TV REVIEW: Fáilte TowersRTÉ1, all week, Little White LieRTÉ1, Monday, The Genius of Charles DarwinChannel 4, Monday and Comedy ConnectionsBBC2, Saturday
LORD SAVE US from August telly. With tumbleweed bouncing down the corridors of RTÉ and the Greek islands alive with the sound of swilling celebrities, the national broadcaster could be forgiven for just pointing a camera at a rotting sheep and broadcasting the results to the nation. After all, the alternatives are so uninviting, Sheepcam might still comfortably win the rating wars.
What RTÉ usually does, of course, is take a wander round the flophouses and drink-tanks of Dublin 4, biff a few has-beens on the head and transport them to some crumbling farmhouse, remote ice-rink or sinking galleon. This year's adventure in creative banality invited a typical selection of partially famous good sports - her off The Apprentice, him out of Big Brother, her that does the weather - to run a hotel in County Louth. The show is called Fáilte Towers and it makes me want to cry.
Certain editing and casting decisions suggested that the producers were keenly aware the programme was going to attract a degree of ridicule. Local people interviewed in the second episode dared to question the luminescence of the stars currently washing pots and pouring pints in the big house. "I don't know any of them," one bewildered fellow remarked. Now, the fact that the producers left this comment in leads us to two possible conclusions. They, perhaps, find it gut-bustingly hilarious that any citizen could fail to recognise the likes of Liz O'Kane (she presents property porn, apparently) and Claire Tully (Page Three stunna and budding biochemist) and have decided to have a little fun at the poor man's expense. That can't be right. Let's take a more charitable view and assume that the programme-makers are tacitly acknowledging the relative obscurity of their contestants.
At any rate, the cacophonous Baz Ashmawy, who co-presents with Aidan Power, has been allowed to ooze sarcasm out of every shrieking pore. When announcing the imminence of an eviction, he screws his face up into a boo-hoo wrinkle and casts his eyes to the ground in awful mock grief. Every shriek, pout and grimace seeks to convey the ironic distance he has elected to put between himself and the show. "I'm here, but I'm not really here," he appears to be saying.
By way of contrast, the 12 contestants worked psychopathically hard at conveying their excitement and trepidation at the tasks ahead of them. "I can't believe I am actually checking somebody into a hotel," somebody called Michelle Heaton said. The solemn quake in her voice would have been more appropriate for somebody experiencing their first outing as a wing-walker or a crocodile wrangler. One by one, family favourites such as Derek That-Guy and Mandy On-The-Tip-of-My-Tongue entered the Diary Pantry to express terror at the prospect of making a bed or boiling a potato. When, on Tuesday evening, Tully was sent back to her bikini and her microscope, she did the decent thing and blubbed like a baby. These guys deserve every extra second of exposure that has come their way.
Nobody threw themselves at the enterprise with as much gusto as Jennifer Maguire, formerly of The Apprentice, and perennial political sourpuss Patricia McKenna. Every reality show needs a good feud and, before the first guest had time to steal a towel, the two women were already scowling across the soup tureen while muttering about each other's (a key phrase in this genre) "game plan". McKenna, whose chosen charity is Women Who have German Helmets for Hair, was appalled that Maguire, representing The Severe Cheekbones Alliance, had dealt inappropriately with a wrongly garnished steak. I mean, really. Maguire really should have ordered an entirely new dish rather than just scraping off the unwanted onions, but there was no reason for McKenna to rage as she did. It's not as if Jennifer were financing divorce referenda with taxpayers' money or allowing American fighter planes to refuel on the hotel lawn. Mind you, that one from The Apprentice really does have a very high opinion of herself. Now, if you ask me . . .
You can see the problem. Can't you? Like a moronically catchy Europop tune by Aqua or the Vengaboys, bad reality television has a way of boring into the skull and fastening itself to the cerebellum.
One remembers public information films in which drug dealers would invite gullible children to "try just the one puff", before assuring them there was no chance of getting hooked. At time of writing, Evelyn Cusack, the admirably reliable and properly qualified weather person, is still in the hotel and I am hoping that she and her charity will triumph.
