TV REVIEW: Cabin Fever is Treasure Island on a boat. Where once there was the exoticism of a desert island, now there is a vague sighting of land through drizzle.
Cabin Fever. RTÉ1, Sunday and Monday
The Importance of Being Morrissey. Channel 4, Sunday
True Lives: Wedding Planners. RTÉ1, Tuesday
The Dinner Party Inspectors. Channel 4, Tuesday
There are black clouds, not blue skies. Contestants don't win prizes by shinnying up palm trees and hanging from cliffs; they do it by tying knots.
On Sunday night, the boat and its crew sailed into the deep grey sea. The vessel is light on personality and heavy on vomit. For the opening programme, seasickness was the central character. Hardly a minute went by without someone gulping down a sentence and running to the side of the boat.
"Excuse me," the contestants would say. "Huuaargh," they would add.
Between shots of them throwing up, the public was asked to form on opinion on which person it wished to jettison. Derek Mooney hosts a live edition of Cabin Fever on Mondays. Mooney normally presents wildlife shows and Winning Streak, so he seems very excited to be working with live people here. The eviction show asks the loser to walk the plank. The sense of menace inherent in that forfeit, however, was somewhat deadened this week by the way Mooney presided over the stunt like a protective aunt. He waited patiently as the candidates put their life jackets on, reassuring a fretting audience that RTÉ didn't want any accidents.
"You had a good innings," he consoled the first evictee, Ciara, while dutifully ignoring the fact that she had been bowled out first ball. Before the duck took to water, Mooney reassured frantic viewers that the RNLI were standing by to rush to Ciara's assistance if necessary. When she returned to the boat, he thanked the RNLI for having fished her out. A nation breathed easy once again.
Cabin Fever is as dull as the weather. It cares less for personality than for parochialism. Captions repeatedly inform us what towns the contestants are from and the contestants themselves keep telling us not only what towns they live in now, but also what towns they were born in. Cabin Fever has guessed that a one-hour package of highlights each week is a narrow window through which to distinguish the characters of 10 people, so it has bypassed that and gone straight for reliable local patriotism. It is pitched at banner-wavers and local newspaper headlines. It may take Cabin Fever eight weeks to sail around Ireland, but it knows just how small this island really is.
Stephen Patrick Morrissey gave his first television interview in 16 years this week, but rather than tear down the wall around him, The Importance of Being Morrissey served to add a few bricks. The singer lives in Los Angeles now, but is still immutably, resolutely Morrissey. He has the face of a peeling hacienda. When he rides his moped down Sunset Boulevard, he does so in a casual suit, wearing no helmet, his hair drifting high but steady in the breeze. He cruises the freeway in an open-top convertible. He walks his dog to the edge of the Hollywood hills and poses against the cityscape. He wears regal detachment and Chips sunglasses. He seems to exist in constant anticipation of a photo-shoot for one of his own covers.
He has, as one person put it, fully embraced his destiny as an eccentric. He takes tea and biscuits with Nancy Sinatra, sleeps beneath a portrait of Diana Dors and has a photo of Bobby Moore in his living-room (although one friend said that it would be less for the footballer than for the little row of terraced houses in the distance). Morrissey is still arrogant, bitter, aloof, recalcitrant and utterly convinced of his genius. If he weren't a genius, you would hate him for it.
He also possesses a disarming charm.
"You've made me and so many people so happy," a fan blushed. Morrissey gave a bashful shrug and replied: "I didn't mean to."
On a visit to the barber he took over after the cut, because only he can style it correctly. When it was greased and teetering in the correct manner, he turned to the camera. "Shazam!" he said.
He remains opaque, saying much but giving away little.
"I don't know what he's like. Nobody knows," said Noel Gallagher, before amending that statement a little. "I'd say his mother knows. But I'd say he doesn't even know."
It was up to the contributors to have a guess, and they were a heavyweight bunch. You don't often get J.K. Rowling, Bono and Alan Bennett sharing the same space. It was interesting to see how many of the middle-aged men interviewed here - old fans, commentators, friends - still dress like Morrissey. He attracts a lot of obsessive types, observed his guitarist, and they are mostly men. How unfair. My tape of the programme is tucked safely away, to be viewed only on special occasions.
Wedding Planners followed this new branch of the emergency services as it went about its business. Peter Kelly, for instance, specialises in theme weddings. If you feel that the one thing your wedding lacks is a fine selection of Rasta wigs, he's your man. His company is called Weddings By Franc. It's pronounced Fronk and is a reference to Martin Short's manic wedding planner in Father of the Bride. People used to tell Kelly that he was just like Fronk.
"You're just like Fronk. You're gas," they'd say. Kelly thought about it for a while, and agreed that he was indeed gas, so adopted what he calls the "persona of Fronk". He wears colourful clothing. His wall-clock has angel's wings. Women can talk to Fronk. Men can trust Fronk when he talks to their women. A lot of people assume that Fronk is gay. He's not.
"I'm happily married with three children. I don't care what people think," he said. The revelation was enough to make a miniature plastic couple fall off a wedding cake in shock.
He was working with a couple who were spending €30,000 on the day. It was, they kept reminding themselves, the cost of a small house. If they had hired wedding planner Tara Fay, it would have cost them €5,000 for her services alone. That's the price of a small wedding. Brides call Fay at 3 a.m. to describe their nightmares to her.
"A lot of them feel like they own your arse," she remarked. Fay has not had a holiday for quite some time, going from special day to special day to special day.
"But I have to keep smiling," she said with a grin so forced it made you wary of making any sudden movements. Next up, Holy Communion Planners.
If RTÉ had the money it could turn Wedding Planners into a series. The current format du jour in the UK is the lifestyle makeover series, typified by What Not to Wear and replicated by such series as Made for Each Other (unhappy couples wash their dirty linen in public) and How Clean is Your House? (two women wash other people's dirty linen in public). They are all over the schedules at the minute, and you begin to wonder how our ancestors survived without the guidance of a couple of patronising TV gurus. Do not eat bison with one's fingers. Don't you know that fur is last season? One does not scribble on the walls of one's cave.
The latest is The Dinner Party Inspectors. They are Victoria Mather and Meredith Etherington-Smith, two women who are unlikely to sit on anything unless they have given it a thorough sweep with a hankie beforehand. Here, they sit in front of a bottle of wine and a monitor and watch a dinner party as it unfolds. They are goddesses of good manners, overseeing the over-sauced scallops and underclass humour of mortals. They make scathing remarks in social diary-speak. This week's dinner party host began the meal with a poem about himself.
"Oh, I feel prickles of embarrassment," gasped Mather. "I'd rather be at an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical!"
It is all somewhat pointless, an idle spot of middle-class voyeurism. When the meal ends, the inspectors go home and Etherington-Smith writes a letter of advice to the host, while Mather combs a bouncing hairpiece she claims is a Pekinese.
Things that we learnt: we do not lick fingers; we do not talk about the wine; we do not do sexuality for starters; we do not do regurgitation.
The inspectors do not do irony. "Inter-course smoking is a jolly tricky one," we were told. Oh, how vulgar.
