TVReview: Professional party planners Sinéad Ryan and Joanne Byrne, the stars of It's My Party, look like the kind of formidable women who are used to getting their own way.
Apparently, "Ireland's busiest PR gurus" organise everything from "Westlife weddings to Samantha Mumba shindigs". So when the queenly duo agreed to swoop down from the dizzy heights of the Irish showbiz world to offer party planning advice to ordinary people, they probably thought the humble masses would show a bit of gratitude, and eagerly lap up the style secrets of the experts.
But they hadn't reckoned on Tallaght tea lady and self-styled superstar in her own right, Suzanne O'Neill. Suzanne was leaving town, and she had very clear ideas about the farewell party she wanted to throw for her girlfriends. Glitter, feather boas and topless waiters were all on Suzanne's agenda. Oh, and she simply had to have lurid pink phallic straws in all the drinks too, however disgusted Joanne and Sinéad looked. "I want willies," Suzanne said trenchantly.
Sinéad's tasteful suggestion of champagne and cassis cocktails - quite right, Sinéad, don't call them kir royales, those ignorant proles won't know what you're on about - was cast aside in favour of curry and cheap cider dyed with pink food colouring. Perhaps sensing that resistance to Suzanne's iron determination was futile, Sinead and Joanne retreated fastidiously to the nearest alfresco wine bar. Their wilful charge went her own sweet way, hanging a chandelier made entirely of bras from the ceiling, and installing a bubble machine.
When Sinéad and Joanne returned, this unashamedly naff party was in full swing. They wore expressions indicating the presence of a particularly unpleasant smell, especially when they discovered - ugh! - multi-coloured balloons. My dear, did you ever hear of such a thing? Regrettably, the willy straws had been deployed too.
From the smirking voice-over to the patronising comments of Sinéad and Joanne, it seemed that the whole point of this show was to sneer at Suzanne's execrable taste. But if that was the unspoken aim, it backfired badly. The party planners came across as grumpy old sourpusses, while the irrepressible Suzanne, wine glass clutched bravely in her fist, shone with girlish enthusiasm.
ANOTHER CANTANKEROUS GRANDE dame, this time in the shape of Germaine Greer, popped up on the debut night of Saturday Night with Miriam, hellbent on winding up fellow guest Daniel O'Donnell. She started off amiably enough, gossiping with Miriam O'Callaghan and the preternaturally youthful Lulu about the delights of pulling musicians in the 1960s, and trotting out her usual half-mocking spiel about the hopelessness of men - "they're missing half a chromosome, what do you expect?" But when Daniel arrived after the break, she didn't join in the applause or stand up to greet him, instead remaining sullenly in her chair, emitting witchy vibes. Ooh baby! Had there been handbags at dawn in the green room?
Greer is the closest thing the feminist world has to a street fighter, and her first blow was a low one. She rubbished Ma O'Donnell's pancake-making skills. Daniel hit back with a pretty strong insult, by his standards: "hers are perfectly sweet, yours would be kind of bitter". Miaow! Despite his gentle drawl and homespun philosophy, Daniel was proving to be no pushover.
His soft brown eyes went all steely. Moments later, goaded once more by Greer rolling her eyes behind his back, he took her to task for "turning her nose up" at him, causing Greer to squeal as if someone had put a frog in her knickers - and prompting the audience to burst into spontaneous applause. Miriam was left flapping around like a mother hen, trying to placate her unruly guests.
Quite what the mammy's boy had done to awaken the wrath of Greer was never revealed. Perhaps she just thought he would be easy meat: a caricature of foppish and ineffectual masculinity, quickly dismissed by a few silly faces, not worth the exercise of her formidable intellect. But Greer's lazy clawing of O'Donnell merely made him look less daft and far more credible than he usually does, and left her - internationally renowned author, commentator and critic - out-manoeuvred by a country bumpkin. Ouch.
