TV Review: Cocaine is God's way of telling you that you have too much money, as Robin Williams once remarked; and the assembled drug experts wheeled out in High Society were in no doubt that the growing levels of cocaine use among Irish professionals are very much a "disease of prosperity".
With schoolmarmish severity, Justine Delaney Wilson - the author on whose controversial book the two-part programme is based - evoked a world of rampant middle-class coke addiction, where mania for the white stuff is hidden behind a patina of respectability. No pallid, sweaty, pock-marked druggies here. And the drug dealers aren't seedy types who lurk in clubs waiting to catch your eye. Instead, they arrive at your workplace in a posh car and with a nice leather satchel full of mind-altering treasures, providing a kind of narcotics-on-wheels service that's just right for the busy professional.
After watching this show, you'd be forgiven for wondering if your child's teacher alleviated the tedium of double geography with the assistance of nose candy. And might your mild-mannered accountant be moonlighting as a high-level drug dealer? A parade of reputable types owned up to their secret coked-up lives: all against a flickering background of credit cards chopping out lines of coke, white powder hoovered up through bank notes, and of course, kerr-azy images of flashing psychedelic lights and roller coasters to show what it feels like. Yes - a bit like a sparkler shaken very, very fast: we get it, we get it.
But is the nation really as coke-saturated as all that? Since the documentary relied entirely on actors providing "reconstructions" of original testimony given to Delaney Wilson, you always felt at one remove from the truth. And several of the claims made in her book have already come under scrutiny, most notably the allegation that a serving Government minister admits to using cocaine. (The minister in charge of the Government's drug strategy, Pat Carey, has expressed his disbelief at the book's allegations, and challenged the author to produce evidence to back the anonymous statements.)
In the television version, RTÉ played safe, referring only to a "politician" - "Robert" - who owned up to taking cocaine, and added darkly that he is "not the only one around here who does". But perhaps the most shocking admission in the programme was made by "Gary", an airline pilot, who insouciantly acknowledged that he uses coke more on the days he is working. "I don't think my work is adversely affected: as they say, planes fly themselves," he remarked breezily.
Making sensational claims like this needs fairly hefty back-up; in this case, all we have is Justine Delaney Wilson's assertion that she has recordings of the anonymous cocaine users featured in the book (and, presumably, the show) locked away in a safe. There's no doubt that High Society was an attention-grabbing programme. But it only offered tantalising, incomplete glimpses of the full picture. In its over-reliance on heavily disguised and reconstructed personal testimony, this documentary left you with the lingering sense that you were never quite trusted with the full facts.
PRETTINESS, IN GREAT, billowing waves, is usually what's expected of any adaptation of A Room With A View, EM Forster's deceptively simple tale of young Lucy Honeychurch's search for individuality and love. It's got to be gloriously decorative: tennis on the lawn ("Oh, I say, Freddy, you rotter, that was out!"), prim hats, tortured emotional entanglements, bucolic capering, wonderfully lush panoramas - the works. The new adaptation for ITV by Andrew Davies offered all this, but it somehow failed to deliver, falling short of Merchant-Ivory's definitive 1985 version of the novel, which balanced the requisite sunlit loveliness alongside a sensitive handling of Forster's concern with the struggle between free-spirited passion and class-bound convention. Part of the problem here was the characterisation: Elaine Cassidy as Lucy was a shade too knowing for a young ingénue abroad. And Rafe Spall played George Emerson - the free-thinking socialist who insists on "insulting" (that is, kissing) Lucy at any given opportunity - as a taciturn and rather charmless cockney oik. Inevitably, that compulsive desire to "sex up" period drama was here too: but making George ponce around bare-chested in an Italian pensione with nothing but a towel concealing his modesty was clunky and forced.
This re-imagined A Room with a View was a bleaker vision right from the start, opening with Lucy wandering the streets of Florence, wearing a wedding ring but - uh, oh - no sign of a husband. However, it was the altered ending - supposedly closer to Forster's intent - that really ruined it. In the 1908 original, Forster finally allows Lucy, after much muddle and confusion, to transcend the prissy strictures of English society and marry George, the man she truly loves. Davies's Lucy got her man in the end too, but only fleetingly, as the scene of their passionate lovemaking faded to a grim shot of George's corpse slumped on a First World War battlefield. Now this was just trampling on the chocolate-box for the sake of it: a concluding moment of fragile optimism and hope turned to death, loss and bitterness. There's truth in the adage: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Such tacked-on grittiness does not add emotional resonance and political edge. It just annoys viewers who want to see an (authentic) happy ending for once.
GOING HEAD TO head with A Room with a View on Sunday night was the new Stephen Poliakoff offering, Joe's Palace, the story of the strange relationship between the reclusive and eccentric billionaire Elliot Graham (Michael Gambon) and Joe (Danny Lee Wynter), an open-faced teenager, frugal with words, who took care of Elliot's fabulously grand empty mansion. In fact, the palatial house was virtually a character itself: its cold perfect rooms, exquisite objets d'art and immaculate marble stairways exuding a malevolent intent. Its claustrophobic presence suffused the entire drama, which turned on Elliot's need to discover how his father made the money which bought the mansion: "I've got to get to grips with how I ended up who I am . . . I can't spend my father's money until I know how it was all made." If Elliot was haunted by suffocating fears about the past, Joe skimmed easily along the surface of the present: amiable and largely unperturbed by his solitary life in the huge, echoing house. His custodianship was interrupted only by visits from sleek, glib young cabinet minister Richard Reece (Rupert Penry-Jones), who persuaded Joe to allow him to use one of the rooms for secret assignations with the suitably sultry and flame-haired Charlotte (Kelly Reilly). She turned out to have a quite stunning succession of tight strawberry-print summer dresses suitable for adultery use. Given the pervading atmosphere of tawdriness, venality and exploitation, it was hardly surprising when, in the end, Elliot discovered that his father owed his fortune to a productive business relationship with the Nazis.
As ever, Poliakoff was bewitching and alienating all at the same time: Joe's Palace was slow-moving yet engrossing; irritatingly ponderous yet undeniably gripping. The entire action took place as if in a bubble, sealed off from the chatter of everyday life. Poliakoff-world is a shady, mysterious, stultified place, and by the end of Joe's Palace you felt desperate for release from it.
BUT NOT HALF as much as you needed to escape at any cost from Channel 4's truly execrable The Love Trap, the new late-night series which set out to find "the most romantic men on earth". The set-up: Carolina, a young blonde Swede, chose five men from five different countries (on the dubious basis of their ability to cook their own national dish), to come on over to London and try out their seduction techniques on her. Time for a parade of knuckle-nibblingly bad national stereotypes: Florian from Germany was quick to declare his love of lederhosen and bier, while Sam from Australia opined that "sheilas are attracted to me being a bit of a larrikin", before spoiling it all by adding: "If [ Carolina] isn't in the mood for anything, it doesn't matter, I'll just go down the pub and grab a different sheila." By contrast, Alvin, from Uganda, was portrayed as an earnest bible-basher. But his reaction to Carolina's admission that she didn't have a bible (Alvin: "Jesus Christ!") seemed strangely at odds with his pious persona. No more idiotic chivalry and politeness tests, enough already with the fluffy pink hearts and arch voice-overs. Please - just put us out of our misery now.
Hilary Fannin is on leave