For a programme about three men, possibly the most authentically female moment in Bachelors Walk came at the very end of the series. Raymond and Barry having been dumped by their women, and Michael's girlfriend having miscarried, the three boys were left sobbing to the maudlin strains of Tom Waits singing Barry's ex's favourite song. It faded out on that until what will presumably be a second series, but you wonder what they did immediately afterward the credits rolled. Maybe they rented Bridget Jones's Diary on video, bought an industrial size tub of ice-cream and settled down for a pyjama party. Pillow fight!
It seemed somewhat out of character for the three bachelors at the centre of the series. You would have thought the tears would have been more likely shed into pints in Mulligans, and for a series so hinged on its humour to have abandoned it at the death felt like a bit of a cheat. It was an unsatisfying and downbeat ending, then, to a series that had otherwise hardly put a foot wrong.
Bachelors Walk became television to talk about because it deftly walked the fine line between tapping into the zeitgeist and giving us a story that was fundamentally human. It was a brave thing to have Dublin loom so large, partly because of the inevitable continuity errors. On Monday night, Michael's pregnant girlfriend phoned him to tell him that she was on her way to Holles Street Hospital, only for the two of them to turn up in the Rotunda. But the city was a solid supporting actor rather than the star. They lived in the capital, but that didn't mean they went around making jokes about the Millennium Spike every five minutes.
It will be interesting to see just how quickly Bachelors Walk dates, to see how swiftly it could become a nostalgia piece. It could so easily have been a comedy-drama out of time before it even made it to the screen, but was smart enough not to go with computer whizzes telling jokes in binary code, and instead created three timeless drifters, dreamers and chancers. It wasn't that a man could recognise himself in at least one of the characters, it was that he could recognise himself in all three.The love stories, with the exception of Barry's superficial relationship with the schoolgirl, were teased out skilfully and rarely flagged over the eight episodes.
Where it looked a bit leaky - and there were moments and characters that were just too exaggerated, too wacky - the charm and the jokes held it together.
The chief reason, of course, why it was so successful was that there was a thrill in stumbling across a good Irish comedy that was also engaging drama. That kind of programme does not exactly come flooding out of the telly. If it did, we probably would have been a lot more blasΘ about Bachelors Walk. As it was, there was a certain novelty value in watching recognisable characters against an Irish backdrop rather than British or American. When something so rare comes wandering into view, everybody wants a look at it. It would be nice to think that we won't have to wait until the second series of Bachelors Walk to be treated to a view like it again.
Anyway, if they decide against a second series they could always go for a spin-off, The Adventures of Davor. Vincent Walsh's Balkan refugee - his suit sleeves rolled up and the quiff blowing in the breeze - secretly lived three weeks in the house without detection ("He spent 15 months on the run from the secret police," as Barry explained. "Raymond's not going to find him."). He ate an entire chicken in one episode and pulled a giant sandwich from the sleeve of his jacket, like a hungry surrealist magician, in another.
And there was that pre-coital cleaning routine. You've probably just started your breakfast, so I'm not going to describe it. If you saw it, it'll stick in your mind forever. If you missed it, you're probably better off.
For those ageing Generation X-ers quickly running out of alphabet, the excellent Cold Feet returned this week to pick up the baton. After spending two series delicately sewing together the relationships between the six main characters, it's now busy picking them apart at the seams. Jenny has left Peter for a job in New York, his reaction being to roll over and act as a bridge on her way.
Meanwhile, David and Karen are finally turning the separate beds arrangement into a separate houses one. Adam and Rachel are the only couple left intact, but are creaking dangerously under the strain of Jane (Victoria Smurfit) trying to squeeze between them. A timebomb set at Adam's stag party, she has come from Ireland to claim him. You can always tell when she's near because a twee fiddle tune follows her wherever she goes. It got a whole lot louder when she invited herself to lunch in their house. There ain't going to be enough room at the table for the three of them. Maybe Bachelors Walk has it right, a happy ending doesn't make for good drama.
"There are strong scenes which some viewers might find disturbing," said the continuity announcer before Wednesday night's Fair City. Thankfully, it wasn't the sight of Hannah Finnegan finally giving in to the inevitable and attempting to smoke 40 cigarettes at the same time. Rather, it was that of Billy-the-Most-Evil-Man-In-The-World - and the best Fair City character - meeting a bloody and annoyingly premature end. It was a plot twist kept under high secrecy by RTE - unless, of course, you forget the fact that "Why Billy Had To Die!" was the headline on the front page of last week's RT╔ Guide. The magazine's eagerness to blurt out the ending can be traced back to the famous incident over Glenroe, when the Guide ran a photograph of the cast and a teasing headline wondering who will die, while TVNow! sat beside it on the shelf with a big picture of Biddy on its front page and the headline: "Biddy dies!". Ever since, it has been keen to ruin it for everybody before another publication else tries to ruin it for everybody first.
Anyway, after having built up enough enemies to find himself murdered several times over, Billy was done away by the tag team of his new wife, Carol, his new stepson, Lorcan, and old employee, Leo Dowling. They are not the most brilliant minds. Carol's attempt to run away to another country was somewhat eroded when she left her plane tickets, passport and mobile phone behind her. The script had coincidence rear-end coincidence by having Billy find the items at the very moment Lorcan left a message on the answer machine that outlined his mother's travel plans in such detail that only the title of the in-flight movie was left out. Billy was not best pleased, his face contorting so much that it seemed in severe danger of turning inside out.
A bout of wrestling with Leo, ending in Billy unconscious and bloodied, was a neat red herring to have us believe he had been killed. But it all came to a head when he rose from the dead and went for Carol. Lorcan, an unlikely hero, arrived like a knight in white, laceless runners. With the grace of a young Arnold Palmer, he brought death to Billy with the swing of a three wood.
We didn't see the blow land, but the sound was that of large tree landing on a pallet of eggs.
"He's out of our lives now," said Carol standing over the body. "Of course he isn't. He's lying bleedin' on the floor!" yelled Leo, leaving the viewer to only guess at which meaning of the word "bleeding" he intended.
In the effort to clean up the bleedin' mess, Leo and Carol should have turned to Neal Smither. In California, Neal has cornered the market as a Crime Scene Cleaner, but will not be winning any humanitarian awards for his efforts. He is an obnoxious man with simple demands. "Shotgun suicide in San Francisco. Yes!!" Neal moves through jobs involving decomposed bodies, incontinent corpses, brutal murders, messy suicides. His philosophy on the world has a certain Hobbesian simplicity. "I've seen it and smelled it, and it stinks. It's a stinky one." The gorier things are, the better the job. "See that, that's your brains on the carpet. The hard stuff. This is what your family gets to find after you do your final fuck you. Pretty, ain't it." He has brains on the brain, so to speak. "Watch out," he warned the cameraman, "you're stepping in brain." And brains on the shoe.
tvreview@irish-times.ie
