TV Review Hilary FanninWhen is a celebrity not a celebrity? Em, let me think . . . When no one has ever really heard of them? When you'd pass them by in the supermarket in a rush to buy the Cat-Lit without secretly congratulating yourself on being cool enough not to have looked like you noticed them - because you didn't? Or is it when they end up in a tent in Connemara, sponsored by a milk bottle or a chocolate bar, to skin a few rabbits and scale a few peaks for charity?
On our green and apparently pleasant little island, which secretes its A-list celebrities in the folds of its coastline and the hollows of its velvety hills, finding willing celebri-tettes to populate RTÉ's People in Need Telethon, Celebrities Go Wild (not so much a title as a blushing misnomer), obviously can't have been easy. The show, which persisted over several wearying nights, demanded of the eight contestants that they hike from Leenane to Westport, encountering en route some adventurous challenges set for them by wilderness expert Jamie Young. The celebs included Shane MacGowan's twitchy girlfriend, Victoria Mary Clarke, who bailed out shortly after the first "task", bungee-jumping off a crane arm (apparently, she wasn't happy with the toilet arrangements), and lingerie model Katy French, the first to receive the viewers' boot, despite her hefty optimism and willingness to pluck a skinny chicken on a windy hilltop.
Night after nervy night, presenters Anna Nolan and Aidan Power feigned cheery spontaneity in a spanking Winnebago and urged us to vote to save our favourite celebrity, which was a little like asking us to choose our favourite fish finger (I like that rectangular-shaped orangey one), there being little to distinguish any one of the eight contestants from the other. All were courteously banal and everyone seemed to be enjoying the fresh air; in fact, there was more tension in the tent poles than between the campers. Among the more individual contestants to emerge during the week, however, were a pyromaniacal Michael Healy-Rae, a prolific talker, sponsored by a banana company, who adhered his cap to his head with gaffer tape before diving off the above-mentioned sullen crane, and, surprisingly, Michelle de Bruin, who made a rather deft prodigal's return.
De Bruin, who declined to appear on The Late Late Show on the eve of the expedition, not wanting to face difficult questions, would, one suspects, have been the last person to expect support in a telephone voting contest, and it is quite possibly her wary humility that appealed to the great voting public. But who was the bright spark who allowed her to rattle a vial of "health supplements" at the camera when, at the beginning of the hike, the contestants were showing their luxury items? By the time you read this, either de Bruin, Healy-Rae or soap star Alan O'Neill will have been crowned top celebri-tette and The People in Need Telethon will have a significant bit of extra cash in the sack. It would be churlish to begrudge, even if the extraction of the lucre was unnecessarily prolonged and more than a little painful.
'BY ENDURANCE WE conquer" - so, apparently, reads the motto on the Shackleton family coat of arms. Having been mentally beaten to a raspberry pulp by TG4's sorely surreal new six-part bilingual comedy drama, Paddywhackery, my tarnished family crest reads something like "by endurance I grey".
Certainly TG4 is to be commended for pushing out the boat of new Irish drama. Its commitment to opening up the language to non-native speakers (people like myself, who received the language in a classroom through a gauze of relentless incomprehension) has, by and large, resulted in quality programming;most recently, the channel struck TV oil with the superb The Running Mate. The well, however, has now hit a dry patch - TG4's latest foray is a gruesomely naive and leadenly unamusing piece of work.
Compulsory education and the long years of doodling over Peig Sayers while waiting for the bell to ring is no joke and, unfortunately, the venerated Fionnula Flanagan as the stagnantly doleful, newly vengeful Co Kerry heroine, apparating out of thin air with a shawl over her head and a parchment filled with names of students who didn't understand her text, is also deeply, corrosively unfunny.
