TV Review Hilary FanninAnyone for a "panini and lap dance lunchtime special"? Twenty quid all in, and even more appetising if the barman keeps his greasy locks out of your cup-a-soup.
Once upon a time there were more religious vocations in this country than there were home-grown dramas. Not any longer. Now, with our dusty seminaries converted into unisex bathrooms and colleges full of atriums and screenwriting courses, there is an emerging population of confident and creative writers and film-makers snaking around out there, shaking up our collective identity like beads in a kaleidoscope.
Trouble in Paradise, by actor and writer Barbara Bergin, is one of a number of new dramas commissioned by RTÉ, whose increased commitment to producing quality drama has been bearing fruit over the last year or two. Bergin's script is, in some ways, a brave attempt to shake the booty of rural Irish life. It is set in Belltown, a damp midland outpost, where Asian lap dancers stifle their yawns and the locals buy their burgers at the "Buffalo Post".
Reminiscent of Eugene O'Brien's terrific Pure Mule, a taut investigation of love, sex and Smirnoff in an inhospitable town, elements of Bergin's script appeared to be in place for a dark and idiosyncratic world to emerge. Unfortunately, and surprisingly (given the talent on board), the script took a sharp right somewhere along its woodland path and headed decisively into a hackneyed marsh.
Trouble in Paradise seems to revolve around a land conflict between the cartoonish Little family (Doc, a failed country'n'western singer, his wife a beautiful lush, his daughter an avaricious blonde, his recalcitrant son seeking solace in a virtual world, all living in a gauche hacienda built on the proceeds of a dubious inheritance) and a West Brit gambling addict who loses his estate to Doc in a card game.
Somehow, over the course of the first episode, this interesting premise turned into an overwrought parody built on the shifting sands of heightened realism. Suddenly the cast were magnetically pulled towards caricature: to mention but a few, we got glibly unconvincing central-casting eco-warriors, a villainous barman who has apparently buried Shergar in the local woods, and a muscularly fundamentalist young Catholic priest from west Dublin, all of whom battled with an unconvincing plotline that demanded that the whole town despise Doc's daughter. And with lines like "he thinks with his dick" and "she's a conniving little bitch", self-consciously delivered in that flat Midland accent we've come to associate with darker, more theatrical forays into rural Irish life, it ended up as an untidy slab of stock Paddy-arty-whackery scrabbling madly around for a chair before the music stopped.
Maybe the adventure was a little undercooked, and one hopes that over the next five weeks the series will establish its own identity rather than falling, as it now does, somewhere between Killinaskully and Blue Velvet. But whether the trouble with Trouble in Paradise is in a premature airing or in a lack of certainty in the direction, its problems cannot be laid at the door of the actors, who are, for the most part, superb. Their commitment to this new piece of work is obvious, with Declan Conlon's delicately realistic portrait of a lonely and intelligent Garda particularly noteworthy, despite his having to battle a wearyingly unbelievable premise. Sadly, even these terrific Irish actors' generous and prodigious talents couldn't lead Paradise to nirvana.
POLITICAL RUMPY-PUMPY, the devious machinations of Westminster lobbyists, the anxieties of sinewy Labour junior ministers and the lustfully wandering eyes of up-and-coming new-wave, boxer-shorted Tories are the heady stuff of Party Animals, a new drama from the makers of This Life, which also began this week.
From its jauntily angular opening music to its seductive conclusion, this bright and confident little slice of state affairs brought with it such a whiff of deja vu that one could almost smell the This Life shoulder pads.
Cleverly limiting its political canvas to the antics of the Foster brothers - two sons of a deceased Labour activist, the eldest of whom, the sexually ambitious Scott (Andrew Buchan), works as a successful political lobbyist, and the younger, Danny (Matt Smith), as a purist nerdy researcher-stroke-geek who no one fancies - Party Animals is comfortably alluring. It's all there: into Scott's orbit (and bed, presumably) comes Ashika (Shelley Conn), a beautiful second-generation Ugandan special adviser (and a little bit more) to the boxer-shorted Tory hopeful, James Northcote (Patrick Baladi), who, like all dramatised Tories, has a father-in-law who is a peer and a wife in the counties polishing her Aga.
