Hotel (BBC 1, Monday)
Underworld (Channel 4, Tuesday)
The Vincent Browne Interview (RTE 1, Sunday)
Making The Cut (RTE 1, Sunday)
I'm Alan Partridge (BBC 2, Monday)
As commonplace now as a fly on a pair of trousers, fly-on-the-wall documentary series have become a kind of soap verite. In recent years we've had a fly's eye view of an airport, a driving school, a dinnerparty, an Australian family, a rugby club and an opera house. A new eight-parter, Hotel - which looks at the day-to-day carry-on in Liverpool's Adelphi Hotel - began on Monday.
Few viewers will book in for the full, two-month stint at the Adelphi. But on the evidence of the first episode, the occasional visit should prove amusing. The ubiquitous fly's opening revelations centred on the hotel's busiest time of the year - the weekend of the Aintree Grand National. As ever, owners, trainers, punters, jockeys and prostitutes jostled for positions in the hotel. But this year was different because of the IRA bomb threat which made the great race a faller before it began.
The Adelphi was a winner, however. Benefiting from the bomb threat, which resulted in a rush of wannabe stay-overs, it was able to sell mattresses, laid on the floor of a function room, for £45 a person. Not, mind, £45 a mattress, which, between a few people - depending, of course, on what sort of a punter you were - could have made for an interesting each-way bet.
It was the Adelphi's general manager, Eileen Downey, five feet of Tysonesque pugnacity, who spotted the chance to make a killing on the postponed National. Other, more exotic females - one wearing a spangly, blue dress (at least four sizes too small), kneehigh white boots and, a delicate touch this, a white feather boa - also fancied their chances. After all, this was Mattress City and a great deal of the punters (in the broadest sense of the term) were well drunk.
Eileen was having none of it, however. Spotting the floozies, which, in fairness, wouldn't require the services of the Pinkerton agency, she marched - Eileen always marched - up to the boa woman. With the hauteur of a Maggie Thatcher dismissal, Eileen ejected Ms Boa with the most menacing "Out, Out, Out" heard in a decade. "Are you a resident?" she asked, before immediately answering her own question. "You're not a resident." It was an impressive display of verbal palmdusting.
Meanwhile, senior receptionist Christine Fletcher was confronting abusive guests and flirting with drunken jockeys in the hotel sauna. One drunk, a thoroughly obnoxious cretin, insisted that he had booked a room earlier in the day. The hotel had no record of this (or, that's what they said, anyway). He said that he arrived too early to check-in but that he had been assured his room was booked. By the time he arrived back, legless and belligerent, the room was gone.
Still, he persisted. With the tenacity that only drunks and party political bully-boys can muster, he banged the counter and shouted at the top of his voice. He wasn't quite the hotel guest from hell (rock stars and footballers have additional tricks) but he was quite vile. Christine called two bouncers in morning suits - they looked like prop forwards at a wedding - to "escort" him from the premises and they promptly, and literally, threw him out. He was lucky, though. Had he persisted, Christine might have set Eileen on him.
Hotels retain an Upstairs, Downstairs stratification. In the kitchen and the linen room - indeed, in most parts barred to guests - old-fashioned graft predominates. The fly did not make many visits to these parts of the Adelphi. But, when he did, they were telling. Hotels, we know, thrive on cheap labour (and, in this case, grubby opportunism) and this opening episode didn't try to hide that fact. But it didn't labour it either.
Eileen Downey looks set to become the series's main star. A natural for the docu-soap, she performs with gusto whenever the fly is around. Given the risks inherent in this genre - Bath rugby club plummeted; the Royal Opera practically imploded; the dinnerparty guests looked like prats - the Adelphi could be in rubble before it all ends. But, for the moment, this is, in hotel terms, a three-star series in the ever-expanding chain of soaps verite.
Written by Andy Hamilton (co-writer of Drop The Dead Donkey), Underworld is a variable-star comedy thriller. Some of the lines are real five-star efforts - "She's so thick, she can barely read her own tattoos" - but some of the action is as slow and dull as an empty hostel. William (James Fleet) is a shy schoolteacher, who uses his emphatic ineffectuality to great effect. Susan (Susan Wooldridge) is his pushy sister, a sort of Eileen Downey without the knockout punch.
Fortysomething William has married 20-year-old Gilda (the tattoo girl). On returning from school, he finds that Gilda (Camille Power) has stolen every stick of furniture in the house. Inquiries reveal that she intends splitting for Brazil with "that Greek bloke from the video shop", with whom she has been having an affair. The neighbours know what William doesn't because they have heard Gilda's orgasms while he has been teaching English in the classroom. William eventually twigs and remembers that the Greek bloke used to give him "a funny sort of smile".
