they were quite nice chaps, really – much cleaner than the natives – and they were no more prone to pillaging than the Irish, who were always fighting each other.
There were comic re-enactments – heavily influenced by the brilliant kids' series Horrible Histories– which were funny. But while Delamere isn't big on vanity in some ways – in full Viking kit he looked like a little elf from Santa's grotto – as writer and producer of the two-part series he spliced in several excerpts from his recent stand-up show for no obvious reason. And by doing that – it's an adult-only routine – he ensured that The Only Viking in the Village, which would be brilliant for kids – history in a fun way: what's not to like? – isn't really suitable for them to watch.
A NEW PRESENTERon RTÉ is a rare and, as it turns out from watching Kathriona Devereux's Small World(Friday RTE1), a good thing. She's great, full of enthusiasm and fun as she travelled to Brazil to meet locals who used to live in Gort, in the west of Ireland, but returned home either because of the downturn here or because they had managed to save enough money – one woman worked four jobs – to go back and build a house and a better life for themselves.
The half-hour programme packed a lot in, from meeting Jerry, the meat-industry man – originally from Cork, a long-time São Paolo resident – who in the 1990s established the link between Gort and Brazil to the strapping Brazilian teenagers with broad Galway accents pining for the west of Ireland.
Thirteen-year-old Leonardo Gomez, who spent 11 years in Galway, had hopes of playing hurling for the county; his hurls were piled up in the hall. He considers himself 90 per cent Irish, and it is the painful questioning of identity that comes with emigration that was so well and simply explored in the programme.
Devereux followed Lucimerie as she prepared to leave Gort and return to Brazil after 10 years. She hadn’t seen her three young children, who were cared for by their grandmother, in two years – a huge sacrifice. “They don’t see me as their mother. They have to learn and know that I am their mother,” she said.
She brought back enough money to build a house and start a business. Ireland, she said, gave her the confidence to know that anything is possible, that she could work for herself and make a better life. Amid all the economic doom and unattractive rain pants, it felt good to get some positive feedback.
Get stuck into . . . Inside Job(BBC2, Wednesday) Where it all started: this Oscar-winning documentary charts the global financial crisis of 2008. Narrated by Matt Damon.
