TV REVIEW: J1 SummerRTÉ2, Monday Colm and Jim Jim's Home RunRTÉ1, Sunday Ballet ChancersRTÉ1, Sunday I'm a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!TV3 and UTV, all week CrimecallRTÉ1, Tuesday
SO, YOU wake up in the morning on your pocket-sprung mattress, your property devalued, your job gurgling in the quicksand of the economic downturn, your suntan fading. Your real problem, though, is how do you wean your pungent teenagers, the babies of the boom, off the Tiger milk?
It's been a strange old TV week, with RTÉ suddenly releasing a flock of reality programmes that seem to have been cooped up like impatient pigeons in the Montrose loft. The majority of these appear to have been aimed at a younger audience - not the afternoon Barneygurglers, but that difficult-to-reach audience of late teens/early twentysomethings, the ones in the Ugg boots and retro flares who are more likely to be imbibing their TV culture through some microscopic antennae, along with their Buckfast and beers, their shots and their cider, rather than tucked up in front of the telly in their bunny slippers.
Or so one would be forgiven for thinking, on the evidence of RTÉ's interesting, if alarming, new fly-on-the-wall documentary series, J1 Summer. Tracing the journeys of three groups of teens as they depart Ireland for a "working" (don't get overly attached to that word) holiday in the US, this is an access-all-areas, no-holds-barred, camera-verité account of just what your precious little darlings get up to when released from the gilded strings of mummy's apron.
Having witnessed half an hour of the "goys" (to borrow my page-companion's inflection) streaking and vomiting their way around the continent, from San Diego to Chicago, I was moved towards nausea. To be fair, not all the programme's participants ended up in the emergency room after vaulting off the rented balcony with a gut full of booze. And not all of them hung out on the beach, impressing the local bikini-barely-wearers with loquacious tales of death by bestiality as inspired by the porn channel. It would appear, though, that there are the makings of a careless generation out there, with some merely having to stretch their sticky hand out towards daddy's accommodating wallet to satisfy their endless wants.
In a sea of petulance, there were one or two living the dream on their own terms, like the bloke from Dundalk who happily endured the zombie contact lenses he was obliged to wear for his exciting new job in a Honolulu comic shop.
Mostly, however, we were stuck in the San Diego suburbs with the goys (one of whom was described by his companions as a "misunderstood messiah" and all of whom had been anticipating "hot women in a hot climate") while they threw missiles at each other's genitals. Still, the boys just wanna have fun. And darn it, as one of the indignant compadres said before leaving Dublin, "we're going to have to work for the rest of our lives!" Yeah? Dream on, pal.
WITH A BIT of forward planning, the goys could have unpacked their laptops from their spanking new rucksacks and participated in Colm and Jim Jim's Home Run, a veritable feast of asinine innocuousness, big purple props and a couple of wobbly blokes off the radio dressed up in Hawaiian shirts and box suits. Presenters Colm Hayes and Jim Nugent, a pair of heavyweight, greying quasi-Ant and Decs, have moved over from early-morning radio to host this messy and ultimately flat game show. With a format that looks like the not terribly bright love-child of Quicksilverand Brainiac, Colm and Jim Jim have been drafted into the Sunday evening family slot, replacing the ubiquitous sabbath-day talent shows with this equally wearying slice of participatory dross.
In the show's first outing, untaxing questions (name James Joyce's most famous novel or, failing that, the members of Boyzone) threw the contestants into spasms of indecision, while scientific experiments (eat a Malteser with two strands of uncooked spaghetti) hurtled them to a standstill.
Home Runemploys cutting-edge technology, however: along with studio contestants, there is a host of would-be players worldwide (from Kinnegad to Kansas, the man said, although the majority seemed firmly located on our patch of green), all crowding under their wondrous webcams. Home computers at the ready, this week's external contestants vied to be chosen to help the studio-based contenders part Colm and Jim Jim from their dosh. Some did this by wrapping themselves in toilet paper, while others attempted to remove an elastic band, stretched around their terribly excited faces, with their tongues. What larks. But if Hayes and Nugent plan to stay on the gogglebox for longer than the time it takes to blow up a balloon through a Clingfilm roll, someone needs to devise a tighter vessel for their tediously run-of-the-mill mayhem.