ELSEWHERE ON THE bank holiday weekend, the national broadcaster demonstrated greater faith in the audience's attention span by broadcasting a decent new comedy entitled Little White Lie. Written by Barry Murphy, late of Après Match, and Stuart Carolan, formerly Navan Man, the film was not shy of revealing its influences - Seinfeld and Woody Allen in particular - but it still managed to map out its own territory and forge characters worth caring about.
The plot was a variation on the classic romantic-comedy trope in which one half of a couple tells a clunking fib that leads the deceiver into ever greater, ever more self-defeating convolutions.
Andrew Scott played a jobbing actor who, after claiming to be a psychiatrist during his first meeting with Elaine Cassidy (playing a children's entertainer), found himself inviting her to undergo analysis on his (or, rather, his brother's) couch.
The writers made no foolish attempts to tamper with reliable templates. The couple had a ruction at the start of the third act, but, as sure as Rock loves Doris, they were back together before the final credits rolled. Carolan and Murphy did, however, manage to work more than a few smart one-liners and effective pieces of comedy business into the film's classical structure. Scott's discovery that the lyrics to well-known pop songs serve as psychiatric platitudes offered some particularly hearty laughs. At first, you may be afraid. You may be petrified. You may keep thinking you could never live without him by your side. But you will survive. And so forth.
So why couldn't I wholly warm to Little White Lie? Well, the acting was excellent and the plot, though slight, was neatly assembled, but the characters appeared to be moving through an unconvincing transatlantic hybrid of a city. With one eye constantly on American models, the film-makers delivered a Dublin in which too many middle-class folk enter analysis, too many wags stride about in dinner jackets and too many men give a hoot about the dating game. Mind you, call up Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen, move the thing to the Upper West Side and you might have an international hit on your hands.
IT IS AN IRONY worth remarking upon that Richard Dawkins, the most conspicuous proselytiser for atheism in the world today, often comes across a little like a pompous archbishop from the English Home Counties. While watching his earlier documentary series, I have, despite my unswerving support for his campaign to outlaw mumbo-jumbo, often cringed at the superior way he can look down his nose at some misguided - though perfectly pleasant - Arkansan fundamentalist and reduce that poor fellow to embarrassed jelly.
Even when trying to be nice, his belief in his own droit de seigneur tends to show through. "How long have you been a sex worker?" he said superiorly to a puzzled-looking African lady in Channel 4's fine The Genius of Charles Darwin. Close your eyes and you were overhearing the Duke of Edinburgh making small talk at the opening of a sex factory.
Anyway, The Genius of Charles Darwin, whose title tells you all you need to know about its concerns, found the professor returning to his home ground of evolutionary biology. While visiting some of the locations where Darwin developed his big idea and examining some of the great man's own specimens, Dawkins laid out the theory of natural selection in lucid enough fashion to convince even the dumbest Homo Erectus.
There was, however, depressing news in this first episode. When, in 1979, David Attenborough embarked upon Life on Earth for the BBC, he felt no need to argue in favour of evolution as an explanation of the origin of species. Attenborough assumed, one imagines, that the conversation was no longer necessary. After all, if you were making a series about ballistics, you would hardly waste your time putting the case for gravity.
The armies of irrationality have, alas, made something of a fight-back over the past three decades, and Dawkins felt it necessary to begin the series in his familiar role of evolutionary evangelist. "I hope to convince you of the truth that evolution is a fact," he told a classroom containing a few discouragingly resistant school students. By Dawkins's reckoning, nearly 40 per cent of people in the UK do not believe in the now (you'd have thought) undeniable truth of Darwin's theory. Give it another few decades and we'll have gone back to burning witches and dancing round totem poles.
THERE IS JUST space to mention two icons of the 1970s who all too rarely make it into the same sentence: Nerys Hughes and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The day before the Russian writer died, BBC's Comedy Connections embarked upon an examination of Carla Lane's iconic sitcom The Liver Birds, in which, to the delight and astonishment of millions, two single women (steady now, Grandma) shared a flat.
You can never go home. The excerpts from the show revealed it to be clunky, cheap and hopelessly marooned in its own time. It was, however, amusing to catch a glimpse of Hughes's famously pretentious Sandra struggling with a copy of Solzhenitsyn's August 1914. As I recall, she was reading it throughout the last two series. I do hope she eventually got through it.
tvreview@irish-times.ie
Hilary Fannin is on leave
