TVReview: Not long ago, when our interest rates were lower, our bottoms were higher and some of the nation's well-manicured digits were tapping out the waiting time to their ripening SSIAs, a mesomorphic wedding planner in a silk shirt royally entertained us with an insider's look at big-cat Irish nuptials. Now he's back: Brides of Franc, a fly-on-the-newly-painted-wall series, follows Peter Kelly (aka Franc) as he executes espousals, ignites matrimonial matches and creates "a fairytale" for those who are prepared to spend the GNP of a small republic on their "big day".
It's still highly entertaining to watch other people blow their budget on fripperies and to observe prospective brides and grooms invest great swathes of anxiety and emotion on napkin pleats, but somehow the programme seems a little darker and more sinister second time around.
Series two and Franc is looking alarmingly well-groomed, wearing a suit jacket decorated with designer graffiti and sporting an angular emerald on his pinkie. At one stage he stood in front of a mirror and casually flicked on his tie, revealing, on the carefully chosen accessory, a soft underbelly of pink silk lining. "Franc loves his pink," he murmured to his satisfied reflection.
Franc also loves his brides, and why wouldn't he? With the average (yep, average, according to Franc's team of planners ) spend on a wedding being in the region of €30,000 - and often way, way in excess of that figure - the fantasies of young women, their dreams of a perfect day, their yearnings for a corner on the jigsaw of celebrity, are lucrative desires for a dream-maker.
Lorraine, this week's bride, admitted that after the difficult birth of her son (with fiancé Gerry), her cravings for perfection had intensified: she now wanted a Harry Potter-style wedding at Kinnitty Castle in Co Offaly. To be precise, she wanted her guests to have a Hogwarts dining experience, presumably with sumptuous feasts magically appearing on golden platters, headless ghosts adorning the chandeliers and owls delivering the menus.
The infinitely more cautious Gerry, meanwhile, would have been satisfied with chicken or beef and a karaoke in the couple's local hotel in Navan.
Thirty-five grand or so later, and having recovered from a nightmare in which Franc metamorphosed into a curmudgeonly Eddie Hobbs (separated at birth, those two), Lorraine was walking up an aisle decorated with flowering broomsticks, while back at Kinnitty Castle, an actor sat inside an empty picture frame waiting to direct 150 guests to the magically transformed "great hall".
Franc's creativity and professionalism are beyond doubt; a squat powerhouse of productivity, he is a master purveyor of bash and bling. He is, it would seem, as happy as a sand-boy with the current appetite for excess. But what I want to know is what happens Mr and Mrs Hitched when the candles are extinguished, the linens are tumbled into the industrial washers, the dress is encased in mothballs and the lilies that Franc scattered in the bridal bath are withered. What happens to Franc's brides when the clock strikes midnight, the credit-card company starts calling, the baby wakes up for his 4am feed and a flatulent Prince Charming can't find his glasses to nuke the bottle? Follow-up series, anybody?
'THREE BILLION LETTERS spell out the human code; we are looking for one letter." As Detroit-based geneticists searched through the hieroglyphic structures of a single cell from a fertilised embryo, 10 times smaller than a pinhead, back in England Jill and Ian sat in their home surrounded by photographs of their beloved infant daughter, Ellie, who had died, aged just seven months, from the inherited disorder Gaucher disease.
Prof Robert Winston is back on our screens, this time with A Child Against All Odds, an exploration of the controversial subject of embryo selection, or "designer babies" as the process is often emotively dubbed. Winston, who helped pioneer pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, a technique which allows fertilised embryos to be tested for genetic disorders, argued strongly and unequivocally for the process, one which offers couples such as Jill and Ian a chance to conceive a healthy baby. (Not shying away from the more controversial and ethically fraught aspects of the issue, Winston also followed Andrea and Glen, a wealthy Yorkshire couple who, having had four boys, wanted, as Andrea said, a girl to "complete our little world". The couple were accompanied on their trip to Cyprus for "sex selection", a process which cost them £10,000 and which is not legal in the UK.) What became searingly apparent from Winston's exploration was that, for the most part, this complex and nerve-wracking procedure is not a game played by whimsical couples looking to acquire pre-assembled blue-eyed, tap-dancing, blonde progeny. For many (including Andrea and Glen), the implantation process fails. But for Jill and Ian it worked, and Jill gave birth to a bloody, wrinkled, robust and healthy baby boy.
