TV REVIEW:YOU HAVE TO have some sympathy for any individual charged with promoting Northern Ireland as a tourist destination. Winston Churchill, when meditating on the locale in the weeks following the second World War, coined a phrase which, to the chagrin of the Ulster Fry Alliance and the Prettifying Portadown Lobby, has adhered in the way manure adheres to wellingtons. "But, as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short, we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again," he said.
Full marks to BBC Northern Ireland, then, for bravely embarking on an attempt to spread some unlikely glamour about the owl sanctuaries and novelty rock emporia that straddle the Bann. Some bright spark in that organisation has decided to invite a faded grotesque from the 1990s - faded enough to be within regional television's price range - to smile tolerantly at obscure attractions throughout the six counties. Radovan Karadzic being otherwise engaged, the BBC eventually settled on the cluster of regency frills and baroque curls that goes by the name of Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. The resulting show, Laurence And Jackie's Northern Exposure, offers one of the most unintentionally compelling vistas of the season. Imagine a show in which a man who hates children has to spend six weeks making balloon animals at birthday parties and you will get some impression of the grim fascination the series inspires.
I knew little of Mrs Llewelyn-Bowen before watching the show, but, after observing the imperious way she deals with hoteliers, lighthouse keepers and her gibbering husband, I am more than prepared to have her by my side the next time Zulus besiege my house. If there had been a few more Jackies about the place in the early part of the 20th century, the Union Flag would still fly over Nyasaland.
In the first episode of the series, Queen Jackie and King Laurence (do I have that the right way round?) set out under characteristically flinty skies and through typically blustery valleys with a mission to uncover what Antrim could offer visitors in the new era of tranquillity. It was, therefore, somewhat unfortunate that their first stop was at a clay-pigeon shooting facility outside Ballymena. There are many reasons to make fun of LLB, but, in his defence, he has never been anything other than a professional. Who else, after being handed a shotgun on his first morning in the North, could stop himself from making a tasteless remark concerning the area's recent unhappy history? Laurence decided, instead, to direct his comments towards his in-laws.
"I just imagine your mother's face on each of the clay pigeons," he smirked. With the bitter wind curling her hair about her face and the Presbyterian gloom challenging the camera's night-vision capabilities, it was hard to make out the look on Jackie's face, but I suspect Laurence may have paid for his quips at a later hour. Last night the couple advanced on Armagh. The county quaked a little.
ELSEWHERE THIS WEEK, two more momentous family disputes were subjected to different classes of reinterpretation. The Tudors romped, bawled and tortured their way back to TV3 and, on BBC2, the former ruling dynasty of Iraq had their bloody linen aired in The House of Saddam. The comparison was interesting.
The Tudors, which has kept the Irish film industry in socks and shoes for the last few years, is a very peculiar beast indeed. Ride past the show at a canter and you could be forgiven for dismissing it as a lubricious, anachronistic romp offering as much useful insight into the Tudor era as you might derive from Sid James's antics in Carry on Henry.
It is certainly true that little effort has been made to scuff the actors' consistently gorgeous teeth or deaden the healthy bounce in their expensively coiffed hair. With her gleaming smile and catty vernacular, Natalie Dormer, who plays Anne Boleyn, looks and sounds as if she has just sauntered in from a day spent lunching and shopping with Carrie Bradshaw's younger, more up-to-date sister. The series' incarnations of Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell look younger, fresher and hipper than those austere statesmen can ever have managed. Only Peter O'Toole, sitting down for a few episodes as Pope Paul III, carries the right antique gravity about him. (Though Peter can, of course, probably draw on some personal memories of England in the 16th century.)
Does this really matter? A glance at The Six Wives of Henry VIII, the highly regarded BBC series that captured the public's imagination in 1970, reveals more flared sideburns, swelling perms and King's Road lipstick than you might expect. If you just want the facts then excellent documentary series are available in nice boxes from - according to your political affiliation - Simon Schama and David Starkey. Every era deserves the right to monkey around with history in its own way and The Tudors, though frequently absurd and always overheated, does the job nicely for the noughties.
