TV Review/Hilary Fannin:Growing up in Dublin in those drizzly years between the settling of the dust of Nelson's Pillar and long before the erection of the gleaming Spire, one had certain cultural expectations around St Patrick's Day that were rarely disappointed.
There was the glum wind roaring down O'Connell Street, scattering the tunes of the military bands over the dutiful and uninspired spectators, followed inevitably by a malicious burst of hailstones and a long wait for the bus home. And when you got there - knees blue, fingers chapped - there was sod-all on the telly except more rain.
This year, despite the gleefully reminiscent freeze, things were quite different, with a multicultural parade followed by hours of mad but generally positive emotion on rugby and cricket pitch. RTÉ drama, however, chose to celebrate the national holiday weekend with a screening of Single Handed, a dour and listless two-part drama that seemed to utilise the more obvious changes in Irish life - immigration, wealth, stone-clad industries in verdant hills - to tell a dispiriting tale of megalomania and boyo-ism.
It began with young Garda Sgt Jack Driscoll (Owen McDonnell) returning to his home patch in the west of Ireland, peak-capped and waterproofed, with a great big jeep, a murky (if unrevealed) past and two pretty and soulful peepers, to take up a spot of Garda-ing.
The discovery of the corpse of a young Montenegrin woman in a dingy caravan soon found Driscoll elbow-deep in a morass of sexual exploitation and secrecy, with the tawdry exploits of yon villagers lined up for the new sergeant's scrutiny like a row of muddy ducks.
It was a full notebook for Driscoll: there was the lachrymose entrepreneur who once furtively gave birth in a cow byre (to Driscoll's half-sister begob); and there were Driscoll's errant father's cronies (well-dressed, well-versed in sycophancy, and revelling in new-found wealth) who were using the impoverished "she wasn't complaining" Montenegrin for sex.
Meanwhile, Driscoll had (unknowingly) hit the pit with his half-sister, the corpse was discovered to be pregnant and the line "she was a little foreign tart on the make" was being vainly brandished about like a broken umbrella in a downpour.
Single Handed felt as if it had been superimposed forcibly on the landscape and as if it demanded of good, solid actors that they cut their cloth to some defunct imperial measurement. It was depressingly predictable fare, although the countryside, despite its watery sheath, looked alluringly beautiful.
FROM SLUSHY BOG to the manicured formality of 18th-century rural England and a cloying adaptation of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park - the drama (like the weather) obstinately refused to get any better last weekend, with Billie Piper temporarily abandoning her Tardis to give an unconvincing interpretation of girlish heroine Fanny Price.
Piper's endless pirouetting around the garden in a Regency smock, her chasing of pug dogs up and down the airy stair, her unruly peroxide blond curls tumbling a-this-a-way and a-that-a-way was, shall we say, more than a little tiresome. The whole thing, in fact, seemed to be populated by 20-year-old thesps who had mistakenly assumed they were at a midsummer Rada picnic.
Still, bless 'em, they did manage to get out of their pre-washed Abercrombie sweats long enough to do their "Austen acting". You know the kind of thing: a bit of cadding about and louche lying around on the ottoman, followed by lusty swallowing and anguished raking of shoulder-length tresses, before returning to the canteen to find out who'd been cast as the new Hermione Granger (and that's just the boys).
Good news for the medicinal ITV leeches though - it had been ages since they got out of the prop department to practice a bit of bloodletting on a feverish young rake. The burning question is: why indulge in the making of a costume drama if you are going to give it all the emotional weight of a flimsy episode of Emmerdale? Anyway, there are two more Austen adaptations, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, up ITV's frilly sleeve, with the network excitedly promising further displays from "the absolute cream of British acting talent". God, I can't wait.
"I AM FRIGHTENED to have a dream, because I cannot afford to have that dream taken away," said a woman in a red sari from the bowels of a ragged Kolkata (or what most of us know as Calcutta) street.
