TV Review: It's interesting to see Dublin on the box - you get a little frisson of excitement when actors with Irish accents and European footwear arrange to meet under the Spire, a forlorn Clery's clock ticking away in the distance that just didn't cut it with the casting director.
It's interesting to look at modern Irish characters such as Maureen Boland (Orla Brady), single mother, lifestyle journalist with the Irish Standard, struggling with her work/life balance, her own well-heeled mother trotting off for sushi with a snowy-haired lover. It's interesting to observe the interiors of these characters' homes, kitchens with chrome and glass and well-framed abstractions on the wall. It's extremely interesting to see Nigerian characters in an Irish drama, and frustrating and disappointing when the issue of racism and intolerance towards the refugee community is handled with the finesse of a herd of bulls in Brown Thomas.
Proof 2 is a sharply directed, well acted, visually sophisticated production, but it is carrying a blunt instrument under its well-cut clobber - the script. The actors gallantly adhere to naturalism while being hung, drawn and quartered by exposition.
Maureen was on her way to interview a US businesswoman who was about to scupper an Irish pharmaceutical company whose former employees were getting tossed into moving traffic and having their throats slit. "You're going to discuss soft furnishings while she's making a profit from keeping poor people sick?" asked her colleague, Terry Corcoran (Finbar Lynch). "Yes I am," you expected her to answer. "And probably sleep with the Irish pharmaceutical MD while I'm at it, in my Dick Whittington boots. It may help me come to terms with my tricky relationship with my mother." Proof 2 continues for the next two weeks, hopefully with shades of grey. It's worth a look though, if only for the game of "how did that bloke get from Ringsend to the Dáil in two minutes when it took me an hour this morning".
"AN ADDICT," CASANOVA said, "must be an expert in his own downfall." Russell T. Davies, writer of the new Doctor Who, is still time-travelling, this time back to 18th-century Venice, a city in quarantine feeding on lust. Davies's Casanova is a classy Carry-On movie complete with theatrical asides and a bit of harrumphing how's-your-father. Davies has used Casanova's autobiography (which wasn't published in its entirety until the 1960s) to illuminate the extraordinary life of an audaciously promiscuous Italian adventurer who was kicked out of the seminary for immoral conduct and ended up in the dictionary as a noun. And for anyone who thought that sex began in 1963, this is prescribed viewing.
"I live on," said Peter O'Toole, playing the elderly Casanova. "I live on, I refuse to believe in an afterlife, so God refuses to let me die." Davies's device is to have the occasionally sentimental but utterly unruffled older Casanova (who ended his life as a librarian) illuminate scenes from his past to a beautiful and provocative young servant girl, Rose.
This is a high-camp, slapstick, swashbuckling version, with gondolas, canals, yellow-toothed cuckolded husbands dashing across pretty bridges, miniature castrati snapping like poodles and lavishly costumed women with breasts like bread rolls salivating over a skinny young Casanova. In an alluring and sensual production, however, there are questions left unanswered, such as: how did young Casanova (David Tennant, who resembles a kooky Tommy Steele drowning in Florentine lace and Chinese silk) ever grow into the gravelly, enigmatic O'Toole? And where did his gender-hopping lover, who disguised herself as a young man to further her singing career, get hold of a glossy rubber penis to dupe her suitors in 1746 Venice?
WEDDING PLANNER PETER Kelly could tell you - he probably has a stash of them under the icing bags. The second and final part of Brides of Franc offered us the weddings of Lisa and Adrian and Sarah and Torstein, the former at Kilshane House in Tipperary last October, the latter in Slane Castle last July.
It is chilling to imagine what the combined spend on these lavishly eccentric affairs could do in less auspicious locations. Kelly described his endeavours to provide his brides with their dream weddings as "live performance". Live performance, that is, with a headstrong cast of prima donnas, their nervous guests picking their way through the occasional camel, wall of fire or ballerina emerging from the undergrowth, not to mention tripping over the quarter ton of linen or developing an allergy to the €7,000 worth of flowers.
I am the "calm god", said Kelly - and someone would want to be. Just as Lisa and Adrian tied the knot, it was discovered that the harp in Kilshane House, which should have tinkled prettily at the reception, was devoid of strings.
Kelly had about 30 seconds to find a replacement and "avoid a serious dent in his reputation". Yes. Of course.
"The bride is on site," Kelly told his decorating team back at Slane Castle. The bride on site was, of course, Sarah (formerly of Drogheda, now of Dubai), arriving with her customary boundless perfectionism to inspect their handiwork. Sarah - who one suspects would have had scapulars of Oliver Plunkett laundered and cross-stitched on to the foreheads of her guests if she thought it "worked" - was pleased with the interior . . . however, she wanted the haystacks in the surrounding fields removed (messy things, haystacks, and what are they for anyway?). Kelly's team didn't flinch; they wearily continued tying up the napkins with ribbons hand-finished in pearl while Sarah, checking the ribbon for tautness, twitched with pleasure.
At the end of the programme we learned that Kelly, consummate performer and master of multi-tasking, had hired an assistant, Bertie, a blithely Machiavellian Corkonian - there has to be a series in it. Interestingly, Sarah returned to Dubai and jacked in her job as a flight attendant to become . . . a wedding planner.
AFTER THE UNBRIDLED lunacy of Franc, Naked Camera, the new comedy offering from RTÉ, seemed just a little timid. The format is predictable: unsuspecting Joe Public meets wacky park attendant/customer/traffic warden and the ensuing mayhem and smorgasbord of misunderstanding nearly keeps you awake.
There were some gently humorous ideas, all well-executed and without the customary gruesome candid-camera embarrassment. A spectacled traffic warden (Maeve Higgins) offered to tear up a parking ticket if the guy she had just fined asked her out ("Some people," she coyly suggested, "find the uniform off-putting"), while park attendant Patrick McDonnell's concern for the ducks extended to reading the list of additives on an unsuspecting couple's bread-wrapper. "They're sensitive ducks," he told them. "They're from Russia . . . they're lactose-intolerant." It was mildly entertaining for 28 minutes, but it's difficult to see where McDonnell, Higgins and JP Gallagher, all talented and experienced comics, can go from here with this format.
HIGGINS SHOULD ADD a supernanny to her wardrobe of offbeat characters - the real one, Jo Frost, could do with a laugh. Returning for another bout of behaviour modification, Supernanny made us all feel much better by revealing how appalling other people's children are.
The new series kicked off with the Collins family: Jason and Karen and their four children, two of whom, Ben (10) and Joseph (4), were anarchically badly behaved. They shouted and bit and spit and dissed and cursed and peed, and squeezed shampoo all over the bed, while their dazed mother followed them around the house bleating like a lamb in a kebab shop.
Enter a suited Frost with intimidating eyewear. Her biggest task was not to remove the paving stone from Joseph, who was aiming it at her head, but to get Jason and Karen to work together to provide a consistent and systematic method of breaking the mob rule in the house and to operate as a family.
Frost's reputation remained intact. Her "toughest challenge yet" was no match for constructive routine, discipline and guidelines. For the children - who previously had no idea what was expected of them - being treated calmly, confidently and fairly freed them from the tyranny of chaos and unhappiness.
But although improvements were visible and Frost's tactics appeared to be working, this was a depressing, voyeuristic experience. You couldn't help feeling that these children's psychological makeover was as flimsy as Lisa's confetti and as disposable as Sarah's haystacks.
