The only show in town

TV Review: Late summer and the programmes have dried up in the sun

TV Review: Late summer and the programmes have dried up in the sun. It's August; and everybody, goes the thinking, is outside, writes Shane Hegarty.

The television is blaring at an empty room, and through the double-glazing comes the sound of children chasing butterflies and playing with hoops and sticks. Of dogs leaping at lovingly-flung sticks, of neighbour nattering with neighbour, of men cursing at barbecues. It is the sound of sunshine and warmth and daylight, currently with 33 per cent extra free for a limited time only.

For those that are left behind - the ill, the lazy, the TV columnists - the flicker of the television feels very cold. The box needs to be shunted from corner to corner, because the glare of the sun keeps creeping across its screen. We keep vigil during long, bright days. We're the ones who notice that Eileen Dunne is the only person left in the RTÉ building, minding the house while everyone is on holiday. She reads the news bulletins a few times a day and spends the rest of her time patrolling the building, gently swinging the keys from the end of her finger, gathering up the post off the mat, perhaps sometimes sneaking into the director general's office and swivelling in his chair. The summers are hers alone. It may offer an explanation as to why she remains unchanged in fashion and physical appearance after so many years. Thawed out for three months of the year, she ages at only a quarter of the rate as the rest of us.

For the Irish channels, this is mostly a time for repeats and remainders. Early Thursday morning, RTÉ went off-air for four hours before dawn to carry out essential maintenance works. They needn't have disturbed their sleep patterns to accommodate us. Everybody's outside, remember; you can do pretty much what you want, when you want. This week, RTÉ began broadcasting The Virgin Mary, a series that considers the possibility that Mary may have been raped by a Roman soldier and which decides she probably gave birth at age 13. When it was aired on the BBC at Christmas the station received 500 complaints. People picketed its offices as it was being broadcast. In an Ireland proud of its Marian devotion, surely this would translate ten-fold. I rang RTÉ to ask. After The Virgin Mary was broadcast here on Tuesday night, only 14 viewers picked up the phone to register their outrage. That's hardly enough to fill a pew in Ballinspittle.

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There are evenings when RTÉ1 has seemed like a station involved in a twinning project with TV3. On Sunday night, RTÉ1 showed made-for-TV movie Range of Motion. It starred Rebecca De Mornay and an actor so disinterested in the plot that he slept through most of it. Oh hold on, he was playing a coma victim, husband to De Mornay, whose life of domestic splendour and musical montages was abruptly interrupted by tragedy and cliché. It did manage to provide the week's least conventional love scene, when De Mornay decided to fully assess her husband's range of motion as he lay in his hospital bed. She removed her clothes and climbed on board his comatose body like one would a Harley Davidson and, mistaking his pectoral muscles for handlebars, attempted to rev him back to life. Try the choke! Give it more gas! You'll no doubt be delighted to hear that it worked. The next day he woke up, presumably to ask for a cigarette. It was an outcome that challenged so many conventional theories of critical care. Nurse, we've tried everything to wake this patient, there's only one course of action left. Prepare for a libidoctomy!

Likewise, the Townlands series has been worth a visit, if it was not always worth staying. This week's programme, especially, had the look of an end-of-season off-cut. Football Crazy followed millionaire builder Mick Wallace and his Wexford youth's football team to Italy. Wallace is the man who draped the giant "No To Nice" sign from one of his Liffeyside sites. The media took a shine to him, this unconventional tycoon, always dressed for the building site, his blonde hair flowing past his shoulders so that from behind he could be mistaken for a mermaid for whom things just haven't quite gone to plan. Anyway, Mick brought the young lads to Turin, where they played some matches, trained a bit, watched their minibus break down, disagreed with the food and came home again. That, more or less, was that. We learnt little except, perhaps, that in their range of hairstyles the boys showed themselves to have far more imagination than the production company that followed them on their trip. There are so many sports teams going on foreign tours, that it is a mystery why this was seen as any less prosaic. You get the feeling that Mick Wallace was supposed to have brought personality to the party, only he didn't read the invitation properly. The result was a weak and pointless film, a half-hour holiday video when a short postcard would have sufficed.

Football Crazy could never have been another The Rod Squad, the only series of real class to have graced the summer months. It continues to follow Roddy Collins and John Courtenay as they attempt to bring glory to Carlisle United, a club with a powerful immunity to glory. In Collins it has turned up a wonderful, dramatic character but, alongside that, The Rod Squad has also succeeded in going beyond the parochial nature of the initial premise (local boys done mediocre) and offered real insight into life at the bottom of football's food chain. The matches are filmed from ground level, the floodlights reflecting the mist and the gloom. The colour of football is not the vibrant red of Premiership jerseys or the garish green of its money, but that of the mud of a Division Three pitch on midweek match night in deep winter.

TG4 has been repeating the Cogar series, but then you can never be quite sure what is new and what is old on TG4. It sends its programmes out there and keeps playing them until the tape wears out. This week's documentary profiled Eddie Lenihan, a Limerick storyteller and folklorist with hair that seems to have exploded from his face and head like water from a broken fire hydrant. He travels the country, recording the stories that the older generation heard told during the long nights before television came along, and possibly during the times when it came along but there was nothing good on. It is important, said Eddie, to harvest the stories before that generation is gone, and the stories too. The young people haven't the interest any more. "It's not surprising - all they have is television," he said. I would have thought that people still tell stories, only they have a shorter shelf-life and they tend to be told around the water cooler rather than the fire. The instincts are the same, it's just that the cultural references come from ever-decreasing circles.

For a man with such a dislike for the box, he had a hunger for fantasy. Lenihan has a particular interest in fairy lore, once successfully lobbying to save a hawthorn tree from being uprooted to make way for a new road. Fairy trees, though, have long held a position on the list of things you just don't bulldoze, somewhere just above environmentalists and tiny snails and at the other end of the page from Georgian buildings and mediaeval forts. The hawthorn tree, he explained, is the meeting point for fairies on their way to battle. Cutting one down brings nothing but bad luck. He had heard stories of people who had cut down a fairy thorn only to later die of cancer. And I know of people who have died of cancer without ever having even touched a fairy thorn. Those little bastards will get you either way.

Otherwise, it is drought season. If the weather was this Italian all the time, maybe our television would be as bad as Italian television too. We are only a few days away from the autumn schedules when we will be guided to the oasis. Or at the very least it will be a mirage of an oasis, but even that will be enough to give us succour for acouple of weeks.