TV Review: The way Roddy Collins tells it in The Rod Squad, when he mentioned to John Courtney that Carlisle United was for sale, his dinner date took two drags on a cigarette before announcing: "I'll buy that." So they each fulfilled a dream: Collins to manage an English football team, Courtney to own one.
"I can't think of anything better than to own my own club," declared Courtney. That is the stock quote of all new chairmen. Many end up believing that there can be nothing worse than owning their own club. Dreams come in all sorts of shapes and textures.
Carlisle are near the bottom of the Nationwide Football League. The club's salvation most recently came not from a couple of swells hopping off a plane from Dublin with grand dreams and healthy chequebooks, but from an on-loan goalkeeper who, a couple of years back, scored a goal four minutes into injury time, so saving the club from sinking into leagues sponsored by home-decorating firms and paint-stripper manufacturers. The programme, though, didn't fill us in on this, just as it ignored how Collins had already been managing the club for a year before the cameras arrived to pick up the tale. He had raised Carlisle to the dizzy heights of 17th place, but had been let go for a few games before Courtney's purchase of the club cued his reinstatement. Either through laziness or for fear of fracturing the clean lines of its story, the programme ignored the prologue.
The remainder still makes for good copy over the series' three programmes. Collins has been a walking, shouting, swearing, charming soap opera for a couple of years now, as he has transformed Carlisle into a kind of Irish outpost, one that is built on subsiding promises and cracked optimism. The sky could be falling down, said Courtney of the manager, and Collins would say: "Hold on, you get that corner and I'll get this corner . . ."
The team plays at Brunton Park, a name that does not ring with beauty. The groundsman, Ted Swainson, tends to it; he is a man who raises the Union Jack in the morning but who seldom lowers his own sense of self- importance. It is a never-ending circle of torment that he must care for a football pitch on which footballers then expect to play. When they run on the grass, they bend the blades the wrong way. He holds a special hatred for goalkeepers ("the dregs of the earth"), who scratch the turf.
Collins and Courtney aim to make Carlisle a First Division club within four years. Those who followed their progress last season will know that year one did not go quite according to plan. The sight of Collins during the opening match of the season will set the tone: fuming from the sideline as his team gets hammered.
"Me, I'm happy," he said, punching his office desk in frustration as the sky dropped another couple of inches closer to his head.
On Tuesday night, as it turns out, RTÉ loaded the schedules with the watchable stuff, so that you could enjoy the sunshine for the rest of the week. Roses Revealed confirmed the Rose of Tralee final to be only the tip of a green iceberg. Throughout the year, the heats hunt down, as one judge put it, girls who are "lovely and fair and that type of thing". The regional competitions take place not in the splendour of giant marquees, but across the grimy dance-floors of hotels and nightclubs, where the results are read out as disco lights swirl unattended.
They come with their sashes: the Corby Rose, the Derby Rose, the English Martyrs Rose. They do their turns, lifting their taffeta dresses to reveal dancing shoes so big you could set up home in them, and they reel and clatter like they've never reeled and clattered before. They sing She Moves Through the Fair and The Fields of Athenry and that anthem of our nationhood, Bette Midler's The Rose. Not all are overflowing with the requisite supply of loveliness and fairness and that type of thingness. One was so surprised by her own lack of talent that she stepped back in shock as a song fell, mutilated, from her mouth. A fringe Rose of Tralee final involving all those who came last in their heats could do wonders for the ratings.
CSI: Miami is a not so much a spin-off from CSI: Crime Scene Investigation as a genetic match. As with the original, bodies fall from the skies, limbs are found where limbs should not be. Nobody ever just dies. Deaths are either by suicide or murder, but it always turns out to be murder.
It is polished and buffed, constantly reassuring itself of how stylish it is. The camera keeps zooming towards bullet-holes and jumping into chest cavities. There are helicopter shots galore, little interludes during which it reminds us of the setting just in case you had forgotten. It is not unusual that everybody works with the lights dimmed, but even the outdoors has gone for atmosphere over practicality. It always seems to be dusk.
For something so self-consciously modern, it is curious that the female scientists are the kind of boffins that come straight from 1950s sci-fi flicks. They have legs that go all the way up to their big, beautiful brains, but they need the firm, manly hands of the experienced male scientist to guide them. Those hands are attached the long arm of the law's Lt Horatio Caine. He is played by David Caruso, who left NYPD Blue to become a movie star and has now come crawling back with a look of great displeasure on his face.
Caine is stony-faced and humourless, going about his business with the focus of a man who's never failed to wrap a case up within an hour, including ad breaks.
This week, a plane crashed. It was either suicide or murder. The script moved inexorably towards a neat conclusion. There are gizmos and gadgets, but in the end it all comes down to hunches. The cases will be treated like challenging word puzzles. All they really need to do is stop at pivotal moments and concentrate really hard until someone shouts "aha", waves a finger in the air and realises that they've figured out one of the clues. If cracking crime really was as easy as it's made out to be here, the underworld would have long ago given up for want of being able to offer the cops a real challenge.
Following straight after CSI: Miami, Boomtown is another new US thriller series high on style. Time runs backwards, blood flows into wounds. Key moments are freeze-framed, then replayed. Boomtown, at least, has a good excuse. Its central conceit is to tell LA stories from the perspective of several characters, some regular, some just passing through.
It began with district attorney David McNorris (Neal McDonough) receiving a call from his wife, telling him of a murder outside her building. We then saw the event and outcome from various angles. From McNorris's point of view and from that of a journalist, Andrea Little, who asks him tough questions in public, because she's having an affair with him in private. That sounds a little too romantic novel-like in the telling, but it was immediately clear that this is a relationship bubbling more with disdain than with passion.
There are cops Ray and Tom and paramedic Teresa. There is a detective, Fearless (Mykelti Williamson), who we first find sleeping with a hooker because it's on his list of things to do before he dies. Finally, of the regular characters, comes Joel (Donnie Wahlberg), whose wife is at home recovering from a suicide attempt. At the end, Boomtown brought a dead suspect back to life to show us how his day had gone.
It carried it all off with aplomb. It played with expectations, so that what you heard happening in one scene did not turn out to have been so clear-cut once you were shown events from a different viewpoint. Even the opening scene, in which an old man appeared to be some sort of wise narrator, was revealed in the final scene to be the grieving grandfather scattering the ashes of his son.
It introduced characters and laid the seeds of future stories without distracting from theplot in hand. It zipped along, each vignette giving the plot a booster injection. There was a great backwards car chase that had nothing to do with the rewind button, but simply with good old-fashioned stunt driving. It included a scene in which a cop ran after a suspect to the soundtrack from the movie, Run Lola Run, a smart acknowledgement that this sort of thing has been done before and that Boomtown is only approaching it from a different direction.
Finally on Tuesday, Nicky Byrne and Georgina Ahern got married. The bride managed to avoid the TV cameras, but on RTÉ news bulletins Ray Kennedy informed us that she had worn a brown and cream suit. While delivering this important news, Kennedy wore a blue shirt with green tie.
