`There's no place like Home," proclaimed Judy Garland with great conviction in The Wizard Of Oz, although it's a mystery why she preferred grim, black-and-white Kansas to the Emerald City. Despite the sometimes bleak reality, the dream of home is deeply embedded in all our psyches. For most people, it's the biggest financial commitment of their lives, the chance to claim a little piece of ground for themselves and shape it any way they choose. In Home, a new series from independent production company Treasure Films starting next week on RTE 1, every sort of home imaginable gets a look in, from a multi-million pound mansion to the harsh realities of sleeping rough in a derelict Dublin church. In six half-hour films, Home follows first-time buyers on the house hunting trail, a middle-aged couple trying to sell their suburban house so they can move to the country, a traveller family evicted from their illegal but longstanding halting site, and two couples stuck in bed-and-breakfast accommodation as they wait to be housed.
The first programme starts at the top of the heap, with the attempts of multi-millionairess Christine Griffith to sell her stately pile, Rossanaragh House in Co Kilkenny. When Irish-American businessman Tom Costelloe arrives on the scene, it looks for a while as if the deal has been closed, but things don't quite work out. Director Liam McGrath's film follows all this with a wry but affectionate eye - none of the protagonists are viewed too harshly, although there's a very funny moment when Costelloe's WASP-ish wife (the spitting image of Lilith, Frasier's wife in Cheers) passes critical judgment on Griffith's taste in interior decoration. But the general tone is sympathetic - rich or poor, young or old, these people all have the same objective - finding a place to call their own. McGrath agrees that his protagonists generally come out of things rather well, and that we're not invited to sneer at them as we are in some recent British documentaries. "It's possible, though, that some of the estate agents got involved because they thought it would be good publicity, but things don't always work out like that."
McGrath's previous work has tackled the traumatic subjects of youth prostitution and male rape. "After doing a couple of very serious social documentaries, it was good for me to make something a little lighter in tone," he admits. The jaunty tone is emphasised by an entertainingly wide mix of music, from Johnny Cash to Canned Heat. "I tried to have a lot of fun with the music, picking themes for the different characters. Even though some of the situations may seem a bit grim, we'd like to think that they've all got an element of humour to them. We wanted to convey that the spirit to survive and get on with life runs through all these stories."
The search for a home is a tailor-made subject for documentary, with its narrative arc of searching, finding and (hopefully) closure. "We had the luxury of shooting over a period of seven months, so we had a chance to really watch these narratives develop," says McGrath. "But once you start filming, you don't know what way things are going to go. When we'd found the people, they were all incredibly open about letting us in - it's a very stressful time for them, after all. We did find with some of the institutions, like the health board, that there was some resistance and suspicion of us coming in at first. They're more used to dealing with a current affairs-news kind of approach, but that changed as they got to know us, and saw we just wanted to film what goes on there. It's important to build up those relationships and develop that trust."
Each programme in the series ends with an update on the most recent news of how the characters are getting on. "They're all resolved as much as possible at the end with a photo-update, and we'll try to make those as up-to-date as possible, up until a few days before transmission, if necessary," says McGrath. "The most appealing thing about this subject is that it's something we all have to face up to sometime. It's the one point in people's lives when they know there's definitely going to be change, whatever happens."
Home begins on Wednesday (RTE 1, 8.30 p.m.)