The Ambassador - BBC 1, Sunday
Kangaroo Palace - Channel 4, Tuesday and Wednesday
Michael Hayes - Channel 4, Monday
True Lives - RTE 1, Monday
`Shame the devil. People died. We owe their families the truth," says the new British ambassador to Ireland. Attempting to do for the British diplomatic service what Helen Mirren has done for the British police force, Pauline Collins features as the title character of The Ambassador. Arriving in Dublin, where she is surrounded by typically seedy CD serpents, Ms Smith's first major dispute centres on the sinking, albeit accidental, of an Irish trawler by a British submarine.
As a metaphor for the subterfuge of diplomacy, this was the most honest part of this opening episode of six. Oh, it was entertaining alright, and a decade or so on from playing Shirley Valentine, Ms Collins is ideal for the somewhat contradictory role of mumsy power-woman Harriet Smith. She is a formidable creature indeed: she knows international maritime law, can speak Japanese and, most Mirrenish, can speak to ordinary folk and sort out her devious colleagues.
So, she is kind and tough. The embassy rats do not want the truth of the trawlersinking to emerge but our woman is just too sharp. Not that she is as successful in her family life as she is professionally - her husband was killed by a Middle East car bomb meant for her and her elder son will not let her forget this. He's an odious little prat who, we hear from a Taoiseach, is "reading politics at Trinity". "Reading" no less. Can't be Fianna Fail in power so.
Anyway, much of the interest on this side of the Irish Sea is in location spotting: Dublin Castle, the city's Georgian squares, Skerries harbour . . . After the ignorance of Eastenders's Irish episodes last year, The Ambassador is - as you'd expect - a more diplomatic visit. On one level, it's just starcentred hokum, but on another it does, at least, raise issues for a British public. Do not expect Harriet Smith to condemn, say, Widgery, with passionate zeal. But this is ceasefire-time drama. It could not have been done (at least not done without the propaganda being exceedingly offensive) at any other time.
After the glut of cops, docs and frocks in television drama, this . . . let's call it `dip opera' . . . at least makes a welcome change. Ms Smith talks too much about "moral obligation" - hardly the dominant ethic in the ultra-pragmatic world of international relations - but then Helen Mirren got away with similar guff in a police station and, so far at any rate, Pauline Collins has not strutted around trying to create an aura of smouldering, if mature, sexuality.
Owen Roe, as Ireland's foreign minister Kevin Flaherty, was the most notable in the rest of the cast. Still, even his convincing Brian Cowen-Lite performance had to acknowledge that this is a star vehicle for Pauline Collins. There are points that, like an embassy bureaucrat, we could nitpick at endlessly. (How come she knows Japanese? Would the Japanese conduct negotiations in Ireland about siting a factory in Britain? Why doesn't she shoot the vile son?). But these are quibbles.
A more substantial objection, however, must be made about the moral denouement of this first episode. As a payback for sinking the trawler, this British ambassador deliberately snubs the Japanese, knowing that their factory will go to the grief-stricken, little Irish port rather than to Britain. Now, there's diplomacy and there's diplomacy. And then there's patronising codology. It was an enjoyable opener up to that. Maybe the Celtic Tiger success story has been orchestrated by conscience-stricken, guilty Brits. Now there's propaganda that's not excessively diplomatic.
LIKE The Ambassador, Kangaroo Palace opened with pictures of a ship at sea. Instead of a trawler, however, this time we saw a liner which was bringing Aussies to the Swinging London of the 1960s. A mini-series (at four hours long, it wasn't that mini) shown on consecutive nights, it was the television equivalent of a 1,200-page airport novel - the kind of cube-shaped thing you might read on a 24-hour flight to Sydney.
In the outback, one girl declares: "I'm going to go on the pill and have an affair with Peter and Gordon." Hip or what? Anyway, we follow four young Aussies - Richard (a wannabe journalist); Catherine (a wannabe photographer/artist); Jack (a wannabe waster) and Heather (a wannabe non-virgin) - to Earl's Court (Australia's Kilburn) and a shambling old crash-house, the Kangaroo Palace of the title.
Every 1960s cliche was included and the Aussies have some unintentionally hilarious encounters with The Scene. On the voyage, Jack grants Heather's wish but the romantic thread throughout concerned the relationship between Richard and Catherine. Cream, The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Spencer Davis, three-skin joints, Afghan coats, dodgy haircuts . . . and all the rest gave an authentic look to a time long gone now.
