TV Review:Never trust a man with badly dyed blond hair: this was the central insight of Anner House, RTÉ's feature-length adaptation of the Maeve Binchy novel, set in Cape Town.
It was clear from the moment you saw the ex-pat banker Nicky Nolan (played by Conor Mullen), his highlights glinting menacingly in the South African sun. You just knew he would be venal, grasping and shallow, and - most damningly in the eyes of romantic drama fans, all agog for true love - a thoroughgoing commitment-phobe.
His ungentlemanly comment to long-suffering girlfriend Ruth, a hotel manager, who followed the loathsome Nicky from Dublin to Cape Town, said it all: "Darling, you're exhausted, and your roots need re-done." Ooh, bitchy! Where's a real man when you need one, rather than this sleazy wastrel? Enter Neil Barry (Liam Cunningham), a man battered by life and with the face to prove it. A shambling alcoholic, freshly booted out by his rich wife back home in Ireland, Neil had arrived in Cape Town to do a spot of soul-searching. Essentially, that meant much staring moodily out over the sea, looking craggy and perplexed. Neil's a man of few words, you see, but that didn't matter, because underneath that surly exterior, there beat a heart of gold. We know this because he was barely off the plane before he was down in the townships, kicking a ball about with a crowd of photogenic black kids, as you do. Then he's diligently proving his worth to Ruth (Flora Montgomery) by helping her transform a decrepit Cape Dutch residence - the eponymous Anner House - into a dream hotel, before rounding it all off by rescuing a pack of sad-eyed wandering orphans. And not a tuft of silly blond hair in sight.
You don't really need to ask who got the girl, do you? Yes, of course it was good old Neil, his loser's garb discarded, who took Ruth masterfully in his big, safe hands and gave her The Kiss, as a cheesy pop ballad swooned in the background. There was nothing more than a snog, of course - this is Binchy-world we're in, a chaste throwback to the era of chivalric courtly love.
Despite the exotic location - and the scenery was magnificent - Anner House stuck faithfully to the tried-and-tested formula for popular romance: shamelessly cliche-ridden, and - aside from minor variations of plot and characterisation - as orderly and predictable as the fairy tale of Cinderella. As for the issue of race, it was handled throughout with a kind of bumbling, well-meaning ineptitude. Yes, there was a garrulous Asian family who played a prominent part in the action, yet black characters came far less to the fore, often appearing as genial servants or confused outsiders, with little or nothing to say. But Anner House was never going to offer an incisive portrayal of South African race relations. Instead, it delivered exactly what the fans wanted: pure sunlit escapism - an antidote to the mundane or messy frustrations of love in the real world.
WELL, WHO WOULD have thought it? Jackie magazine, the scourge of disapproving parents in the 1970s and 1980s - it was the advice about covering up love bites that got them riz - turned out to be just as innocent and pure in intent as anything that Maeve herself could come up with. Compared with the salacious, sex-saturated publications that teenagers read today, Jackie Magazine: A Girl's Best Friend made us come over all nostalgic for an era where girls were content to coo over chaste posters of David Cassidy, and to practise kissing on the backs of their hands - that's when they weren't making themselves woollen hats adorned with knitted bacon, egg and chips. Aw, bless. Most of the action in Jackie occurred very much above the neck, and quite right too, according to the improbably upstanding Scottish matriarchs who edited the magazine, which was based not in swinging London but in conservative Dundee. All along, they heartily disapproved of those nasty love bites, and we never knew! It's a shame, then, that the producers of this initially charming documentary decided to go for the knowing, arch approach. They interspersed comment from columnist Sue Carroll, BBC Newsnight's Martha Kearney, and newsreader Fiona Bruce (who actually appeared in one of the photo stories) with daffy-sounding extracts from the magazine's famous "Cathy and Claire" problem page - "my platforms make me taller than my boyfriend - please help!" - and mocked-up shots of a voracious teenage boy coming over all Transylvanian on his girlfriend's neck.
Before long we were drowning in irony, and narrator Arabella Weir's screechy girlish voice-over was starting to feel more than a little painful. The only relief from this effortful "jolly japes in the fifth form" schtick was the improbably long, meditative shots of whey-faced teens with heavy fringes, placidly leafing through their copies of Jackie. And even that got boring after a while. At an hour, the programme was way too reliant on such obvious padding. The frothy subject matter simply couldn't sustain such a lengthy documentary - and it showed, like a dingy, fraying bra-strap.
IT WAS BACK to the era of big collars and fat ties again with 30 Bliain ag . . . Pósadh. In 1977, RTÉ broadcast a series of programmes examining the nation's attitudes and habits. In this new series, original presenters Pat Kenny and Maurice Manning reunited to confront their past sartorial and style gaffes - the hair, Maurice, the hair! - as well as to chart the changes 30 years have wrought on Irish society, helped along by a few sofa-loads of personalities, including Mary Kennedy, Aoibhíonn Ní Shuilleabháin and Blathnaid Ní Chofaigh.
Marriage was the focus of the first show, and many of the new findings were hardly revelatory. So in 1977, 37 per cent of people were in favour of divorce, while in 2007 75 per cent of people would vote in favour of divorce if there was a referendum? Big wow, as they used to sarcastically say in Jackie: no surprises there. The pundits rather predictably agreed that we are much more open about sex now, and that the curse of mammyitis, which afflicted the nation's men, turning them into querulous, spoilt babies, is at last on the wane. Things hotted up a bit when we cut away from the sofa-bound chin-stroking to sit in on Brendan and Catriona's marriage preparation course, which was eerily reminiscent of the scene from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, where John Cleese and his screen wife give a roomful of schoolboys a very graphic sex education class. "Even now Catriona is my girl and I'm her boy," said Brendan with a sprightly grin.
Most poignant was the discovery that while in 2007, 83 per cent of men and 78 per cent of women said they were happy with their sex lives, 12 per cent of women "don't know whether they are or not". That sounded like a real throwback to the grim 1970s sexual landscape of confusion, ignorance and repression. Are the lights still turned off in Ireland? Or perhaps that mysterious 12 per cent were simply keeping their private life, well, private. The strange complexities of personal relationships are never reducible to statistical analysis, after all.
IT WOULD BE a mistake to attempt any kind of analysis at all of The Third Policeman's Ball: An Evening Celebrating Flann O'Brien, a whimsical and often impenetrably surreal tribute to the Irish author and satirist, who was, according to Tommy Tiernan, "the father of modern Irish stand-up". Broadcast live from Vicar Street in Dublin, Tiernan and his fellow comics, including Barry Murphy, Kevin Gildea and John Lynn, treated the audience to a bizarre range of skits and vignettes, all inspired by the writings of the "cantankerous old divil". This was, of course, entirely in keeping with the wilfully obscure style of O'Brien who, as Tiernan reminded viewers, would respond to a child's query "Is Santa Claus real?" with the answer "Santa Claus is real, but your father doesn't exist".
The roll-call of luminaries called to reflect on the darkly comic talents of this "writer's writer" was impressive. The show's presenter, Senator David Norris, was in his customary effervescent mode as he interviewed O'Brien's friend and biographer Anthony Cronin, and a splendidly raddled-looking Stephen Rea. So why was it so hard to stem the creeping tide of inertia? Maybe you had to be there on the night to get it. Or perhaps tributes are always destined to fall short of the genius that inspired them. As one guest admitted, it was the kind of show that the mercurial O'Brien himself may have walked out on after five minutes.