TV REVIEW:THIS WEEK we learned that the handiest way to become a multi-millionaire is either to run a banjaxed Irish bank while it's haemorrhaging money or murder a random stranger – and amazingly only one of these get-rich-quick yarns is fiction.
The plot at the centre of escapist drama
The Reckoning
(UTV, Monday) began with poor, single mum Sally (Ashley Jensen, last seen in
Extras
and
Ugly Betty
, but here downtrodden and exhausted) being called to the office of a swish city lawyer, where she learns of an inheritance from someone she doesn’t know. There’s a catch. To claim the £5 million, she must kill a man – a rapist and a murderer who, says the mysterious voice on the CD giving her the instructions, “deserves to die.”
The cash would be handy because her teenage daughter has cancer and hope lies in treatment in a US hospital. The moral signposts were writ large: Is it all right to do a bad thing for a good reason? Should good people be let live at the expense of bad people? Her partner, former copper Mark (Max Beesley) brushes aside her horror at the proposition, but before he can pull the trigger she realises that she is caught in a bizarre chain. If she carries out the murder, she will be killed. The race is on to discover who is behind the chain of events and why.
This week's first episode set up the incredible scenario, while strong acting and tight editing ratcheted up the thrill factor. Since Downton Abbey, ITV seems to have upped the quality of all its dramas, but it's going to be a challenge to stretch the plot out to a second episode.
IMAGINE A PROGRAMMEcalled Meet the Obamas, filmed in Offaly and featuring a cast of pink-skinned farmers, all laying claim to Barack kinship and visiting rights to the spare room of the White House, and you get the idea of how tenuous Meet the Middletons(Channel 4, Monday) was. "Britain is awash with folk who share their DNA with our future queen," went the voiceover as the outer branches of the Middleton family were shaken and an abundance of far-distant cousins fell out. The only thing the hairdresser, the supermarket manager and the rest had in common – apart from the diluted DNA link – was that they are commoners. The camera lingered on the kitschy china figurines in the home of Kate's distant cousins, the Harrisons (heck, I could even be related to her), just to prove how lower middle-class they were and how Kate now won't have to look at any more Aynsley now that she's gone up in the world. There's no chance that any of them will be at the wedding, so there wasn't even that frisson at the thought of Kaylee and Alan rocking up to the reception with their tattoos and blingtastic earrings.
Unfortunately, they were all nice and a little dull, though dull is probably a good thing: the last thing the Windsors need is a blow-in with skeletons in the cupboard, what with their own colourful family history. You’d have to warm to 99-year-old great-aunt Alice, who has never met Kate but said: “I worry about her going into that family. She’s too good.”
KATE MIDDLETONIS probably having as much input into her big day as Dubliner Suzanne, who, in the first of a new six-part series, Don't Tell the Bride(RTÉ2, Monday), agreed to let her fiance, butcher Finbar, plan the wedding. The idea for the programme is that a prospective groom is given three weeks and 10 grand to organise every aspect of the big day, including picking the wedding dress and the venue, with no communication allowed between the engaged couple.
The director tried to inject a bit of tension into the proceedings – shots of the groom’s mates saying how rubbish he is at this sort of thing; clips of them downing cans of beer when they should have been busy wedding-planning – but really, how hard is it to book a hotel, order flowers, text the invites and buy a few dresses for what was a very traditional, by-the-book wedding? Though admittedly, as Suzanne is over 6ft and a plus-size, finding a dress was a challenge – it came down to picking the only one in the shop that he thought might fit. She pretty much hated it. He slipped up with the hen party, too, sending Suzanne and her seriously glammed-up friends to an all-you-can-eat bargain buffet in a Chinese restaurant while he and his mates got hammered in Temple Bar.
The voiceover injected a bit of fun into the overlong programme (with no rows, tears or tantrums, there wasn’t enough material for an hour), and the groom’s profession handed the script-writer puns a-plenty: “For this butcher the stakes couldn’t be any higher,” and “If he doesn’t do it right, the butcher could be dead meat.”
OLDER TEENAGERShave always been the hardest audiences to reach because they simply couldn't be bothered watching the telly. There's some hope, though, if they get to watch their own age group on screen, which is what Frenemies(RTÉ1, Wednesday-Friday) is banking on. In the debate-style set-up, a dilemma is put to a teenager – what do you do if your dad is acting way too young for his age, or your teachers are being unfair – and then conflicting ways of sorting the problem are given by other teenagers. Meanwhile, the person's real friends are backstage suggesting which option they should choose and why.
Presenter Eoghan McDermott handles the whole thing with ease, and the warehouse setting looks good. It’s unusually serious for a youth programme, and while the first show was a little stilted, the energy of the smart, clued-in teenagers was bubbling under the surface. It just needed to be let out a little, and maybe for some more challenging subjects to be thrown in – the teens were clearly able for it.
A final word goes to Michaela: Finding Peace(RTÉ1, Wednesday) because there is little more to say that would add to the poignancy of the programme. It was intensely personal, making public the rawness of grief, with the family and friends of the young woman who was murdered on her honeymoon in January recalling in simple, warm detail the person they knew. It couldn't have been anything other than sad.
The simple style of straight-to-camera interviews – with her friends sometimes talking about her in both the present and the past tense – intercut with footage of a vibrant Michaela on The Late Late Showor The Rose of Tralee, painted a picture of a woman who had lived a lot and had a lot to give. Her new young husband John McAreavey's immensely thoughtful contributions were the most affecting. He proposed in Paris, he said, and they then waited two years to get married.
“I wish we had gotten married sooner.”
WHAT NOT TO MISS NEXT WEEK
Supergarden (RTÉ1, Tuesday). Last year ambition got the better of most of the contestants, with ghastly gardens, improbably coloured walls and not enough plants.
Hopefully things will have calmed down this year – and Mary Reynolds is a tonic.
tvreview@irishtimes.com
