The Late Late Show
RTE1, Friday
Lee Evans: So What Now? BBC1, Monday, Tuesday
NCS: Manhunt
BBC1, Monday, Tuesday
Beckett On Film
RTE1, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday
If you had fallen asleep in front of the telly in recent days, you might have opened your eyes and wondered just which year of the 1970s you had woken up in. The tone was set at the end of last week on The Late Late Show, when Pat Kenny came over all Benny Hill and interviewed Scary Spice after slapping his lap and inviting her to sit on it. It didn't seem quite the time to go all serious and steer the conversation towards her charity work with AIDS victims and battered women, but that's our Pat for you - always one to catch the mood just right. At the start of the interview, before she'd even had the chance to catch breath following a jackhammer dance routine, he wanted to know about her mixed-race background. You are, he told her, misappropriating an earlier Tommy Tiernan joke, beautifully beige.
On Monday night, Lee Evans did his best to drag television comedy back a couple of decades with Lee Evans: So What Now?, a title that just begs to be flung back at him like a custard pie. It has been a long time since prime-time comedy used as its showcase a little man running around with a flaming bucket on his foot, but that's what you get in what amounts to a remake of Some Mothers Do Have 'Em. Evans plays the hilariously clumsy character who can't close a door without a vase falling off a sideboard. The worst thing that can be said to him is "don't touch anything", because that is sure to lead to "crazy" consequences. Every time something goes wrong, his mouth opens like a dead fish's and he darts around in a panic. He should have just said "oooh, Betty" and got it over with.
It is so terribly old-fashioned, right down to the marrow of the script (what there is of it). There is a predatory landlady with only one thing on her mind, an authority figure driven to madness by Evans's idiocy and references to "the war" as if it only happened yesterday. Jokes with any currency need to be explained. "I write mobile phone rings," Evans says, before shaking his face and making a buzzing noise. "Do you recognise that? Its the vibrating tone." It was nice of you to spell that out for us, Lee.
Even more than Frank Spencer, Evans has been compared to Norman Wisdom because, short of shouting Mr Grimsdale and wearing a cap sideways, he has pilfered his every trick. Wisdom visited Albania this week with the England football team and was shown on the news being treated like some kind of blundering God. If the question is Lee Evans: So What Now?, then the answer might involve the collapse of democracy and the establishment of a despotic regime in somewhere that has a warm climate and easily amused locals. The thing that is most 1970s about NCS: Manhunt is the way the police can only communicate with each other through shouting, a la The Sweeney. The one thing that is very modern about it is the style of the murders.
Just killing someone isn't good enough any more; it has to be tortuous, horrific and imbued with some deeper level of meaning beyond the fact that the missus has been playing around or the old man has a life insurance policy that would otherwise have just gone to waste. The credits had hardly rolled on NCS: Man- hunt when an old woman had been tied to a chair and beaten violently. We were then given a good close-up of her urinating. Her kidnapper had kindly caught the whole thing on video, so we could get action replays.
There also seems to be some kind of arms race going on with TV detectives. Morse's Christian name, you'll remember, was the rather splendid Endeavour, while David Jason is the crabby Jack Frost. It looked as if NCS: Manhunt had avoided all that by calling the main character the relatively normal DI John Born. It's only when his assistant arrives that those hopes fall apart. Her name is Picasso. Maureen Picasso. I looked up the name in the phone book, but there are no Picassos. There are, however, plenty of Pollocks. And one Van Gogh. I'm being a wee bit too picky, though, because NCS: Manhunt (the NCS stands for National Crime Squad, by the way) was an enjoyable procedural drama, filled with enough twists and turns and blind alleys and guessing games to keep you on your toes. Plus, you can't ask for more than a fresh angle on the car chase, with this one tracked on a big-screen map with arrows closing in on a target, as the team listens in to the action on walkie-talkies. David Suchet played DI Born - leading his group of techno whizzes and honest coppers in the hunt for a psycho out for revenge on a shady policewoman - with a mixture of world-weariness and straightforward zeal to see justice done. What's more, we didn't get so much as a hint about his past, his home life, his relationship, his dark secrets; everything was kept well-hidden beneath his long black coat.
Most TV cops these days tend to have visited their doctor, their shrink, their exwife and their lover long before they've so much as taken a fingerprint. If they turn this into a series, it's Keith Barron's barbarous chief inspector who holds most promise for the juicy revelations. His line of questioning was candid. "Charlie, I have occasionally made love in women's underwear," he revealed, in the hope of getting a suitably confessional reply. Try that next time you catch someone robbing the gnome from your garden.
Now, an apology. Last week I reviewed the documentary Check The Gate, which followed the making of the Beckett On Film series. It turns out that I quoted docu-maker Pearse Lehane with words that were on my preview tape, but which were not in the broadcast film. Sorry to him for that, and sorry for any confusion caused to those who saw the documentary and wondered where I'd plucked that one out from.
This week's selection from Beckett On Film has been anything but confusing, instead settling into a fine rhythm which pulsed away throughout the evenings. It has become oddly reassuring to wander across the works, most of which are short enough to enjoy, with the added bonus of intellectual self-satisfaction thrown in.
Of the films, Conor McPherson's treatment of Endgame on Sunday night was delicate and considered, with the formality of the theatre obviously to his liking as a director (his stab at cinema with last year's Saltwater was rather less focused). Endgame may have been the most substantial film in terms of length this week, but it never flagged, and Charles Simon and Jean Anderson gave the two best performances of people in bins that you're likely to see this year.
The marvellous inventiveness of Anthony Minghella's adaptation of Play - three characters relaying the details of their love triangle from the constriction of urns - helped to smooth over the difficulty of keeping up with the words, although it is probable that much of the visual brilliance was lost on the small screen.
Jeremy Irons's reading of the short Ohio Impromptu, meanwhile, was golden against the black-and-white vision, as the camera moved with stately beauty around the actor, sitting cloned at a table.
I watched Catastrophe, with its pointed dig at directors, and the equal stupidity of actors, and wondered where I had seen the lead actor before. Was he in an episode of The Bill, or maybe an ad? That I only learned through the credits that it was the celebrated playwright, Harold Pinter, probably says a lot more about me than about him.
To Stephen Brennan, however, goes special mention. In Waiting For Godot last week, he stole the show with a magnificent outburst of nonsensical rhetoric as the otherwise mute Lucky. This week, his performance, dredging up memories in A Piece of Monologue, was doubly powerful. The simplicity of the delivery was matched by the direction, with the focus on the various angles of his cragged, livedin face emphasising character in a way that Neil Jordan's Not I, focused purely on Julianne Moore's mouth, never could. The Beckett season ends this week, and it has been highly worthwhile, with several of the films sitting snugly on television, and the relatively meagre budget of £5 million justifying the experimentation on those that didn't. The plays also served as a comment on the unquestioning, undemanding flotsam that was often going on elsewhere in the schedules. And if nothing else, as a friend pointed out, those of us who have seen all 19 films will be qualified to lecture in at least a few minor universities around the world.