After all, if teenagers must be exposed to Jonathan Rhys Meyers - back as Henry VIII - thrusting his hands up young ladies' skirts then they may as well learn a little about the Reformation while they're at it.
The real surprise in this opening episode of the second series was quite how much historical information the writers did manage to get across. Tear your eyes away from those naked bosoms and that fellow being boiled alive and you might catch a discussion on the discontents of Pope Clement VII. You don't get that in Home and Away.
All that noted, the ripe Stilton cheesiness of The Tudorsremains hard to ignore. Consider, for example, the writers' misguided attempts to set up parallels with recent history. As Dormer's haughty Boleyn became ever more irritated by the continued presence of Maria Doyle Kennedy's dignified Katherine of Aragon, she eventually broke down and - offering fluttering eyebrows that might ring bells with Martin Bashir - demanded that Henry make a choice.
"You can't have three people in a marriage," she said.
Remember what eventually became of poor Ms Boleyn. One trusts the folk behind The Tudorsaren't getting carried away with themselves and attempting to fuel conspiracy theories surrounding the demise of her distant successor.
The allusions lurking around House of Saddam were mostly to fictional stories. By conspicuously threading the theme from The Godfather through the trailers, the BBC was making it thumpingly clear that the programme makers intend to hammer home every available parallel between the Saddams and the Corleones.
Nino Rota's chords were nowhere to be heard in the opening episode. But this sternly compelling drama, co-written by Alex Holmes and Stephen Butchard, was peppered with the promised references to Coppola's films.
The story began with Igal Naor's hulking Saddam, then deputy president, inviting his superior and some co-conspirators to a children's birthday party. Retiring to a private room, the don and his lieutenants made the premier aware that if he did not stand aside they would force him out of office at gunpoint. Thus begins a narrative arc that will eventually take in two wars before ending with discovery in a foxhole and a sordid death by hanging.
As events progressed and the complex story continued to develop through a chain of eye-watering horrors, House of Saddam began to escape the influence of the Mafia and forge an identity of its own. Butchard and Holmes appear to have done their research and, without weighing down the dialogue with too much detail, they got across a great deal of recent history in a compact space.
Like The Godfather, House of Saddam does, however, allow its awful anti-hero a degree of sinister glamour. Saddam does not wear suits as silkily tasteful as Michael Corleone's, but, in the same way as the Mafioso, he is followed about by a charisma that reduces everybody else in the room to midgets. The real horror of this promising series is that it almost persuades us to admire someone so irredeemably monstrous.
MORE HORRORS WERE on display in the first episode of Channel 4's Car Bomb, a fascinating documentary series on one of the more unlovely inventions of the 20th century. Robert Baer, the CIA operative who provided the inspiration for George Clooney's character in Syriana, dug up some genuinely enlightening titbits on the development of the device and, clearly a skilful interrogator, extracted some surprising stories from bombers and their victims.
It is well-known that car bombs first became commonly used in the years leading up to the British withdrawal from Palestine, but I was surprised to discover that the first ever such device was detonated by an anarchist on Wall Street in 1920. Look closely in New York's financial district and, as Baer demonstrated, you can still see large pockmarks left by flying shrapnel.
The most gripping moments of the programme came, however, during the interviews with the perpetrators. However many decades may have passed, the ageing bombers still manage to cling to familiar obfuscations concerning blameless victims.
"Every Israeli is a potential soldier," an elderly Arab mused.
"Innocent people die. You can't avoid it," another former freedom fighter said.
Can't you? Try staying at home.
Next week's programme will tackle the arrival of the car bomb in Northern Ireland. For all the minor inconveniences suffered by Laurence and Jackie last week, it is nice to think that a foppish interior designer and his formidable wife can now curl up in a lighthouse-keeper's cottage without any serious fear that they will get blown to bits by a primed Morris Minor.
"Where's the gin?" Laurence said at the close of their first day. When Reginald Maudling, former Conservative Home Secretary, first visited Northern Ireland, he asked for a different spirit, before delivering the second-most famous quote on the then-beleaguered province.
"For God's sake bring me a large Scotch," he bellowed. "What a bloody awful country." This was, of course, long before World of Owls was established in Ballymoney. It looked like darn good fun actually.
tvreview@irish-times.ie