TV Review Shane HegartyLove Is The Drug is a drama about angsty twentysomethings and their sex lives and is centred on their favourite watering hole.
I must have missed something in the licence fee review that insisted that RTÉ make three dramas a year about angsty twentysomethings and their sex lives. RTÉ has recently discovered how to make consistently professional drama, but now it's decided to make the same drama over and over again. It has become an artist obsessing on a theme. It is RTÉ's "boom period". It just happens to feature the occasional flash of a bust.
Love Is The Drug is a comedy about three brothers - two of whom are chasing skirt and one of whom is about to stop chasing and settle down - and their parents, whose sex life is gathering dust.
Shane (Allen Leech) is the central character, a gentle soul obsessed with Lisa (Ruth Negga). In the first episode he tried to woo her through a series of misadventures and miscalculations that in real life would be somewhat creepy, but in fiction are kooky and cute. Lisa, as is often the way of these things, is there simply as a focus of his attention. Her character is a rough sketch, a prop. She is cold and unemotional until she falls for him, after which she becomes funny and passionate. There is nothing in between; her character is kept together by the sticky tape of her good looks.
The most immediate thing about Love Is The Drug is that you can watch it with the sound down and still know exactly what's going on. Honestly. Try it for five minutes. The whole thing is played out in visual clues. The plot unfolds with Fisher Price simplicity, if not Fisher Price content. It is a teleplay in three acts, but 30 props.
It is obviously derivative of Trainspotting, complete with freeze-framing the action to introduce characters, and techno music matched to moments of fantasy. Yet, as twentysomething sex life dramas go, Love Is The Drug is not as gratuitous as RTÉ's previous drama, The Big Bow Wow. Nor is it as self-reverential, pretentious and intent on representing something, whether it's a generation, a city or an era.
Actually, I'm not sure that Love Is The Drug represents anything other than how love can be fulfilled only through wild, spontaneous sex; the kind that leaves clothes strewn along the route from kitchen to bedroom. It represents a demographic that has little to worry about other than having enough cash for pints and condoms.
This, so, is what drama looks like when it comes from the best country in the world in which to live.
Whereas The Big Bow Wow lumbered its characters with labels and issues, Love Is The Drug sprinkles them with sexual urges and one-liners. And it's much better for it. Its main challenge seems to be to unfold the plot in scenes of 12 seconds or less. It is superficial and light-headed, but it is entertaining and endearing. It doesn't really care about meaning or message. It cares only about getting to the next set-piece and making sure it's funny.
What is odd, though, is that it is set in Drogheda without any clear reason why, except that it offers a new cityscape other than the IFSC or the Dublin quays. Almost everyone in it has either a Dublin or a Northern accent. Perhaps it was felt that the Louth accent does not lend itself to lofty speeches about love - it is hard to get to the emotional core of passion, when you must stop repeatedly along the way to stretch vowels and flatten constants.
Our sexual history Our sexual history is currently the topic of Craiceann - An Scéal, which this week donned its inhibitions again after casting them off for a first programme which featured soft focus reconstructions of pagan unmentionables.
The second programme dealt with the sobering influence of the Christian church on sexual promiscuity. We were told the church was so against sex that at one point it even frowned upon marriage. Showing an obsession with all things sexual that was to fuel its fury for centuries, the list of the church's penitentials dealt with a detailed variety of sexual iniquities. There was a penance for each of the nine types of masturbation.
It did not tell us under what method of research these nine were identified.
It did, though, inform us that in Old Irish the phrase for masturbation was "hand festival". If there is a Euphemism Hall of Fame, that surely deserves pride of place.
There was much massaging of the ego on TV3 this week, even as it continues to show a lack of self-respect. During The Swan, the station stuffed the ad breaks with trailers for upcoming programmes and movies, although it was a little like opening a box of chocolates and finding that it is filled mostly with coffee creams.
The station's chief contribution to the cultural wellbeing of the nation is its importation of dumb American reality shows, which at least allow us the opportunity to wallow in our intellectual superiority. This week's addition was The Swan. Here, two women are each week taken from their lives and given entire body makeovers by a team of surgeons, dentists, therapists and personal trainers. They are average women. In this show, there can be no adjective more damning.
They leave husbands and families for three months, and during this period they are pumped and plumped, diced and sliced. Their teeth are straightened and their breasts lifted. Their lips are made fatter than their bottoms. We watch the surgery. "Oh baby," yelled a surgical assistant, looking at a pair of breasts rising like bouncy castles. "Those are awesome!"
Finally, the contestants are revealed. Host Amanda Byram greets them: "You . . . look . . . absolutely . . ."
Scary?
Freaky?
Battered?
"Unbelievable!" Close enough.
Byram presents as if humming away subconsciously to avoid letting clumsy ethical dilemmas knock her off her stride. She has left Ireland for a career in Los Angeles, and slipped in like a sharpened scalpel. She reads the list of surgical procedures the contestants will undergo as if she's reading today's lunch specials. You watch, somewhat aghast, and wonder, is there a surgical procedure to rebuild dignity?
Byram wraps things up by telling one of the contestants they have won and are this week's swan, and consoling the one left as this week's ugly duckling. The winner goes on to take part in an end-of-series pageant. The other goes back to her trailer looking like Mount Rushmore after an earth slide.
You can be outraged about The Swan, I suppose, but there are better things to be outraged about. TV3's schedule is a good starting point.
BESIDES, HOME-GROWN television sometimes displays a worryingly high tolerance for obvious cosmetic surgery. Sarah Ferguson appeared on The Late Late Show a couple of weeks back, and, if you missed her introduction, you might have found yourself certain that it was perhaps her sister or a low-grade Ferguson look-a-like. She is all angles and lips, like a withered Spitting Image puppet version of herself. She talked of having found her inner joy, even as her grotesquely enhanced lips prevented her from smiling.
Through it all, Pat Kenny accepted her story of having "found herself", without ever asking if she might have done so while lying on a theatre trolley. I know there is always the fear of being impolite, but is that worse than pretending to be ignorant?
Ferguson was promoting a couple of things that night, but she was mostly indulging in self-promotion. Gradually The Late Late Show has begun to resemble a chat show from The Shopping Channel. It is running a competition where you can win shopping vouchers, and announcing it involved plugging half the retail outlets in Dublin. Some weeks Kenny gives away a car, but can only do so after a rundown of its specs, which he delivers like a natty salesman in a car showroom.
These days, the guests are inevitably there to sell you something. Last week, Samantha Mumba turned up to hawk jewellery, doing so in a dress designed to enhance the item's allure but which plunged so far and wide that she was literally left clinging on to her modesty.
Kenny asked the big questions; such as whether she would doany nude acting roles. It looked like she was already auditioning. The camera, though, refused to embarrass her by glancing down. But it still managed to get the jewellery in shot.
This, so, is what a chat show looks like when it comes from the best country in the world in which to live.
tvreview@irish-times.ie