The premise of Paddywhackery is that a mopey, unalluring chap (although I doubt that was the intention) called Paddy, played by comedian Paddy C Courtney (who also co-wrote the series), having been made redundant, attempts, by setting up a business promoting the Irish language, to inveigle start-up cash from a grant-rich Gaelic commissioning office. Tough enough losing your job in the monochrome Celtic playground that the series depicts, without having to sleep on your cringingly over-the-top, pompous mate's hairy sofa ("3G technology for bog-trotters? I don't think so!"). But then to have a mobile-phone-wielding ghost follow you around while you negotiate a series of unlikely coincidences and encounter a bunch of underwritten dramatis personae starts to look like sheer folly. Sadly, unconvincing caricature and broad comedic strokes, executed with a sledgehammer, don't work in any language.
A SALACIOUS TALE from an epoch of bodices and pox was plumply executed on the ever-so-clever BBC4 this week, when more than one million viewers tuned in to watch part one of Andrew Davies's two-part adaptation of John Cleland's ribald 18th-century romp, Fanny Hill. The first television adaptation of the novel (which Cleland wrote while languishing in a debtors' prison and which squirmed around under the petticoats of censorship until the mid-1960s), this is an insouciantly sexy tale, artfully rendered by master adapter Davies, a man who dominates the form. Pulling his paintbox out of BBC's top drawer just before the corporation bolted the door and began jettisoning half of its production staff, Davies clearly managed to cream off a substantial budget, and his cobbled streets are populated by an enviable cast, including Alison Steadman, Hugo Speer and Samantha Bond.
Fanny herself, the peachy babe who abandons rural poverty for metropolitan immorality, is played by the healthily beautiful young Rebecca Night, who leaves no ringlet unwrung to convince her audience that screwing auld fellas to keep herself out of a mouldy workhouse feels just fine and dandy. Indeed, Davies's adaptation is almost prudishly faithful to the original in its insistence that Fanny, although aware that she's being exploited, takes more than a little pleasure in her work, cannily and happily turning rich men's foibles and the baser instincts stored under their brocade breeches to her own advantage. It would be interesting, nay daring, to explore the moral complexities of trafficking economically challenged young virgins to London for use by the upper classes (and one wouldn't have to loosen too many stays to find a contemporary echo in such an approach); it's a brave adaptation indeed which would take on Cleland's central thesis that Fanny can triumph over all those lecherous wig-wearers simply because she is in possession of a headstrong certainty and the libido of a bunny rabbit. But this pretty and, to be fair, entertaining romp isn't that kind of concert.
Anyway, everyone appears to be having a ball: there are ooohs of delight a-plenty as maids admiringly observe their well-hung benefactors (this was in the days before we neutered everyone by pouring all those chemicals down the sink) and, with bowls of painterly fruit and milky white breasts littering the screen, one is left in no doubt that one is in the caring arms of a BBC classic. Pshaw!
MEANWHILE, AS OUR dubiously named celebrities drifted around Connemara like a confused mist, a large group of men and women in padded jackets and varying states of jubilant exhaustion and wretched discomfort roamed fabulous and daunting Kerry peaks under the leadership of adventurer Pat Falvey, in RTÉ's four-part reality series, Beyond Endurance.
Part one of this eminently more serious undertaking followed a diverse group of ordinary men and women (including a truck driver, a barrister, a forester and a social worker) who had answered a newspaper advertisement reading, "Explorers wanted for an extraordinary adventure".
Enduring physical and psychologically testing conditions (including being woken from their hotel beds at 3am after 10 hours on the peaks to do a night hike through a snowy and dreamlike landscape), the participants' ultimate aim was to be one of the 24 explorers selected to travel to South Georgia with Falvey to emulate Ernest Shackleton's historic attempt on the South Pole.
This visually arresting series charts the yearning for adventure that can underlie seemingly pedestrian lives, and it makes a welcome change from watching a bunch of somewhat-but-not-really-famous people crimp their hair in front of the camera lens before taking a bungee jump. It's all about hardship, suffering, humiliation and sunglasses, as the man said.
I, meanwhile, will be beating a latte into submission in a Roman cafe. Tough work when you can get it. Back in a couple of weeks.
tvreview@irish-times.ie