"Perfect? Designer?" asked Winston. "He is only free from the plight of a specific disease; he now has the same chance in life as any other child."
SPEAKING OF CELEBRITY and flatulent princes (were we?), David Gest snores in his hammock. This Gest is a CELEBRITY. We know this because he was once married to Liza-with-a-zee Minnelli and probably still is, theirs being a divorce case of epic proportions which will probably last longer than their marriage. Gest is also famous for his surgically enhanced eyebrows and a couple of scary peepers that have been somewhat over-emphasised by a gung-ho plastic surgeon. My personal infatuation is with his sparse but unrelentingly black hair that appears to be thatched on to his pate. Oh, and I almost forgot, he is also a record producer. But the main reason we know David Gest is a celebrity is because he is appearing nightly on our nervously dispositioned screens in the return of the return of the return of I'm A Celebrity - Get Me Out of Here!
Gest is a nightmare, with an idiosyncratic world-view that leads him to believe that some women (those who intimidate him or who remain unimpressed by tales of how he likes to play with Michael Jackson's snake) "have their heads up their vaginas" or, perplexingly, "vaginas where their heads should be". This outburst of brutal physiognomic misogyny was apparently brought on by fellow jungle contestant and former newsreader Jan Leeming being, well, Jan Leeming (haughty, teary, pain-in-the-elegant-neck, high-maintenance, sixtysomething, with all her own wrinkles, who plans, somewhat unoriginally, to "grow old disgracefully"). Young and lovely Myleene Klass, classical musician, former pop star and bikini-wearer, met with Gest's approval, however, while he seemed to view impressionist Faith Brown as an industrial-sized wet-nurse. There are "pundits" out there who claim that this ant-eating, toad-licking, dunny-chucking nonsense is addictive viewing, and maybe they're right.
Morbid fascination will have many of us tune in from time to time, and I suspect that Tony Blair is getting nightly updates about his outspokenly critical sister-in-law, Lauren Booth, who has already told nine million viewers on the opening show that Blair is stepping down in January. Bush-tucker trial for you, young lady.
Abhorrent or addictive as you may find it, spare a thought for the unsuspecting Australian tarantulas that'll end up in some celebrity's sandwich. Outback arachnids must shudder with relief when these specimens of D-list celeb sapiens retreat to their urban webs and get on the phone to their petrified agents.
FAR MORE DIGNIFIED and indeed quite touching was TG4's Cogar: Bóthar na Trá, an engaging film about the history and enduring popularity of Salthill, in Galway, which was about as far from has-beens in treehouses as you can get.
Incorporating archive photographs and historical research alongside reminiscences and home movies from residents and visitors to this perennially appealing spot, the film was a stark reminder of how much we've changed.
Local historian and writer Tom Kenny described bygone times when farmers and their families travelled to the coast from inland farms, carrying bread, milk, meat and potatoes, to rent a family room for their annual holiday.
These were the days of "the lazy wall" where, after the harvest and before winter set in, pipe-smoking women sat together by the sea to reminisce.
From a later era, contributor Marian Neary Burke remembered the sheer excitement of smelling the sea through the windows of a borrowed car as her parents, the turf and hay gathered, allowed themselves a day off at the seaside, a magical, memorable place for a one-day vacation despite the drizzle, wind and cold.
Others recalled a shop on the promenade that hired out bathing suits at tuppence for half an hour. And then there was Bishop Brown, "the most powerful man in Galway", who was responsible for the "men only" status of the beach at Blackrock, where he liked to enjoy the waters in his "altogether". Thus, the moral guardian of the west turned his blessed bottom to the sun like a basking turtle on the shores of Lake Eyre, while on the "ladies' beach" the women and children enjoyed their banana sandwiches in the shade - ahhh, brings you back.
