TV Review: 'We are trying to make good television," said Mags emphatically. Mags (Orla Fitzgerald) is an aspirant film-maker - you can tell she wants to make movies because she wears a flat cap on her boyish head and has an obligatory bespectacled boyfriend, John (Simon Keogh), who slouches around her father's large and airy Georgian mansion in a pair of limp boxer shorts with a bowl of Wheaties in his ineffectual mitt.
It is Mags who has been charged by her entrepreneurial father with bringing Diogo Furlong (Simon Delaney), a Portuguese-Irish singer, on the road with a dissolute band of hairy musos to kick-start his Irish cabaret career. And so begins The Last Furlong, the new drama from the State broadcaster, and just as we had begun to get used to quality drama from the station and to lay old ghosts to rest, we are hit with a rambling, ill-conceived rattlebag of caricature, dodgy vocals and orange pan stick.
Delaney was very likeable in the intelligent comedy Bachelor's Walk, and has clearly been looking for a roadworthy TV vehicle since. The Last Furlong, written and directed by Bachelor's Walk co-creator Kieran Carney, has echoes of its predecessor - kooky young things under high ceilings, sweetly dumb, shambolic flatmates - but without wit or cohesion, these elements simply inflame irritation and highlight the aimlessness of the plot.
By the time Delaney and his erratic Portuguese accent had found their way to Ballymore Eustace and hijacked a busload of frothy ladies on a "golf outing", the piece had moved into farce. And believe me, it was distressing to see a room full of spiky fifty-something women being reduced to a swaying mass of dewy-eyed appreciation as, teetering precariously on the brink of musicality, Delaney crooned Such are the Dreams of an Everyday Housewife.
Like the over-enthusiastic bloke from sales at the Christmas party who won't relinquish the karaoke mike, Delaney needs someone to gently explain that the party has moved on. Surely we are beyond being bludgeoned into submission by mediocre whimsy and a facile, self-regarding script written, one suspects, merely to facilitate a flimsy characterisation.
But maybe there's a more apt response. At the start of The Last Furlong, Diogo's mama drops dead listening to her son serenade her - it's a pretty extreme reaction, granted, but possibly not wholly without merit.
UTV'S emblematically spooky drama premiere, Child of Mine, albeit with a much sturdier script and a heavyweight cast, also stretched the bounds of credibility a little too far. Joanne Whalley played elegant Tess, recently married to Alfie (Adrian Dunbar), a solid bloke, divorced with one son, who is affable, successful, and has a wardrobe full of well-pressed chinos. Tess works as a child psychotherapist and, we were told by her sandy-haired lovelorn colleague, is one of the best in the business. However, despite what would presumably have been rigorous analytical training, Tess's obsessive need to have children with Alfie unbalances her, and after a couple of failed IVF attempts, she tries to commit suicide. With no chance now of being accepted as an adoptive parent, Alfie and Tess travel to Canada and illegally adopt two sisters, 10-year-old Heather and her little sister, Grace.
Their mother (their only known parent) has been murdered.
Throwing the psychoanalytical textbooks away (and her common sense with them), Tess takes the reluctant Heather and pliable Grace back to London to play happy families. There are lots of pink Ikea mosquito nets draped around the girls' pretty bedroom, but they are not enough to keep Heather from sleepwalking around the flat and doing a lot of scary pre-teens-in-her-nightie acting.
Tess, played by Whalley with a sleepy, ethereal reluctance, eventually consigns her anti-depressants to the bin and decides that Heather has in fact murdered her mother and is intent on doing the same to her. Appearing just a little worried (actually, as if she'd just forgotten a tricky recipe rather than found out that her adopted daughter is a psychopath), she musters a bit of energy to take Heather back to Canada to face her demons.
The denouement yields up two corpses, plus a crooked sheriff and the cowboy who ran the adoption agency, both of whom are responsible for the natural mother's murder (violent and promiscuous, she wasn't worthy, apparently, of having children). Anyway, Whalley blows out a few of their brain cells in the barn, then Dunbar turns up with Grace dressed in Laura Ashley and everyone lives happily ever after.
So the moral ambiguity of buying two traumatised children and then bringing one of them back to her blood-splattered home to relive her natural mother's death is apparently justified by the end result: a sartorially unchallenged family wafting around London free from legal constraints or the delicate tendrils of therapy. Good, now we can all snuggle into our furry gilets and watch the crime figures soar on the late news.
Young Irish actor Elaine Cassidy is anything but sleepily ethereal in the tantalising Ghost Squad, Channel 4's first home-grown police drama in more than 20 years of existence. The real "ghost squad", a division of the Metropolitan Police set up to investigate crooked cops, was officially disbanded in 1998; however, the continuance of such a division under a different name is neither confirmed nor denied by the Met.
Cassidy plays Amy Harris, a young, ambitious policewoman who, despite the lousy pay and some deeply unpleasant colleagues, loves her work. In the first episode, a lippy young Pakistani, Rakesh (Adam Deacon), a small-time drug dealer, is taken in for questioning. Amy goes off to get him a cup of tea and returns to the interview room minutes later to find him dying on the floor. Attempting to resuscitate him, she gets covered in his blood and soon finds herself the prime suspect for his murder.
Ghost Squad is bloody and fast, and episode one, set entirely in the police station, which was under lockdown as it was investigated by the squad ("a bunch of f***ing Guardian readers", as Amy's boss describes them), felt dense and claustrophobic. The psychological journey that brought Amy from being one of the boys in the relentlessly male environment of the station to the isolated "unlucky cow that walked in and found him" (Rakesh), through to shopping her racist and murdering colleagues and ultimately joining the ghost squad, was played with feral determination by Cassidy. The only time credibility weakened was in the retrospective scenes that looked at what drove the offending officers to beat the boy to death.
Taut, edgy and spirited, Ghost Squad is certainly worth a look.
'My god, I could end up in the tower for this," thought Peter Sellers (according to his son) as his intimate dinner with the voraciously libidinous Princess Margaret became even more friendly. The Secret Life of Princess Margaret was full of salacious tales of infamous parties on the beach at her house on the Caribbean island of Mustique, where she liked her men naked and her vodka quickly. Among the cast of rogues was hard-man (so to speak) John Bindon, a bit-part (so to speak) actor whose party piece was balancing pint glasses on his erect penis - "I've seen bigger," shrugged Margaret's lady-in-waiting, and she wasn't talking about the glasses.
More significantly, in those Cold War days, there were Russian spies hanging from the iron curtains of their embassy windows in a (successful) effort to photograph orgies in Kensington Palace across the road (handy snaps for a bit of "biographical leverage"). The evidence is still stashed somewhere in a Kremlin vault, apparently.
Every day was a party for Margaret, we were told: she started the day with a splash of vodka in her orange juice and tripped the light fantastic until the early hours. Described by various contributors as the most beautiful woman in the world (which may have been due to patriotic fervour rather than 20/20 vision), her last public appearance, at the Queen Mother's100th birthday bash, shocked the British public. Bloated, palsied, wheelchair-bound and apparently oblivious to what was going on around her, the party was finally over.
But in her heyday the "fat little manicurist", as her husband, Lord Snowdon, charmingly described her, seemed to have had a whale of a time.
"Can you introduce me to Warren Beatty," she asked Peter Sellers when she decided to dispense with his services. Lucky old Sellers - his ego may have been dinted but at least he kept his head (so to speak).