Hidden among the crinolines of the schedule was a deeply moving short film, Midnight's Lost Child, a 2003 documentary directed by Drogheda journalist Alison O'Reilly (which, being uncommissioned by any station, took her more than 18 months to make), highlighting the work of the Hope Foundation. The Cork-based initiative runs 55 projects with its Indian partners, helping the street children of Kolkata and their mothers.
The living conditions of the estimated 200,000 children on the streets of Kolkata (a city the physical size of Dublin but containing more than 15 million inhabitants) were, as one would expect, appalling. O'Reilly's unadorned and simple film showed minuscule infants sleeping on thunderous thoroughfares and toddlers chained to gates, their mothers looking for food or working, leaving their children alone, hungry, and terrifyingly vulnerable.
Children have been stolen from the laps of their sleeping mothers, one exhausted young woman told the camera, some to work in brothels, some for the precious harvest of their kidneys, others, she said with desperate optimism, for "adoption".
Among the film's memorable and painful images were those of prematurely aged five-year-old boys, dying of exhaustion from their work in cement factories, and the delicate filigree of bones on the shoulders of tiny girls sold for sex, victims of the persistent belief among some men, as in parts of Africa, that sex with a virgin will cure Aids.
Midnight's Lost Child, while acknowledging the tyranny of the caste system, did not address wider political questions. Why is domestic violence not considered to be violence? Why have an estimated one in every two street children been sexually abused? And why have generations of Indians been born and died on the streets of Kolkata?
It did, however, reflect the ethos of the Hope Foundation (for whom it was made), which is based on the belief that, by taking one step at a time to break the cycle of poverty, by running creches, schools, nutrition programmes and counselling, one can begin to free some children from a life of fear and neglect.
"Education," as one Indian teacher who works with the foundation said, "cannot be taken away."
EXCUSE THE BACK-FLIP to televisual lunacy, but in search of a little, shall we say, light relief, I was inexorably drawn to Ulrika . . . Am I A Sex Addict? Ulrika Jonsson is the blonde Swede, ex-weather girl and Gladiators presenter who is best known, certainly recently, for a series of unhappy relationships, including her bruising affair with footballer Stan Collymore and a tryst with former England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson. She also doesn't get that many gigs these days and, as she said herself, she's got to make a living.
Offering her a job in a documentary on sex addiction (a new phenomenon, apparently, and one whose escalation, seemingly, we are unprepared for - goodness) may have seemed like an inspired, if deeply cynical, bit of media sexploitation, but I wonder if the producers were aware of what a suggestible, incautious and broken subject they were employing.
It was dryly depressing to see this emaciated and insecure woman (who spoke candidly of her depression, suicidal thoughts and anger at her children for keeping her alive) throw herself into the lap of a bunch of long-haired American therapists (all of whom seemed to be called Didi) on a Mississippi ranch and declare herself a sex addict.
Disquieting, too, to observe Jonsson open herself up to a therapeutic relationship that was going to evaporate as soon as the camera was switched off. Regardless, she spoke of growing up in Sweden where, living alone with her father, she observed his almost industrial capacity for new lovers and was "sexualised" at an early age by the pornography that he left scattered around their home.
Sex addicts, Jonsson was at pains to point out, are not people who shag 24 hours a day, they are people with an intimacy disorder (and various other complaints usually boldly illuminated in your average self-help paperback: compulsive attachment, inability to bond, you get the gist).
At the risk of alienating an ever- increasing community of "addicts", Jonsson's "treatment" (which included a 12-step programme, a suggested 12-month period of sexual abstinence, and communicating her wishes to a horse called Red in a "for-real barn with for-real hay") sounded like flimsy protection for a woman with more heavyweight problems.
"Didi has pressed a button deep down in Ulrika," the narrator intoned as the skinny Swede wept over her resolutely detached equine counsellor.
You wanna press my buttons, Didi? Make it the one marked "off".