Of course, things do not work out in the ways they had hoped for our quartet. Catherine, for instance, finds that her runaway, "artist" father is a codger who has been drawing shoes for catalogues. Richard gets a start on the Daily Mail but only after Jack has sent in a ludicrously overblown CV on his friend's behalf. Heather has a good time but returns to Oz after six months to marry her trucker boyfriend. Jack gives it a fair lash with drink and drugs.
It's easy to see the kind of appeal this antipodean drama might have back in Australia. For those who came to London in the 1960s and 1970s - and they did come in their thousands - there would be a nostalgic element to it all. For those who didn't, the inclusion of so many cliches from the period must have given it a subdocumentary feel. On the voyage, for instance, the intrepid four enjoyed an "Across the Equator" gala ball and visited Egypt. When they arrived in London, they found it freezing.
The problem with including so many cliches is that characters can be buried beneath them. The two most fully drawn - Richard and Catherine - relieve each other of their virginity, but thereafter seem fated to hurt each other. This development appeared peculiarly moralistic, balancing legitimate, egoistic drives for self-fulfillment against ideas of sacrifice. They could have ambition or happiness, but not both. Since neither could be happy without ambition, this was a grim universe indeed. Swinging London, me arse.
Still, like The Ambassador, for all its overarching moralising there was good fun in this one. Certainly, it had a sense and achieved a mood of a time when to be young meant that there was at least some room to be irresponsible. When Jack flattened a squad car by throwing a stolen pillar box on top of it from four storeys, we knew he had gone, let's say, a few millimetres too far. But it was funny too. Mention of matters such as class politics and Vietnam, however, were embarrassingly and awkwardly tacked on to the action.
Really, it was like a huge soap opera, hopping kangaroo-like across the landscape of a particular place and time. Sometimes it landed squarely on an issue but too often it went bounding on towards Jeffrey Archer territory. When it did, it was difficult to care for the principals. But just every now and again - especially when accompanied by evocative 1960s songs (though some were heard in years before they were written) - it had something to say: the London of the time was more fun than the London of now, even if Kangaroo Palace didn't admit that the `Swinging' nonsense was mostly a myth.
Anyway, along with diplomats and hippies (dips 'n' hips), there was new cop opera this week too. Michael Hayes features David Caruso, who left NYPD Blue for a mega film career which never really got off the ground. Hayes is a former cop turned government attorney (chief of the public corruption unit). A mob-hitman turned tout has confessed to the murder of an 18-yearold girl, nine years earlier. In return, the tout has got an immunity deal.
Hayes was a copper on the case and does not believe that the girl was, as the hitman insists, a prostitute. This first episode was officially a prequel - made to establish the characters. But it had quiet style. As ever, Caruso stared into the distance a lot, suggesting thought, world-weariness and a limited acting repertoire. There was never any doubt that he'd solve the case and there were some dubiously slushy theatrics (the girl had been praying on her rosary beads as she was raped).
It was also too affirming of the American justice system. But it did have that quiet style and an old-fashioned straightforwardness to it. It is no NYPD Blue and Steve Bochco's new Brooklyn South, which began on SKY 1 directly against Michael Hayes, will almost certainly attract more viewers. But Caruso's sedate style has its merits. Whether or not the series will retain the tone of the prequel, I don't know. But it should - if only to give an alternative to ubiquitous loud, aggressive cop opera.
BACK on RTE, Secret Lives screened Good Night, Safe Home And God Bless, a eulogy to the showband era. Joe Dolan, Dickie Rock, Brendan Bowyer, Butch Moore, Paddy Cole, Eileen Reid and a mini-ballroom-full of other suspects such as the Dixies recalled the 1960s, when the showbands were at their height. If Earl's Court had its kangaroo palaces at the time, Ireland had cow sheds with stages. The Clipper Carlton from Strabane, Co Tyrone were credited/blamed for starting the carry on.
This was quite a loving look-back, which began with Brendan Bowyer belting out Here We Go Loopy Loo and ended with Simple Simon. In between there were a few highlights such as Joe Dolan (the 1975 version) in a magnificent blue, bell-bottomed suit with black lapels and pocket flaps. As a slice of Irish showbiz history - indeed, of social history - there was good stuff here.
But it was rather soft-hearted: we heard nothing about the showband mafia of the period even though there was serious money in it for a while. Butch Moore estimated that, in today's terms, £2 million a year wasn't beyond him. For that sort of return, The Hucklebuck, Little Green Apples, Danny Boy . . . damn it, even Simple Simon could sound sweet. It was a pity however, that this documentary wasn't titled Spit On Me, Dickie - the defining phrase and sentiment of the time and milieu.