So what's been elected to populate our screens has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with a modern-day AB1 Romeo and Juliet clutching their BlackBerrys while they search for a condom under sheafs of the latest Asbo statistics. Slick fun all the same, watching these mini-skirted pseudo-politicos struggling for the hearts and minds of their skinny lattes - and, let's face it, a home-grown drama about similarly salacious activities on Merrion Square would probably not look half as pretty. Perish the thought.
GREAT BLUBBERING SWATHES of prime-time telly these days are devoted to fat.
Body fat. We sit on our backsides and hoover up hours of fleshy telly that seeks to show us how to reduce it, abuse it, cut it out, suck it in, staple it up or shed it. We are, it would appear, obsessed with our lipids.
What a welcome relief then to watch Strictly Lady Sumo, a gleeful and shamelessly straightforward documentary featuring a bunch of large ladies indulging in a spot of roly-poly in the dohyo (sumo ring).
The programme followed the progress of the female troupe - under the tutelage of Steve "Sumo" Pateman, a Derbyshire sumo enthusiast (there's an epitaph) - from recruitment via a newspaper advertisement ("I say, darling, they're looking for a sumo wrestler, no experience necessary" - ouch) through to Pateman bringing his toughest four sumo virgins to Osaka to compete in the world championships. The four contenders were those who had best survived six weeks of Pateman's blandly bullying training techniques, which involved running around a park clutching 40kg weights and beating the living daylights out of a punchbag until their mascara ran.
It was remarkably untaxing viewing, from the women's thunderous balletics in a Derbyshire swimming pool to the roaring of the large, pasty-faced, nappy-clad trainer before he put his sanguine ladies on an aeroplane to galumph around a Japanese sandpit.
"Skinny birds might have more fun," said one of the gals as she raised her not inconsiderable triceps from the perch of her cuddly hip to apply her "fighting lippy" - although somehow I doubt it. Eventually, Adele Jones, a youth worker from Derby, took silver by tossing a big girl (with what looked like a neck brace around her bottom) out of the ring, only to be denied gold by a ferocious Russian lady (I think), who in turn tossed Adele aside like yesterday's spam sandwich. Great stuff, and reassuring to note that "we all have a warrior inside of us" - but who ever thought you could find yours in the small ads?
MORE THAN EIGHT million viewers tuned in to watch Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond - annoyingly referred to by Jeremy Clarkson as "the little fellow", although admittedly he does look like the love child of Tommy Steele and a koala bear - talk us through footage of his anything-but-sweet 288mph blow-out last September in a vehicle that he described as "a jet engine with a chair attached".
Easily eclipsing the viewing figures for the Celebrity Big Brother final, the unflinching Hammond watched himself tell the camera that he "felt so alive" after experiencing the adrenalin rush of travelling at 314mph on his "chair". Minutes later, making his final sprint before he and the crew packed up for the evening, his "car" catapulted off the runway, sending Hammond into intensive care.
Having about as much interest in cars as I do in Jade Goody's career trajectory, I suppose I tuned into Top Gear in the hope that Hammond would give us a glimpse of his torn psyche or that a dewy-eyed Clarkson would tell him there is more to heaven and earth than the velocity of a piston (sorry, I told you I know nothing about cars). But no, after a bit of joshing on the banquette, Hammond elicited a promise from his co-presenter that the subject of his near-death experience would never be mentioned again. Fair dinkum - he is a tenacious chap.
Meanwhile, Shilpa Shetty was cascading gracefully from the Celebrity Big Brother house, putting the final acrylic fingernail in Jade Goody's celebrity coffin.
(Clarkson, with his trademark sensitivity, had earlier alluded to Shetty's nemesis/meal-ticket Goody as a "racist pigface" and a "waste of blood and organs" - don't hold back, Jeremy, tell us what you really think.) But, as with Hammond in Top Gear, all that the decorous and bangled Shilpa wanted was to put the unseemly pile-up of the Big Brother household behind her as quickly as possible.
You want tears and tantrums and a tankful of remorse? Follow Ms Goody into rehab.
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