BEFORE LEAVING RTÉ's yoof oeuvre, it's worth mentioning one reality show that left the others standing, or should I say vaulting. It's all tattoos and tutus in Ballet Chancers, a gently persuasive show which follows Ireland's foremost ballerina, Monica Loughman, and her company, the Irish Youth Russian Ballet, as they train six young Dublin-based hip-hop dancers to perform as ballet dancers in The Nutcracker Suiteat Dublin's Helix Theatre.
Ducklings to swans maybe, but the hip-hoppers were stunning to watch as they auditioned for the sternly perfectionist Loughman. Despite her background of gruellingly disciplined work at Russia's Perm State Ballet (where she was the first westerner to dance with the company) and the knowledge that she has little more than a month to turn these baggy-pant body-poppers into sinew-on-legs, Loughman's elegant frame rippled with excitement as she watched them do their thing. There are weeks of sore feet, bruised egos and shattered confidence to come, but this is one of those rare things, a reality programme that's really worth watching.
ANT AND DEC, the Geordie duo who have knitted themselves their own indestructible television personas (complete with cheeky little off-the-cuffs and a bank balance Biffo would weep for), are back in the sodden Australian jungle for, let's see, around the 440th time, their pert little north-of-England bottoms nesting on a brood of wet and hungry celebrities who, unfathomably, have chosen to spend three weeks in the outback, eating alligator penis, enduring Robert Kilroy-Silk (know which one I'd opt for) and being craftily edited for couch consumption.
I'm A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Hereis about as compelling as those bored teens throwing bruised fruit at each other's testicles in San Diego. How many times do we need to watch some bloke from EastEndersmasticate a marsupial's mickey? How many more times must we contemplate another doleful Wag pretending to be lost in a reverie about Chelsea football club while she twirls in a cascading waterfall in a bikini that has even less ballast than her motives? This year's crop of jungle fodder includes debonair actor George Takei (Mr Sulu from Star Trek) and, oddly, former tennis star Martina Navratilova, who looks like she wandered off in search of the ball and found herself part of a nightmarishly eccentric party game. These two sporting and intergalactic stalwarts, along with gay policeman Brian Paddick, are the senior residents of the affectionately named "camp camp", which housed, at the start of the series, half the celebrity intake. That's the happy camp. Meanwhile, across the luscious weed, lay the miserable, flooded holding-pen for Kilroy-Silk, Esther Rantzen and a couple of hard-bodies with ambition.
Why don't retired television personalities stay retired? This game is a disaster for Rantzen: after an occasionally feisty television career, her stoicism has crumbled in the outback. When I last tuned in she was weeping with loneliness on the very public shores of rubberneck TV, and being comforted by a couple of cooing glamour models. She really should have had the sense to stay at home.
TUESDAY NIGHT. Crimecall. Forlorn CCTV footage of skinny blokes in hoodies pole-vaulting over bookies' counters or lashing the contents of a suburban pharmacy into their oversized tote bags. An earnest policeman, devoid of irony, promising protection to witnesses prepared to give information on the horrendous shooting in a Limerick suburb that left a young man dead, a family cauterised by grief and a community darkening with rage.
The reconstruction of Shane Geoghegan's murder was sickening: his desperate run towards the shelter of a neighbouring garden, the soulless pointlessness of his loss. His mother, brother, friends and girlfriend, suspended in sorrow, pleaded for help to identify his killer. The simplicity of the form gave their pleas an added poignancy. I remember, as a child, watching Garda Patrolwith my eyes out on sticks, and searching my suburban garden the next day for stolen "items" buried in the flowerbeds, whatever those stolen "items" may have been. But that was in the days of yore, before haunted-looking teenagers under grey hoods patrolled the suburbs with sawn-off shotguns. Christ knows what's lurking beneath the dahlias in these forlorn November days.
