TV REVIEW:This week its PierrepointUTV, Monday The Rose of TraleeRTÉ1, Monday, Tuesday Mutual FriendsBBC1, Tuesday My Zinc BedBBC2, Wednesday
THIS FILM CONTAINS scenes of execution, which some viewers may find disturbing." Um, Hobson's choice. On the one hand, there was UTV's jolly depressing Bank Holiday film, Pierrepoint, a sepia-clad biopic about Britain's last hangman; on the other, RTÉ was hosting the 49th Rose of Tralee contest. Man oh man. Credit crunch, flooding, wiry-headed feminists howling at the night sky from the depths of their organic vegetable patches - seems there ain't nothin' can keep that pale moon from rising.
I opted for the gallows.
Albert Pierrepoint seemed like a pleasant enough bloke (notwithstanding the fact that he managed to dispatch more than 400 people from the gibbet), a man who bore the weight of his appalling profession with hearty solemnity, and a chap who afforded his clients as much dignity as he could in the 17 or so seconds he needed to end their lives. Pierrepoint was rendered for television (somewhat inevitably, one felt) by the fine Timothy Spall, an actor who does jowly yearning, flabby sensitivity and oleaginous loss with the grace of a prima ballerina. Spall was joined by the pitch-perfect Juliet Stevenson as his rather mercenary and emotionally cauterised missus, and between the two of them, and plenty of rainy, Florentine-hatted, jangly-piano, Pathé-News period detail, we got a masterclass in well-made period TV drama.
Anyway, 400 noosed corpses later, including a sinewy Ruth Ellis and a slew of Nazi war criminals (who were hanged in efficient bunches of three), and I thought (to put it mildly) that I could do with a bit of light entertainment.
OVER IN THE Dome in Co Kerry, Ray "I'll eat your pom-poms" D'Arcy had been on his twinkly feet for at least two hours and was tirelessly peddling a flawlessly fraternal and professionally goofy asexuality as he once again hosted The Rose of Tralee.
Over two long nights the Roses (a bunch of unmarried women under the age of 28 who can claim Irish antecedents) were paraded for our delectation on a frothy pink stage. And when I say long nights, I mean long nights, as each and every one of the 31 Roses had approximately seven minutes' airtime to wax lyrical about their Sligo grannies, their sister's dress-making skills and their fabulous fiances. Undeterred and seemingly inexhaustible, D'Arcy, like a sprightly, if greying, lamb, skipped through the fairy dust, the glittering tiaras, the billowing silks and appalling recitations, and did a sterling job of keeping the Roses relaxed, the anecdotes anodyne and the microphones on. And if at times he appeared to wilt a little psychologically, hell, the man is human.
Round one saw the usual rattlebag of well-educated, largely articulate young women totter around the tent in their ruched party frocks. Among those candidates to register through the misty drapes of television tedium (and not always for the kindest of reasons) were a brittle taxidermist's daughter who described her father breakfasting over bloodied entrails, a woman in robed emerald green with an irrational fear of bellybuttons, an alarmingly confident American who regaled the audience with mind-numbing chat about her stiletto-squashed pinkies, and then (just as I was ready to hurl the cat at the set) a rather lovely dyspraxic Dublin girl who, despite having the reading age of a seven-year-old, had completed a university degree and runs her own theatre company.
All in all, though, watching The Rose of Tralee is akin to having to wade through your next-door neighbour's second cousin's debs dance photos. It is entirely dull, crucifyingly repetitive and more than a little bewildering as satin blonde upon satin blonde upon satin blonde collide in a flurry of fake tan, precision eyebrow-grooming and good intentions - but doubtless it was all mighty crack if you'd been there.
'WE SHALL KNOW nothing until we are laid out on our zinc bed." The delicately beautiful, loudly prosperous roof garden of a magnificent terraced house in London's Regent's Park provided the setting for David Hare's screenplay adapted from his original theatre piece, My Zinc Bed. A one-off drama for the BBC, the play, which carried the weight of its author's considerable intellectual reputation, dealt with the nature of addiction, of love and betrayal, in an age when fidelity and faith are often replaced by infatuation and obsession.