THERE WAS ANOTHER outbreak of good, old-fashioned Irish decency, of the sort Daniel is famous for, in the unlikely setting of Love Island. "I'm not too comfortable with this sleeping with a woman thing," announced former Boyzone member Shane Lynch in the opening episode, when it turned out that the newly-arrived celebs were expected to share double beds. Could this innocent abroad have missed the essential point of glorified peepshow Love Island? Shane was supposed to snuggle up with the sinister Lady Victoria Hervey.
Luckily, he was able to engineer a swap with the occupant of the only single bed, model Sophie Anderton (aka Little Miss Petulant). Lynch's principled stance earned him the amused scorn of Love Island hosts Patrick Kielty and Fearne Cotton. "Father Shane is a typical Irish gentleman," giggled Kielty in a mock-Oirish accent. But Sophie was delighted to share with her posh mate, Old Vic. "Ooh good," she cooed, "now I get someone to cuddle." Yeah, like a boa constrictor.
It's true that in every other respect Lynch fits right in with the rest of this eye-poppingly dumb bunch of vacuous C-listers, who include glamour model Alicia Douvall ("people think I'm dirty - and I am"); Bianca Gascoigne, stepdaughter of footballer Gazza ("I am quite a needy person"); and Pierce Brosnan's son Chris Brosnan, who looks like Fungus the Bogeyman re-imagined as a beach hunk. And not in a good way. But Shane's refusal to bed-share was the only fleeting moment of integrity in the whole one-and-a-half-hour show, and you found yourself clinging desperately to it like a life-raft.
Yet soon even Shane's bloke-ish decency was swept away in the tide of braying, whingeing, bitching and shrieking which is apparently what celebrities do when they get together on tropical islands. You would say they were a parody of themselves if you didn't suspect that this behaviour was entirely authentic. It all has a terribly draining effect on the viewer: you're left feeling weak, nauseated and deeply misanthropic. If only Love Island could turn out to be the freaky terror-isle of Lost. Then a rampaging polar bear might come along and eat them all up.
SWEDISH FILM-MAKER Malin Andersson's documentary True Lives: Belfast Girls was at the furthest possible remove from gently lapping azure waves and spoilt celebrity antics. Andersson's Belfast was a joyless, attenuated world of peace walls and barbed wire; buzzing helicopters and graffiti-scrawled alleyways. The first thing you noticed was that the film was infused with a strange half-light: a permanent dusk appeared to hang over Belfast, like a visible emanation of the city's sickness. Andersson evidently doesn't buy into the official shiny, happy "bright new future" schlock. This is bad old Belfast with a nasty aura. In the twilit murk, we observed two young Belfast women, Mairéad, a Catholic from Ardoyne, and Christine, a Protestant from the east of the city, as they struggled to make sense of their tightly-constricted lives. Uh-oh, you think. Is this going to be another hackneyed representation of "the divided North"?
Andersson managed to avoid the crude clunkiness of the stereotype by winkling his way inside these girls' homes and families, seeking out the real lives behind the drab patina of sectarianism. The camera lingered long on the minutiae of Mairéad and Christine's severed existences: a stealthy smoke in the back yard, a bedtime squabble with a younger sister. But this bleak, uncompromising documentary didn't shy away from the wounds left by the conflict.
Mairéad recalled the trauma of a police search of her home, when they ripped the clothes from her dolls while looking for weapons. "That's when I really started to understand what it was all about - why we didn't like Protestants and they didn't like us."
Andersson's point was unmistakeable. Look at these girls, he's saying: they share the same working-class lives, the same tentative hopes and dreams, the same knotted frowns, the same fears and anxieties, even the same flat Belfast vowels. They have so much in common. Isn't it absurd that their communities hold them corralled in separate parts of the city? But Mairéad, with her old eyes and whipcracking Belfast wit, knew more about the place than this blow-in film-maker ever would. "A wee Protestant girl who's exactly like me - how am I ever going to get to know her?" she asked.
Despite its sensitivity, you could tell this was a film about Belfast made by an outsider. Andersson's cool Swedish logic just couldn't come to terms with our messy, hot-headed little city.
Hilary Fannin is on leave