People used to hate Eamon Dunphy, something that is recorded in one of Ireland's finest novels. In Roddy Doyle's The Van, punters would wobble up to the counter, their bellies bedecked with Tricolours, and ask for a Dunphy and chips. The Dunphy bit of that combination was a battered sausage. It was called a Dunphy because (and I am only quoting from a great literary work here) it "looked like a prick".
That was in 1990, when Dunphy had performed his knife-throwing act with a biro, and later needed to be protected from a public willing to lynch anybody not willing to don a plaited Tricolour head band, pull on a "Who Put The Ball In The English Net" T-shirt and cry at the very sight of Kevin Sheedy. At a time when the country was locked into a patriotic fervour never seen before or since, Dunphy's iconoclastic commentary couldn't have attracted more ire.
Of course, people don't hate Dunphy at all any more. To pretend otherwise is only to trade on a persona long dissipated through the excellence of his radio show, and a highly polished humility which has accompanied his rise as some sort of representative of the little people. He knows that, which is why, with the first episode of The Weakest Link this week, he didn't treat people with the sort of clipped disdain that has made Anne Robinson a commodity to be cloned and distributed around the world. I have seen the German version of The Weakest Link, and it's not pretty. Whatever Freudian undertones are supposedly imbued in Robinson's persona, in the dark, fire-headed Frau Robinson, they are unleashed like the fires of hell. I may exaggerate, but you really have to see it.
The problem is, it's doubtful that this is really what TV3 wanted. A friend called it "The Meekest Link", which just about says it all. The whole premise of The Weakest Link, its hook, its international success, all stems from an artificial nastiness the host is meant to harness. TV3 knows that, which is why it has ads on buses showing a contestant cowering from a stern Dunphy. In actuality, that nastiness isn't there. With The Premiership, we have already learnt that whatever his strengths on the radio, as a television presenter he is disappointing and unengaging. With this quiz show, he confirms that: delivering the questions like an average table-quiz host. The ad-breaks rob the show of pace and the questions were desperately simple at times. Who invented the television, John Logie Baird or Telly Savalas? There's one to debate in the pub tonight.
Of course, it serves TV3 right. Irish television has decided that, after years of importing British television programmes and settling for inferior stuff of our own, it's almost as easy to buy the ideas for the British programmes and make our own versions of them. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, The Weakest Link, the soon-to-arrive Popstars. Just throw in a well-known personality and it should work out fine. And if that host doesn't fit, then just keep hammering away at him until he does. Gay Byrne became an imitator of Chris Tarrant, Eamon Dunphy is asked to be a male Anne Robinson. Dunphy may be rebelling in his own way, but it makes for very dull television.
AS for Irish radio, blandness was once considered a virtue in the early days. In the 1940s, 3,000 Leitrim farmers took to the lanes in a protest against jazz music. Believe me, that's a fact. I had to rewind the tape of That Old Hurdy Gurdy: Radio 75 Years On to confirm it.
"People heard in jazz something we wouldn't hear now," we were told. Lucky beggars. They didn't have any footage of the march, which is a pity. You can be sure there wasn't a goatee beard, polo neck or Gitane among them.
In this programme, you could dip your line in at any point and pull up a juicy fact. In the 1940s, the newsreader could actually ring Eamon de Valera and ask him how she had performed. There was British war-time newsreel that was so patronising in its depiction of the Irish peasant that it could have passed for a Harry Enfield sketch. Dev became a great believer in the wireless as a way of combating that sort of propaganda. You will not be surprised to hear that he was quite keen on the day when the "laughter of happy maidens" would be commonplace.
It wasn't all scratchy vinyl and anachronisms, however. There were moments when you could actually hear the national psyche change direction.
The letters which came into the Gay Byrne Show after the death of Anne Lovett have hardly yellowed, pleas for understanding and for change carrying remarkable resonance after so many years.
If you could see past the irritating way it insisted on introducing each talking head by bleeding black and white into colour, and if you could also block your ears to the hammed up reconstructions of Dβil debates and early recordings, this was a fascinating documentary.
Irish radio by the way, started with a tribunal and a disgraced politician. How little has changed, although the farmers of Leitrim will no doubt beg to differ.
I must confess that I only have half an idea of what's going on in Armadillo, William Boyd's adaptation of his own novel, but I'm thoroughly enjoying trying to figure it out. After only one episode, it has something to do with a burnt-out hotel, a suicide, sleep-deprivation, money and a zillion false leads, all delicately balanced on the chiselled, insomniac features of Lorimer Black (James Frain).
Black is the armadillo of the piece, gliding through as an apparently privileged loss adjuster who has, in fact, a scrounging, screaming family under the gossamer-thin fiction that is his past. It will all eventually stumble, blinking into the light. The mysterious Flavia (Catherine McCormack), with whom Black has become obsessed, will no doubt be holding the torch when it does.
It is a black thriller in which every performance is delivered with the accuracy the pin-point script deserves. Hugh Bonneville gives a study in boorishness as the silver-spooned Torquil, dishing out the rampant condescension with all the volume you would expect from a man called Torquil. Stephen Rea as George, Black's boss, is an array of facial tics, a body tense with such rage that it is only short of manifesting itself in the form of steam shooting from his ears. He also has a nice line in surreal sayings: "We'll set a sprat to catch a rhino," for instance, or the delightfully baffling, "Softly, softly, catchee monkey."
We once discovered Homer Simpson's solution to every problem is to tell the kids to pack their bags and prepare for a life under the sea. He even sang about it, as he fantasised about using the ocean as his own private sushi bar, sucking hermit crabs from their shells and swallowing seahorses whole. "There'll be no accusations, just friendly crustaceans. Under the sea!"
There wasn't too much that was friendly in the seas visited in The Blue Planet on Wednesday night. The crustacean, in fact, seemed to be getting the bad end of the stick. They are prey to the sorts of animals the BBC spent millions of pounds to recreate for Walking With Dinosaurs, but which are still very much alive and swimming deep down on the ocean floor. I've never been able to figure out just how it is that, while the pressure 1,000 metres deep might be 100 times that of the surface and enough to crush a man, the fish there seem to move through it without fuss. It may explain their ugliness, though. Over-sized heads. Under-sized bodies. Golf-ball eyes. Teeth bigger than the rest of their bodies put together. Insides on show to anyone who cares to look. There's no light at that depth, which might explain why looks don't matter so much.
David Attenborough explained that mating in the darkness is often very difficult. Amazing that, when you consider that the Irish have managed so well for all these years.
Bioluminescent, prehistoric animals made for wonderful television. The pictures were so extraordinary that David Attenborough appeared at the end to persuade the viewers that they weren't put together using a fish tank and the producer's mutant goldfish. In his hand, he held evidence of the crushing depths the cameras went to. A large polystyrene cup had been attached to a submersible as it dived, but had been squashed to thimble size within minutes.
It brought water to your eyes. If they really want to scare the contestants on The Weakest Link, crushing seems as good a threat as any.
tvreview@irish-times.ie
