TV Review Shane HegartyWe are all "clinging to the skin of this tiny world", according to The Doctor. That may be true, Doc, but some of us are clinging on by ice-white nail extensions with our tiaras between our teeth (more of which later). Dr Who is back, and currently inhabiting a witty, soulful and vaguely misanthropic Christopher Eccleston.
In the first of the new series, Eccleston was faced with saving a blundering, chip-eating, telly-watching nouveau race - us - from a deeply unscary lava monster who lived in the bowels of the London Eye. Nobody said it was going to be a picnic. The new Who is gloriously free of plot constraints, allowing people to be eaten by wheelie-bins and viciously attacked by chillingly indifferent mannequins in wedding dresses.
"All plastic is ready to come alive," predicted The Doctor, holding up a vial of antidote that looked suspiciously like washing-up liquid. "Phones, wires, dummies . . ."
"Breast implants?" offered a gorgeously unbothered Billie Piper, who plays Rose, his fledgling assistant. Rose was going nowhere - dead-end job, footie-obsessed boyfriend, hammy mother chained to her hair-straightener in a pink velour tracksuit - until Doctor Who (having eventually and mystifyingly saved the planet from becoming an incendiary Tupperware party) gave her an ultimatum: "You can stay here, fill your life with work sleep and food, or go . . . anywhere."
Rose's hesitation was momentary before this sassy girl-next-door ran into an intergalactic future and alien lovers everywhere cheered. In this exuberantly entertaining rework, which kept the bevy of children I watched with glued to their seats for 45 minutes, cynicism felt as useful or appropriate as a telephone book in a Tardis.
SARAH WATERS'S BOOKER-nominated Victorian melodrama, Fingersmith, in a three-part adaptation, has all the usual ingredients: inheritance, thievery, lust and lies. Apparently innocent young woman Maud (Elaine Cassidy), incarcerated by her elderly uncle on rambling country estate, becomes victim of a handsome fraudster (Rupert Evans), who with the help of her maid, Sue (Sally Hawkins), plans to con her into marriage then drive her to insanity, commit her to an asylum and make off with her fortune.
Charming. Instead, however, Maud and Sue gavotte around the drawingroom and run across the imposing gravelled drive hand in hand, giggling like . . . well, like two actors told to giggle. They fall in love, share a downy bed and, hey presto, you've got a costume drama with a little petticoated lesbianism on offer to spice up your Sunday evening.
The petticoats, though, are starched with deja vu. From the Dickensian kitchen where the petty thieves (the "fingersmiths" of the title) hatch their plan to dupe the heiress, to the club-footed, stammering footman with a crush on Evans, this is a bag of tricks that have been seen before. It feels a little like end-of-term RADA.
Evans is a pretty and foppish baddie who would have difficulty scaring Miss Muffet. To counteract his winsome ways and floppy hair he has been allowed a liberal sprinkling of volatility, which he uses to kick over chairs. To be fair, the women are plausible, the narrative essentially interesting and the greenery green, but even though all is not as predictable as it seems, whatever complexity Fingersmith has up its lacy sleeve is obscured under folds of familiarity.
BODICES, BONES AND bustles were gleefully abandoned by a bunch of 21st-century pioneering women in The Colony, the new historical/reality experiment. The Colony brings four families (Irish, English, Tasmanian and Aboriginal) back to the Australia of 1800, plonks them in the beautiful, inhospitable wilderness with some 200-year-old camping equipment, a couple of axes, split peas and vinegar and more salt beef than they'll care to remember, and tells them, as their ancestors were told 200 years ago, to survive. Mirroring, with as much historical accuracy as possible, the social mix of a settler community, the three white families are also given two convicts each to help them build a house, farm their settlement and look after their livestock in a gruelling 14-week test of sufficiency.
The Irish contingent, the Hurleys (two teacher parents and their four children, from Co Dublin), are a cheerful and practical lot who came to the experiment armed with "a sense of humour". Their new neighbours, the Stephensons, from Yorkshire, and the Hohnkes, from Tasmania (who were feeling "quite rapt" about it all), have been reading survival manuals and seem somewhat more aggressively ready for life in the valley, which is infested, we were blithely informed, with deadly funnel-web spiders. As the colony's new residents got their bearings and began staking claims, it was a bit like watching a disastrous package holiday unfold - you just knew who was going to nab the loungers first and hog the karaoke machine.
