Black Books (Network 2, Monday)
Reputations (BBC2, Tuesday) Atlantean (TG4, Friday)
Can You Live Without . . . Your Wife? (Channel 4, Tuesday)
Those who wonder if RTE should have made Father Ted usually forget that they did make Father Ted about 10 years earlier - only then it was called Leave It To Mrs O'Brien and had about as much impact on comedy as a midge would in colliding with a juggernaut. I only give the history lesson because Network 2 began showing Black Books this week. It's a sitcom penned by Father Ted writer Graham Linehan (this time with Irish comedian Dylan Moran) and an example of writers, cast and network working together with such confidence that they produce comedy that looks effortlessly brilliant, but which probably brought them all to the point of mental breakdown.
That confident channel, by the way, is Channel 4 - not Network 2. Black Books is another Irish-written sitcom, starring an Irish comedian, that didn't get made in Ireland, but that's not a complaint. RT╔ has a long-term plan to sort its comedy out, but as yet they would only produce a Black Books by accident - Irish-written or not.
There's no point in trying to explain the jokes in Black Books or trying out some of the punchlines, because it would only lead to a cold wind and tumbleweed blowing across this column. It's all in the delivery. By way of a plot, Dylan Moran is Bernard Black, a bookshop owner; Bill Bailey is Manny, a guy who starts work with him; and Tamsin Greig is Fran, who owns a shop next door that sells nothing of any use to anyone. It's a fairly straightforward set-up, but taken to places that you just can't predict.
Comparing it to Seinfeld is a lazy route, but unavoidable. It is fill-in-the-blanks comedy, driven by bizarre characters, plausibly ridiculous events and much nastiness. And it can be very nasty. There is an episode later in the series in which Moran does something so unspeakable at a party that it scars the hosts' son with a permanent look of gasping horror. It has to be seen to be believed.
The thing about Dylan Moran is that he looks like a man who has never slept, a terminal insomniac with hair that won't calm down, so that every line, even the weakest of the pack, is soaked in character. He has already translated this stage persona into his "urban man trapped in the country" for Simon Nye's outstanding How Do You Want Me?, and is pretty much doing the same thing here, only with lots more menace - and several more sleepless nights under his belt. Moran can deliver lines with such ease that it's hard to believe there was ever a script involved, and he inhabits the surreal nature of the whole thing as if it's the only recognisable thing he can grasp on to.
Bailey, meanwhile, is a natural foil; wide-eyed and eager, and hopping around like a new puppy. He's waited a long time for somebody to give him a decent role and he relishes it. Tamsin Greig is understated as the unpleasant Fran, but no less brilliant. Black Books was hailed as the saviour of the sitcom when it was shown in the UK earlier this year, as was Father Ted before it.
Graham Linehan, and Father Ted writing partner Arthur Matthews, have been popping up, Zelig-like, at the scene of all that has been innovative, important or just plain funny in British TV comedy over the past few years. There's hardly anything they've worked on that hasn't been hailed as the saviour of a particular genre. Brass Eye and The Day Today were the saviours of satire. The Fast Show saved the sketch show. Jam took it to a level far beyond anything before it. Between them, this is all developing into an awesome CV.
It's difficult to trust a series like Reputations, built on the idea, as it is, that the cherished public image of an icon should be pulled apart at the seams and put back together looking a whole lot uglier. This coming week, it will focus on Florence Nightingale and show how the Lady of the Lamp was more likely to be pilfering the lightbulbs, or something like that. What's the point of having a reputation if it can't be destroyed?
It was a pleasant surprise, then, to be told that Richard Burton was indeed the womanising drunk, tortured soul and once-in-a-generation actor that we had always believed, and not some pop-drinking, happy-go-lucky clown. Despite the cloying title, Taylor-made for Stardom, the programme argued that it was his meeting with Elizabeth Taylor, coupled with his decision to become a film actor, that prevented him from fulfilling his potential as the successor to Gielgud as the world's great stage actor. Burton recognised this and loathed himself for it; the words in his diary are heavy with despair, the fire visibly fizzling out in the interviews he gave later in life.
Taylor taught Burton how to be a film actor, but couldn't quite teach him how to be a film star. Arriving at premiΦres in the limo, he would squint at the flashbulbs of the photographers and shy from the crush of fans. She, however, would wave at the crowds without intimidation, mouthing a few words as she did so. To the fans, these meant the world. It's a good thing they couldn't hear what she was saying. "F*** off," she would wave cheerfully to them. "F*** off."
Some day they'll make one of these programmes about Taylor herself, and what a programme it will make. When she dies, the tabloids and two-bit biographies will pick over her bones and probably find a missing husband lodged in the marrow. To an entire generation, she is recognised only as a serial bride and adjunct to the Michael Jackson freak show. Reputations, using only the smallest glimpses at her movies, reminded us that Taylor was once an extraordinary screen actress.
She also had an impressive turn of phrase that managed to splutter its way through the over-eating. During Burton and Taylor's very public, very scandalous affair as they filmed Cleopatra in Rome, even the Pope chipped in his two million lira on the subject. God's representative on Earth described her as a "sexual vagrant".
"Can I sue the Pope?" enquired Taylor.
Atlantean was a documentary series first shown in 1984, an era when the idea of people flocking to Ireland rather than getting out of the country as fast as they could seemed utterly ridiculous. Given how much has changed, Bob Quinn's anthropological examination of the true roots of the Celts takes on a modern pertinence beyond the mere academic, although its intellectual strength shouldn't be clouded by worthiness. It may not have dated too well in some respects - the clumsy third-person narration is littered with cringe-worthy, self-satisfying wit and subjects often look a little frightened of the camera - but it remains a fascinating, relevant, impressive series.
Stemming from Quinn's assertion that sean nos has more in common with the spoken song of North Africa than anything in Europe, he set about finding further commonalities of culture, first in the belief that Celts may have been Arab in origin and later in the theory that there is a common ancestor . As a thesis, it is patiently drawn out, and as a document of western Irish culture, it is invaluable. Atlantean is far more easily digestible television than the subject might suggest, and its concluding parts are on tonight and tomorrow night. It is highly recommended.
In Can you live without... your wife?, Cliff spent 12 days looking after the kids and the house while "her indoors" spent a bit of time outdoors. Ordinarily this would have been an entirely anachronistic, lazy idea, but headlines earlier that day - namely that scientists have figured out how to make babies without the need for men - put a whole other spin on it. Cliff was now fighting for his life. As it turned out, he coped well and without major incident, despite an early five-hour struggle to open the washing-machine door. His mother swooped in like the domestic SAS to bail him out.
It could have been much, much worse. Before she left, wife Julie gave him a guided tour of the house. "This is the deep fat fryer. You do chips in this," she told him.
"How do I know when they're done? Does it pop up?"
Gentlemen, if you don't know the correct answer to that, put this down straight away and go buy your wife some flowers.
tvreview@irish-times.ie