Of late Mairead Ronan has been back in the Wicklow hills, marshalling her forces on Ireland’s Fittest Family (Sunday, RTÉ One). Ronan and her Muscular Hill People will be raiding the lowlands before winter is out. Ireland has a long history of secret militia training camps in the woods, but Ireland’s Fittest Family is the first time the national broadcaster has really embraced the concept (unless you include the Morbegs or whatever Fortycoats was at).
Ronan has been accumulating these fit families for many years, and it’s still unclear what she plans to do with them. My money’s on conquest – and I would like to assure her that this corner of The Irish Times will continue to support her in all her endeavours. The people will need familiar media voices to help the skittish public acclimatise to her iron rule, and I will coax the weak-willed, unfit families of Ireland, wheezing and groaning as they walk to the fridge (you know who you are), to take their medicine.
Before I do so I feel I should confess: I sometimes find it hard to relate to the people on Ireland’s Fittest Family. They’re so lithe and sinewy and uplifted and in motion. As they leap and run I look for things I can connect with. Is someone chasing them? Are any of them pushing fistfuls of Haribo Supermix into their heads as they leap? Do any of them fall to the ground weeping, before demanding a piggyback from an ageing parent by crying: “I’m tiiiired and I don’t want to!”? Do any of them lambaste their parents about their parenting mistakes (like not giving them a trust fund, or being overly supportive of their stupider dreams and thus setting them back decades) while traversing a big wooden wall? Are any of these families negotiating the terms of a family will with a blue biro and baseless accusations about their siblings while they wiggle through a long plastic tube?
The answer to all these questions, unbelievably, is “no”. I do have some things in common with these fit families. All of them are in shape and, not to boast, but I am also in a shape. It’s just a different shape. One of my own design. I have also been studying the various sports of late so I can converse with big men at the bus stop and, probably, fit families. I may even do a stint on the Irish Times sports desk before the year is out.
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My favourite sports? I’m glad you asked. There’s Wrongball (rugby), Irish Identity Stick Violence (hurling), Bounce Chaos (basketball), Lying to Horses About the Nature of Our Relationship (horse racing), 800 Years and Now This (soccer) and Golf (golf). Yes, I will henceforth talk with authority when a cheerful stranger asks me about “the match” (an episode of Ireland’s Fittest Family is a “match”, right?) and not just instantly wreck their buzz with facts about the banjo.
If I had to pick one thing, though, my favourite thing about sport is the way sports commentators discuss it in straight-faced sombre tones as though some very important factual information is being imparted and not like they’re describing a children’s game being played by massive, adult millionaires. It’s wonderfully counterintuitive to me that sports games aren’t compered by an animated mouse in a waistcoat or Timmy Mallett or one of Ant and Dec.
Anyway it’s the quarter-finals of Ireland’s Fittest Family this week, which means we get to see four different family units compete for their continued on-show survival (possibly real-life survival: it’s unclear what Ronan does to them when they fail). They have help. But the help is dubious. If you or I were to follow a family we barely know, screaming at them to be better, it would be called “targeted harassment”. But this was once classic Irish parenting. And here on Ireland’s Fittest Family it’s called “coaching”.
In my day we were all too embarrassed to win anything beyond our freedom
In this episode it’s undertaken by the acclaimed sports professionals Anna Geary (famous for playing Irish Identity Stick Violence), Davy Fitzgerald (famous for coaching Men’s Irish Identity Stick Violence) and Donncha O’Callaghan (famous for playing Wrongball). They each have been given several fit families to do with as they please – and what they please, for the most part, is to launch them over gruelling obstacle courses made from big tractor tyres, mud and rain.
My favourite challenge is the one named after New Kids on the Block’s gang-violence song Hangin’ Tough (possibly the toughest song ever written). This is the challenge in which all contestants hang from a metal bar suspended high above a freezing lake, while someone in a tracksuit shrieks at them, before losing their grip and falling into the lake. This is clearly a metaphor for anything you’re having yourself. They should make students do it on careers day. “That’s the gist of it,” the worst teacher in the school could say with a sneery wink.
The elimination round that concludes this episode ends with at least one family of burly youngsters hauling their exhausted mother up a huge ramp. She does not, as is tradition, say, “Just leave me here, I’m fine in the mud.” She, like all of them, is more likely to expound on the drive to win. This is another reason I refuse to believe any of these physically and emotionally healthy people are truly Irish. In my day we were all too embarrassed to win anything beyond our freedom. It just felt like showing off. For true authenticity I think we’ll have to wait for Ireland’s Most Sarcastic Uncles or Ireland’s Most Sourfaced Barflies or Ireland’s Most Disappointing Children. All three are no doubt coming to RTÉ later in the year and if so I will watch them.
Babylon Berlin (streaming on Now) is a detective show about the forces at play in the poverty-stricken, socially experimental Berlin of the early 1930s. It manages to be simultaneously stylistically innovative and realistically grimy. It’s now in its fourth series, and it’s clear that one bigoted, truth-hating sect is rising to the top. It’s a strength of the show that the first Nazi armband appeared at the end of the second season. So for a long time the show manages to be convincing about the world fascism came from without the distracting presence of swastikas. We meet good-time girls, gender-nonconforming vaudevillians, expressionist film-makers, starving street kids, opportunistic weapons manufacturers, communists, reactionary aristocrats and opium-addled war veterans before we meet a Nazi. And then it’s season four and we meet a lot of Nazis. It’s all the more chilling for that. I suspect that that’s the way fascism always arrives, gradually, then suddenly.