The Aboriginal clan, tellingly made up of members of the Costelloe and Donovan families, live on the edge of the settlement and are the only ones who'll be poring happily over the mental holiday snaps at the end of this torture. They are already settled in caves, fishing, collecting edible berries and acquainting themselves with the spirit of the place. They are also astute observers of the blundering pale-skinned wildlife in their midst and have successfully traded a single flatfish for a cup of one of the top dogs' rice (they even got to keep the cup).
The convicts (one of whom is actually a deeply panicked New York-based choreographer) were invited to share the respective families' tents on their first chilly night in the outback - something, we were told, that would have been unlikely 200 years ago. The question of how much gentility remains among the assembled bunch may keep you watching.
Although why RTÉ chose to broadcast the opening programme, which if nothing else is a worthy slice of family entertainment, at 10.15pm is a mystery.
IF DR WHO is already worrying that the human race has a tenuous grip on reality he shouldn't watch Brides of Franc - though anyone even vaguely interested in what Ireland has become in the last decade should. There is only one episode left, but it will be the biggie.
Brides of Franc is a Co Cork company whose raison d'être is creating a designer package for that perfect wedding day. There are, apparently, 20,000 weddings a year in Ireland, and Peter Kelly, who is Brides of Franc, caters for the more exclusive end of the market. There are just two Franc weddings a month, servicing the well-heeled and the slingbacks, from secret celebrity nuptials in fairytale castles to wealthy ex-pats who want their homecoming dreams realised. The money that changes hands at these feasts of extravagance is staggering, with wedding-day budgets that start at €40,000 and can reach "up to almost seven figures" - and that's before you throw in a dress or a honeymoon.
Brides of Franc is a two-tiered confection. The first programme introduced us to Lisa and Adrian and Sarah and Torstein as they prepared for their nuptials. Lisa and Adrian live in London and both work for a TV company. Adrian proposed to Lisa Burke, who is Irish, on a moonlit Christmas Eve on the banks of the Thames. Lisa, a weather forecaster on Sky TV, is used to being in front of the camera: she came across as a confident and upbeat woman, who was thrilled with the catering manager when he offered her alternatives to pedestrian salmon as a main course on the menu - "If there's an option of a fish, that opens the world to me," she beamed.
Peter Kelly loved Lisa; he got emotional when it came to Lisa; he wanted Lisa to have something really special - after an hour of wine-tasting at her kitchen table, he suggested some real-life ballerinas to circumnavigate the water feature.
Sarah, who is also Irish, and her Norwegian fiancé, Torstein, live in Dubai and work for an airline company. Their schedules are hectic ("he flies in, she flies out") and the ensuing lack of communication with each other may explain why their budget jumped from €40,000 to €60,000 in the time it takes to apply an oxygen mask. Kelly flew to Dubai to shop with Sarah and bring home a little eastern magic to Slane Castle, where Sarah had decreed that her fairytale wedding should take place.
Sarah was a tough cookie. Dripping with exhaustion, Kelly arrived at his Dubai hotel to find his brittle, inquisitive client scouring the lobby in search of him. Sarah's perfectionism strained even Kelly's uniquely resourceful style. How many times, she demanded, would the waiting staff come in and out of the reception per hour? And was the photographer aware that she wanted her accessories photographed? Kelly ordered a drink and smiled. Sarah held her breath. A lesser wedding planner would have been turned into a frog.
The articulated trucks have delivered a mountainside of disorientated buds, forests have been plucked, dresses have been altered and re-altered, the grooms are comatose, the brides primed - next Thursday is the big day and Sarah has just heard that a big blue unscheduled digger is ripping up her churchyard in Slane.
Time and relative dimension in space (that's Tardis to the uninitiated) couldn't halt this parade. Don't miss it.
tvreview@irish-times.ie