Propped up by an extraordinarily sexy cast, including Uma Thurman, Jonathan Pryce and, it has to be said, a rather less appealing Paddy Considine, the play took place in the labyrinthine emotional depths of a love triangle between a successful software entrepreneur and former communist, Victor Quinn (Pryce), his staggeringly beautiful younger wife, Elsa (Thurman) - whom he had rescued from the floor of a Copenhagen bar ("I was an international junkie of epic proportions," she confessed) - and a poet, Paul (Considine), a recovering alcoholic with writer's block, whom Pryce, with sinister Mephistophelian overtones, invites into his office and his home.
There are always difficulties in adapting theatre for television, and Hare's successful play, despite its gift from the camera of sumptuous locations, its top-drawer cast and its seamless direction, suffered from sounding arch, contrived and at times almost melodramatic as Elsa and Paul fought off their desire for one another over some very expensive soft furnishings and the ubiquitous whisky decanter. Theirs was a passion compounded by addiction to drink, cocaine and danger, while puppet-master Victor, himself an alcoholic, seemed compelled to risk destroying his stagnant marriage by testing his dependent wife's obedience, much as you would train a puppy not to eat the bone you place before it.
While My Zinc Bed was a welcome relief from the parade of lovely girlies around the gazebo, it didn't quite work for me, though at times the dialogue sang. "Do you think the glass is a bit of an intermediary?" Paul wryly asked Elsa as she threw the alcohol down her throat, while the morning sun illuminated the tolerant faces of the sculptures that littered her drawing room like benign forebears. There is nothing new in human failure, they seemed to be saying.
'CHRIST, WE'RE NEARLY 40! What about love and companionship?" Auntie has been a busy girl this week, with the Beeb's new comedy drama series, Mutual Friends, waltzing on to the screen like the unattractive love-child of Cold Feet and This Life. On the strength of episode one, Mutual Friends is a pretty vile, self-conscious "Noughties" statement on the fraught lives of a bunch of nauseating fortysomethings, all faffing around the English suburbs and screwing each other on their Ikea sofas. At its centre is the unlikely friendship between Martin (Marc Warren), an uxorious lawyer, and Patrick (Alexander Armstrong), a merry fornicator with a crumpled linen suit and a job in advertising, as they get up the dainty nose of the largely uninspiring, perennially drooping Keeley Hawes, who plays Jen, Martin's errant wife.
Pssst . . . Infidelity! Suicide! Divorce!, promised the publicity, offering its wares like a panting schoolboy with some well-thumbed light entertainment under his mattress. Mutual Friends, in a deeply sub-Four Weddings and a Funeral kind of way, opened with a bunch of disparate yet connected characters rushing around their well-insulated homes in a state of sartorial indecision as they prepared for the funeral of one of their number, Carl. Days earlier, Carl, apparently losing enthusiasm for his redbrick pile of Victoriana, his three sons and his tremendously fun wife, had drunk a cup of takeaway coffee and stepped under a commuter train, in the process thoughtfully reuniting a bunch of old mates who now have six whole episodes to reveal the buy-one-get-one-free skeletons they've been storing in their stripped-pine wardrobes next to the chinos and flowery wellies.
Oh, roll on, episode two. With a bit of luck, Jen might lose her footing getting on the 8.05.
SO, AFTER ONE Rose had packed away her cornet, having blasted us with a good-natured version of The Bear Necessities, and another had pocketed her speedily solved Rubik's Cube, and others had discreetly slipped their delicate feet out of their high heels, after five hours and 20 minutes the 49th Rose of Tralee, Aoife Kelly, was garlanded with her silver tiara. The Tipperary Rose looked radiant and absolutely delighted as she hugged the judging panel, her parents and her fiancé, and the Dome swelled with rousing applause from the crowd, the aunts from New Jersey, the uncles from New Orleans, the glittering sisters from Dubai, the bulky brothers from Tyneside, the sun-drenched nephews from Perth, and the dewy-eyed grannies from Ballinasloe. And the pale moon winked above the Kerry hills before slinking off to illuminate Ms Kelly's petal-strewn path.
Preparations for the festival's 50th are already under way - hell, I know when to admit defeat.