TVReview:'Women are monogamous, men are not." So went the thesis at the centre of the dull pile of suburban intrigue and petty narcissism that was Little Devil, a mildly distasteful drama from UTV that was about as palatable as last week's stuffed cannelloni and as alluring as a stubborn strand of spinach on the teeth, writes Hilary Fannin.
The ubiquitous Robson Green, an actor who doggedly scales the glacier of mediocre television drama, never quite daring to look down to see that it is melting, played Will, an affable head teacher with elbow patches, a house in the burbs, a clumsy pre-adolescent son and a feisty wife who was engaged in fellatio in her boss's expensive car. Ah ha! So women are not monogamous, after all?
Apparently not; not if, like reasonable old Will, you let them out of the house and allow them to have a career. Next thing they're making more money than you, brokering deals in their slingbacks and slinging their hook at the boss (who also happens to be your old mate), in this case a bite-sized sack of testosterone called Adrian (James Wilby), for whom every piece of crumpled ass that walks through his glass-plated office door is a potential notch on his effete Gucci belt.
Poor Will - there he was getting his vicarious rocks off listening to slurping Adrian describe the joys of rumpy- automobile-pumpy (while Adrian's tetchy wife got quietly sloshed in the corner), not realising that the nameless tart in Ado's latest escapade was the mother of his children. What's a man to do? It's all right, just wait for episode two, Will - you get to revenge-shag the rest of the cast.
So far, so prophylactically pedestrian. Little Devil, however, not content to capture us in the maw of its humdrum titillation, put its own murky spin on suburban swing by showing the yawn-a-minute proceedings through the eyes of Will's aforementioned 11-year-old son, Ollie (Joseph Friend).
A ploddingly dull boy, grappling with parental deceit and double standards with the acumen of Ken and Barbie in a singles bar, he was further weighed down by some of the worst lines you can give an adolescent thesp, such as: "Now I'm totally freaked out, grown-ups are really weird!" (this mouthful as his splintered parents gazed at each other over the Special K box, having indulged in that nasty grown-up habit of sleeping with someone you've just threatened with divorce because lawyer's fees are so much more costly than screwing around with your kids' equilibrium).
'WATCH YOUR FISHTAIL!'Children are fragile creatures at the best of times, but dressed in dickie-bows, patent-leather shoes, ankle-socks, tiaras and big pink dresses, brimming with hope and pulsing with excitement, their fragility is almost heartbreaking. Baby Ballroom: the Championship Final samba'd on to the screen with the remaining contestants - tuxedos sharpened, quiffs waxed, eyelids glittering like disco balls - quickstepping, foxtrotting, jiving and revving up their rumbas before ending up in the splits on the polished floor, like multicoloured discarded banana skins.
Baby Ballroom wasn't all about precocious children swathed in fake tan and freighted with tight-lipped mothers awash with frustrated ambition - there was a bit of dancing, too. Seriously though, this strangely absorbing spectacle of twirling miniatures was also about highly-skilled children (a heap of whom seemed to come from Merseyside) pursuing a dream, albeit a familiar dream, often inherited from ballroom-dancing parents and grandparents.
"I'm really, really, really, really, really, really happy," said Rebecca, who might have been on the purple team, and didn't win.
"People in Asda look at me!" grinned Eleanor, from the yellow team, who didn't win either. Meanwhile, one sweet little boy on the blue team, who was growing into his teeth, and who did eventually win, said that he just wanted the kids in his class who were "skitting" him to realise how hard he'd worked.
Kelseys and Kimberlys doing the cha-cha-cha wouldn't usually float my boat, and little boys who say "everyone knows I like my cufflinks" do not usually elicit my sympathy, but one couldn't help feeling for all these lacquered little divas when their names were called for elimination and they ran up the studio steps to flop dejectedly against enormous weeping fathers and shattered mothers in kitten heels - surely there are ways of making such contests kinder.
"You are born for the floor," said young Liverpudlian crooner Ray Quinn (you remember, he came second in last season's X Factor after snuffling his way through You'll Never Walk Alone). Quinn, who sat on the adjudicating panel with Bonnie, a watery ice-dancer, and a chap called Pierre, is the genuine article, a man who knows his heel turns from his kickball changes. He too was a champion juvenile ballroom dancer in his day. The endless parade of TV talent shows will be well-stocked; all the shiny-shoed wannabes out there have a new role model.
THIS WEEK SAWthe Leaving Certificate results posted and the annual lunacy of hordes of teenagers clutching little brown envelopes in the mistaken belief that the hieroglyphics therein translate into their futures. Immediately, the airwaves were full of the familiar post-match analysis, asking why maths and science seem doomed forever to be left on the bench. Meanwhile, Prof Richard Dawkins, in the first part of his interesting, if somewhat cheekily pompous, new series, Enemies of Reason, offered his own interpretation of why the sciences are failing to ignite the interest of students, a state of affairs not confined to Ireland.
Dawkins's argument was that, as a society, we are "valuing private feeling more highly than evidence-based reason". Examining a rattle-bag of New Age phenomena (most of which have been slinking around at the edge of reason since before the flood), from tarot readings and astrology to aura portraiture, spiritual readings and water dowsing, he concluded that this multi-million-dollar industry, one that makes bedfellows of the Dalai Lama and George Michael (they both have the same star sign, but don't ask me which one), is impoverishing our culture and leading us on a foggy, superstitious path towards a frightened and unenlightened fundamentalism (hey, don't hold back, Richard, tell us what you really think).
The camera had a field day at a New Age spiritual fair, packed as it was with central-casting crystal- ball-gazers falling over their kaftans to dispel Dawkins's cynicism. In general, his unshakeable dogmatism in the light of gentle dowsers uncovering bottles of sand in their search for water, and of dodgy spiritualists wading through the grief and vulnerability of the recently bereaved, won hands down, the unambiguous light of his ultra-rational explanations sending the muddled mice of superstition scuttling off under the skirting board.
We are, as Dawkins said, "wanton storytellers", creating "intention out of randomness", imposing mystical patterns on reality and doing our damnedest and most elaborate best to avoid the finality of death. One left the programme convinced of the authenticity of Dawkins's arguments . . . but . . . somewhere in the midst of his disquisition I found myself thinking of the strange white cat with the green eyes that hid in the lichen-covered trees and followed my mother home, the misanthropic cat that looked like her grandmother, wild and disapproving, the cat that was her grandmother, she said, who had come back with the sole purpose of causing aggravation. She called the cat Spook . . .
SPEAKING OF THINGSillogical and entirely subjective, RTÉ is running a strange little series of half-hours that mop up a corner of the spilt summer schedule, called Consuming Passions, which this week listened to four Cork women wax lyrical about their particular predilection: chocolate.
Amid many lingering close-ups of a friendly woman in a pink jumper eating her way through a delicate selection from her local confectioner was one unassailable fact: we Irish eat more chocolate per capita than any other nation bar Switzerland (where they build their houses out of Toblerone), 20lb of the stuff per person per annum apparently. Maybe it's me - I have about as much interest in the stuff as I do in the compositional forces that make up a cuckoo clock - but this candified half-hour left me cold. Another bittersweet reminder of the paucity of the season.