TV Review: On ITV and TV3 there seemed to be only two programmes this week. Alongside I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! and all the attendant coverage, there were eight episodes of Coronation Street.
The soap scattered itself about the schedules, ambushed you at odd hours. It did so in order to provide a big finale to the story involving Dev and Maya, his ex-fiancée turned psychotic tormentor. Dev had jilted her for Sunita - who was originally his cousin, but that's a fact that everyone, from characters to scriptwriters, is now too polite to mention.
Maya is a kleptomaniac, pyromaniac solicitor and couldn't have been madder if she had reported for duty dressed as a brush. This week she set fire to each of Dev's seven corner shops. Then she kidnapped Dev and Sunita, tied them up, gagged them and left them to burn in the Rome of his empire, the Corner Shop on Coronation Street. The whole street came out to watch. In a place well used to facing serial killers and major catastrophes before breakfast, it is a surprise they didn't shrug their shoulders and return inside to their tea.
Anyway, Maya's plan failed, as Sunita and Dev were rescued at the last moment. We watched the Corner Shop ignite, the flames licking at the Rice Krispies until they went Snap, Crackle, BOOM! Maya was then required to meet a sticky end, which she did in her car, by crashing against the wall at the end of the street. That is the same spot that did for Don Brennan, a few years ago, when he too was driven to arson before aiming Alma Baldwin's MG Midget at a dead end. It must have been a deflating final thought for Maya to realise that the wall has claimed more lives than she ever did.
Meanwhile, I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! has infected the schedules. Since the low-wattage stars went into the jungle on Sunday, morning programmes have discussed it endlessly, afternoon television dissected every minute of it. On TV3's Ireland AM, the latest news from the bushtucker trial scrolls across the screen. On ITV, the show airs through the night. It could fool you into thinking it was necessary television. It is not. This series has had neither the panto spikiness of John Lydon nor the alluring corruption of Jordan. When even Janet Street Porter is toothless, you know it's not going well. Even the masochism of the bushtucker trials has lost a good deal of its novelty. When the sight of a celebrity sticking his face into a fly-infested pie leaves you unmoved, you begin to understand what psychologists mean when they warn us of desensitisation.
And there is Fran Cosgrave. Ireland is a small place, in which the most meagre of celebrity can be overstated. We thought we had kept tabs on all our celebrities, ticking them off the register as they left or re-entered the country, booking them in for their annual VIP splash. And a guy turns up and even his own family may be wondering who he is. As it happens, that question is answered on page 3 of today's Weekend Review, so you may cancel that subscription to VIP forthwith. No doubt we shall find out all about him when he returns from the jungle. At which point we shall no longer have any interest.
FOR WEEKS NOW Sky One has been running trailers for sci-fi thriller The 4400, obviously harbouring great hopes for what was the most watched cable show in US history. Then it threw the opening episode in front of the first night of I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!, which was likely to leave it flatter than Maya's motor.
The 4400 opened with a giant comet on a collision course with Earth. As it approached, it shifted down a few gears, parked above a lake and dropped 4,400 people off before reversing back into the sky. It wasn't a comet, then. It was an intergalactic SUV. What are all these people doing back on Earth? We don't know. But we can guess that their mommy will pick them after she's had a lunch with the girls at that new deli in the asteroid belt.
These people, it turned out, had all gone missing some time over the previous 50 years, but had not aged a day since. Each and every one of them was an American. These days they are not only God's favoured people, it seems, but Little Green Man's too.
Its start, so, was something like the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Its middle, though, was like a humdrum episode of The X-Files. Its Mulder and Scully are Gretsch and McKenzie played by Tom Baldwin and Diana Skouris. They are chasing after the mystery, armed only with a dogged bravery and a nascent sexual frisson. Baldwin previously appeared in Steven Spielberg's UFO-abduction series Taken. Given that was such a turkey, it's a wonder he's happy to be there when they come back.
The central mystery, by the way, is that the returned abductees are displaying disturbing psychic powers: the ability to tell the future, to cause earthquakes, to make people's ears bleed and their brains burble. As yet, however, none of them has displayed the ability to come up with an unpredictable storyline.
ELSEWHERE THIS WEEK there was The Sex Inspectors, in which a couple of know-it-alls watch people having sex and tell them where they have gone wrong. It's Trinny and Susannah without the clothes. Then, having tutored the couple, they watch them having sex again. There is no need to re-read that passage; it said what you thought it said. If you watched the first episode you will have been introduced to Charlotte and her partner, Jamie. Charlotte's chief problem was her extreme shyness. She hid her face under the pillow during pleasurable bits and sent her husband out of the room before the, ahem, denouement. Her solution? To have sex on television. The intensity of that contradiction hurts the mind, so it's best not to dwell on it.
The sex is filmed through night vision, so it's like watching one of those nice Nature Watch programmes in which Bill Oddie waits all night to catch a glimpse of a badger. Only there are more animal noises in The Sex Inspectors. Sometimes it switches to an infrared, heat-seeking camera, at which point it's as if you have suddenly turned over to a porn version of Predator. You can't quite tell which way is up. Which multi-coloured blob is on top. How many blobs there are.
The programme lacks eroticism, which is deliberate. It lacks subtlety, which is Channel 4. You can be appalled, but it's easier to turn the telly over to something else.
By the way, Charlotte and Jamie have a small child. In a few years' time, there will be entire series of programmes given over to following the children of the volunteers for this kind of television. A pair of know-it-alls will watch their emotional collapse. Then they will rate them on it.
RTÉ HAS A liberal approach to censorship, even if it is sometimes it is inadvertent. For instance, there were f-words galore in an early evening showing of the factual drama, Dunkirk. But it's unlikely to get to the point at which it will show Irish couples at it for the cameras. In a country of many mammies, volunteers would be few.
As The Sex Inspectors was lowering brows on Channel 4, The View was attempting the opposite on RTÉ1. The arts discussion show remains the last spot for movie reviews on RTÉ, and also carries the burden of the wider arts. In John Kelly it has a presenter who has gradually settled into the role and who often directs the discussion with both wit and authority.
However, it remains rooted to a late-night slot. The BBC may recently have begun broadcasting a dinnertime arts show, but there is the general sense that arts programmes are for the dark hours, when the arty types are smoking their last Gitane before bed. RTÉ Radio 1 has a daily afternoon arts show in Rattlebag, but it seems there is little room for such lofty notions on RTÉ television. The arts may largely be visual, but on the most effective of all the visual media it is pushed to the margins.
Nevertheless, Patrick Kavanagh: No Man's Fool reminded us that RTÉ sometimes commissions programmes of forceful cultural importance. Directed by Sé Merry Doyle and filmed by Michael O'Donovan and John T. Davis it was a vivid, often beautiful documentary, empathetic with the poet and elevated by the affecting recitation of his poems, sometimes spontaneously, by friends or read by Gerard McSorley.
It was a programme to mark the centenary of his birth, but which was fine enough to be shown to mark his 200th birthday. And as the trash cleared for a time from the schedules, it was a reminder that television can sometimes shine most brilliantly. And in those moments you would forgive it anything.
