In A Land Of Plenty - BBC2, Wednesday
ER - RTE1, Sunday
Friends - N2, Tuesday
The View - RTE1, Tuesday
Perfect Breasts - C4, Tuesday
Sometimes you want to work at it. Sometimes you want it handed it to you on a plate. "You have to make sense of it all by yourself," were the first words spoken in In A Land of Plenty. When you're given that kind of choice, you tend to give it five minutes to sell itself. It had us straight away. The BBC's adaptation of Tim Pears' novel tracking one family over the last five decades of the 20th century began, as so many do, at the end.
But it had an obliqueness, a hallucinatory quality, that it refused to drop even as it left the child drawing patterns on a wall, a woman in a bath and a character asking his reflection where he should begin and drifted back to the 1950s and the start of the story.
This was filled in with snatched memories, fuzzy images, uncomfortable dreams and awkward sex in narrow corridors. It was an opening of extraordinary clarity through the collage. Everything was stitched together with a taut rumba, establishing the newly-married Freemans intent on christening each of the 28 rooms in the house; the inferno of the factory owned by generations of the family; their position as employers and landlords to the rest of the town; their growing brood. It also established the grand, looming house. The kind that sucks in the happiness and innocence and adventure of its tenants, but can only ever give back tragedy. If it's not haunted now, it will be soon.
Robert Pugh and Helen McRory were excellent as Charles and Mary Freeman, more intent on making babies than looking after them when they came along, the screams of their love-making at one point seguing into those of a new son. But they couldn't keep up the pace. Pregnant with the fourth, Mary stood out of her chair with a groan. "Here we go again," she said. "Where," asked a son. "Hell."
After that, she took up reading instead. Which is where the story really began. Young James, a mother's boy in a world dominated by his boorish, domineering father, emerged as the central character. He watched his mother sleep-walking the corridors; colluded in her secrets as she discovered bars, jazz and performing poetry; observed her slow drift away from his father. Charles, of course, is too locked into his own world of cricket and fine engineering and self-appointed patronage to the lower classes to ever see the change coming. You knew he was in trouble when he arrived home to find that beatniks had invaded his house. Read the signs, Charles.
By the end, there was a sense of foreboding so thick you could have parcelled it and sent it to the lab for examination. The factory. Father. Mother. James himself. At least one of the children will want to keep an eye out for a cold hand on his shoulder, and then there are the generations that follow. There are nine episodes to go. Here's hoping there's enough foreboding to go round.
Back again this week was ER, €1, Sunday), returned this week, drowning in trash, thanks to a strike, and football players, thanks to a riot. It takes nerves for a show to court comparisons by so openly filling itself with actual rubbish. Critics are a lazy bunch and will use any visual clues available. Meanwhile, poor old Dr Carter (Noah Wylie) floated through the episode having admitted himself to a clinic to fight the prescription-drug addiction brought about by being stabbed by the patient who also killed his colleague Lucy.
He checked in after the last series ended and left in time for the new one, sporting Captain Ahab's beard and the whale's attitude. He returned as the police cars converged on the hospital, but didn't go inside. The riot in his head, you feel, is only kicking off.
AS Carter was leaving the clinic, he might have met Matthew Perry going in. Perry plays the jumpy, tragic clown Chandler in Friends and has struggled with a very public prescription-drug addiction. I only mean to mention it because the new series betrays the increasingly stellar existence of the cast.
The episode (Monica is annoyed at Rachel for snogging Ross, and so stealing her thunder on the day she finally got engaged) was a well-written, wonderfully played-out farce, but you couldn't help but spot the signals. Perry has lost so much weight that he is quickly disappearing inside his padded suits, his face shrunken to the point where the teeth are taking over and his eyes wider than those of an abandoned dog's. The rest of them, though, are all mahogany tans, Sellafield smiles and bodies sculpted by men called Andre who wear Spandex and have video tie-ins. We have always been very forgiving of their perfection, but this is getting ridiculous. I laughed, but through gritted, stained, slightly crooked teeth.
The first series of The View €1, Tuesday) began this week, although it was really an old series with a new name. Just as RTE inexplicably dropped Later with John Kelly last autumn, they've inexplicably brought it back this winter, only with the guests up off the couch and sat at a table. As much of a treat as Kelly is on radio, it just doesn't make any sense to keep pushing this particular square peg into a round hole, even if that always seems to be taken as some sort of dare to RTE.
Kelly can never claim to be the most confrontational of hosts and as panellists Susan McKay, Roddy Doyle and Julie Parsons meandered along in general agreement, Kelly did his best not to disturb the atmosphere. You yearned for him to disagree with somebody just for the hell of it, to yell "pah!" at somebody's views, to jump up and kick over the table. Anything to get things going.
But even when Parsons made some disgruntled noises about the lionised Crouch-ing Tiger, Hidden Dragon, it just seemed a cue for Kelly to turn away and pour another soothing, herbal tea of a question for Roddy Doyle. At least the hilarious theatre piece from Forced Entertainment at the close was worth hanging on for.
"If you could choose one contemporary motion picture to show to Emily Pankhurst, what would it be?"
"Rugrats: The Movie. Because it was the last film I saw, and I'd like a second opinion."
The mother of that 14-year-old girl who was recently promised a boob job for her 16th birthday turned up on Perfect Breasts beaming with pride as her daughter ran through all the reasons why she should have the operation. Kay and her daughter, Jenna, invoked suicide, depression and Britney Spears with a sort of blankness which comes from learning everything you know in life from watching Tricia. Or maybe it came from all that squinting at the freshly polished cleavage in Hello! "Posh Spice, Scary Spice. They've had them done. Emma Noble, Paula Yates, Pamela Anderson, them too."
She squinted a little closer to home. "I'd love to have mine done 'cos my mum's had hers done. Maybe it runs in the family."
Kay's Mum glowed so much you feared she'd go nuclear. "She's a bright girl. She's got her own head on her shoulders." And sure if she doesn't like it, she can always get a new one.
Perfect Breasts was depressing. The succession of teenagers describing their operations were undoubtedly chuffed with their new selves, but just because they're happy, should that make us happy too? Of course, they are never "perfect breasts" at all. Silicone is banned in the US, but recommended in the UK. No implant can last more than 20 years at most, so they'll all be back to the surgeon again.
One girl had had her operation done through the nipples, severing her milk ducts in the process. Did it bother her? Did it heck. "I can't imagine breast-feeding 'cos they're just sex objects to me." It made you wonder if the leaking had begun already. This is the same girl, by the way, who had financed her operation through a £4,000 loan from Marks & Spencer.
The documentary also followed Laura (19) and her mum as they looked through new bras and new boobs. Before the operation, Laura sat on the edge of the bed, gown pulled down, breasts circled with ink, the surgeon snapping away with a camera. It could have been page three as done by David Lynch. Throughout most of this, her dad sat in his garden, less than comfortable on the subject of his little girl's breasts. "I thought swimming might do it. She can't swim and I thought that's even better, she can learn to swim as well." That's daddy for you, always the practical one.