Anyway, William and Susan are kidnapped by a gangster aesthete (Alun Armstrong) who has a liking for Hardy and horticulture and a distaste for Hemingway. Explaining the radiant blue of his hydrangeas, he tells William that it is all because of Frank "The Fat Man" McKenzie, who, along with a few stone of Iron Crosses, is buried in the flower-bed. "It's like he is still with us," says the sensitive thug. "Mind you, I'm glad he isn't," he adds.
It's a strange mix of witty character comedy and blunt, malicious violence. The Greek bloke, for instance, takes a white, Londonstyle taxi, driven by ultra-Cockney Mike Reid (big smile, hairy chest, gold around the neck, bigoted opinions on everything) and ends up with his throat slit. Heavy. Presumably, Reid is in the pay of the aesthetic villain, but that is not made clear. At the end of this opening episode, Susan, having (with William) caught up with the fugitive Gilda, has just got into the white taxi.
Underworld is patchy, which is hardly surprising given the mixing of genres. When it works, it's splendid, but it cannot sustain either its comedy or its drama - they tend to cancel out more than they complement each other. The cast is first rate, the dialogue is, sometimes, sparkling. But, like watching tennis does to your neck, you can get a crick in your brain switching between the humour and the horror. It's good fun but it's probably too ambitious.
The generally good fun Nell McCafferty pitched up - poppyless - for The Vincent Browne Interview. She was generally confident. He was less abrasive than usual. Appropriately, the exchanges kickedoff on "the women's movement". Women, McCafferty said, now have more money, are out of the house more, have better sex lives, have control of their own fertility and have separated the Catholic church from the State.
Without bothering to point out that men too have more money and sex and are out of the home more, Browne contested these claims. "Haven't the advances been modest?" he said. "Rome wasn't built in a day," said Nell. "We've come very far, very fast." It was, of course, a matter of perspective and as both parties appeared to appreciate this, there was little contentious in these opening exchanges.
It was really only when she was challenged over her very catholic condemnation of the Catholic clergy (in the wake of the paedophile scandals) that the interview began to generate any heat. At this point, Browne became quite barristerial, arguing that such blanket disapproval was grossly unfair to the great many clerics who carried out their duties conscientiously. But McCafferty remained unmoved, pointing out that we have no idea of the full extent of the horror involved.
On the matter of the IRA, she said she believed that "armed struggle was once legitimate, but since the early '90s, it is no longer necessary". Whatever the morality of this (many constitutional republicans - such people do exist - would argue that the violence should never have started or, at least, should have stopped long before the early 1990s), it was unusually honest on the most explosive subject in Irish public life.
After that, the pair spoke about journalism, in particular about McCafferty's spectacular success with, and unsatisfactory (from her point of view) departure from, The Irish Times. Then, rather late really, it was time to address the phenomenon of New Nell. "You've been co-opted over the years, you've become part of the establishment," said Browne. "Things are getting better," she said. But this was not an adequate defence of the indulgence New Nell has afforded Britain's royal family in recent years. Browne, too indulgent himself on this occasion, let it pass. He shouldn't have. Even co-option doesn't legitimise capitulation.
Finally, Making The Cut and I'm Alan Partridge. RTE's super series finished on Sunday with an episode titled Retribution. It has (because it has had foreign sales in mind) been too self-consciously Celtic Tigerish. But otherwise it has been splendid. Brendan Gleeson as the hoodlum Flanagan was superb - an arrogant, bullying bad-ass. More importantly though, he was put in proper perspective.
As the visible underbelly of the Tiger, Flanagan types receive huge media attention and, as a result of sometimes brave, but more often idiotic, journalism, enjoy a weird kind of celebrity in this country. That there are greater forces - political, social and economic - propping up these assholes often goes unreported. At least this drama series got that much right and that is a lot. For sheer horror, Flanagan's post-bomb face was memorable - even if it went a bit close to looking like an especially garish Hallowe'en mask.
I'm Alan Partridge is a new sixparter in which Partridge (Steve Coogan) takes the mick not only out of media celebrity but out of the idea of media celebrity. It's all rather clever-clever but the Partridge personality of monstrous insecurity and even more monstrous ego allows you to laugh at the pathetic creature without feeling guilty. In this series, Partridge, the celeb, is a broken man still obsessed with himself. Such types do exist and even an apoplectic Eileen Downey would have her work cut out to eject them from the media. This is satire with a bad attitude. Great.