A Small Summer Party (BBC2)
Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes (BBC1)
Alive Alive-O (RT╔1)
Going Native (Channel 4)
Ag Triall Ar An Iarguil (TG4)
Keith, the taxi driving tragic-hero from Marion and Geoff, got out the car this week, and for the first time - if somewhat reluctantly - the camera followed him. Marion and Geoff was an original, poignant, funny comedy, in which we saw the world for 10 minutes a night from his dashboard, as Keith (Rob Brydon) remained terminally optimistic, even as the sky was falling all around his cab. A Small Summer Party was an extended flashback to the day his wife, Marion, finally ran away with Geoff, as played by Steve Coogan. It was equal parts hilarious and melancholy, as you would expect from Brydon and co-writer Hugo Blick, but immediately flawed. The video diary format works beautifully with one camera, but not when trying to incorporate three of them wandering the house. There was also too much back-story to interest anyone who didn't know the original series. And for those who had been devoted to it, too much of a precious mystery revealed.
Marion and Geoff was self-contained, concentrated and driven wholly by Brydon. Much of its joy came from the slow peeling away of the story and the character, building a narrative with gaps you filled with your own imagination. A Small Summer Party did attempt to preserve the mystery of the previously unseen family. Marion never spoke and was seen only in glimpses, and the two boys were dressed in fancy dress space suits all the way through to keep their anonymity.
But even so little was too much. We didn't need to see at first hand Keith's cringing reverence for his wife's lover, or how he would willingly lay down his dignity for the world to trample over it, rather than lose the little he had in life. It always made you wince more when relayed with Keith's relentless positive mental attitude in the muffled cocoon of the cab. A Small Summer Party was pulling away the cloth to reveal the puppeteer hiding beneath the stage.
Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes is a series based on the premise that Arthur Conan Doyle's very real inspiration, the surgeon Dr Joseph Bell, was also a cracking private investigator to whom Doyle would play the Watson. It takes a very modern view of the Holmes novels and their time and drops them into a right old potboiler. Taking as its cue the Sherlock Holmes mystery The Solitary Cyclist, it opened with a young lady in a forest being shadowed by a cloaked, featureless figure on a bike, who has a habit of disappearing into thin air. From such preposterous beginnings did an equally preposterous and wildly enjoyable plot emerge. There was a mysterious figure in a window, a fainting lady, a contested estate, an arranged marriage, shots in the dark, a ghost and a horribly scarred ex-lover bent on revenge.
Charles Edwards plays the young Doyle as an eager mind always charging off on the wrong trail. He is the hand that keeps you distracted, Ian Richardson's Dr Bell the one that does the tricks.
Bell solves conundrums with such an immediate insight that you wonder if he didn't commit the crimes himself. With one bound of logic, the motive, method and culprit is unmasked with the ease of one doffing one's top hat at a lady.
"There's no time to explain," Dr Bell will say, darting out the door. "We may already be too late." It does make you wonder, though, what on earth did they talk about on the carriage ride over.
Alexander Armstrong stole the show this week as the head of Dr Doyle's practice. His moustache trembled with condescension and his boxing gloves were ready for a duel at a moment's notice. He offered a free surgery to the poor, prescribing his own patented blood tonic to all. Blurred vision? Two bottles of blood tonic. Spear wound to the neck? Three bottles of blood tonic. He was busy working on an invention he was sure would change the nature of warfare: a Magnetic Bullet Stopper. He needed to test it first.
"What are you doing?" exclaimed Conan Doyle as his colleague took aim at the maid.
"I'm going to shoot her in the face. But don't worry, the Magnetic Bullet Stopper will prevent it." It was up to Dr Bell to point out that the invention was simply a big magnet that couldn't stop even steel bullets. He did so with great adroitness. Genius.
There was a nostalgia for the Dublin of old in Alive Alive-O: A Requiem For Dublin, SΘ Merry Doyle's creditable film about the demise of street trading in the capital, narrated with the poetry of Paula Meehan. It explained that if Molly Malone wheeled her wheelbarrow today she'd be either fined by the garda∅ or would arrive to find that her streets broad and narrow had been knocked down and redeveloped as a luxury apartment block with adjacent shopping mall and hotel/leisure centre.
The removal of the traders has been systematic. "When the State failed to banish communities from the city centre, it then moved against their most traditional ways of making a living," said Tony Gregory. The Government did not break off its holidays, mobilise the IDA and ask the nation to be calm on the day the traders left the Iveagh Market for the last time. Street traders used to refer to themselves as dealers, but ceased as the connotation of the word altered. Community worker Seβnie Lamb pointed out that the council had managed to clean the streets of traders, but that you could still buy heroin on their corners. It was a case of cutting the heart of the city, but leaving a rotting appendix behind.
Going Native has been enjoyable, primarily because the Naylor family have looked miserable since they left suburban England for a remote, dusty village in Swaziland. The two kids have discovered what it's like to attend a school in which corporal punishment is treated as an Olympic event. Mother, Lynn, has begun begging the production crew for food and has been trying to incite rebellion in the women of the village. They're having none of it. "She is a useless daughter-in-law," they decided over the hand-washing. "A wife should respect her husband. Cook, wash and clean." The husband in question is Rob. He, of course, has settled in just fine. The grin that came across his face when Lynn had to kneel before him before serving his dinner will be wiped from him once she gets him home.
This week, Rob had to go and get a job, eventually finding one in a South African-owned hotel in which the guests were white and the staff, including Rob, black. He wasn't too happy to be earning 34p an hour to serve chilled fruit to people paying £100 a night for a room.
"You want some coffee?" he asked a table of guests.
His boss pulled him aside. "It's: 'would you like some coffee, sir'." "OK," agreed Rob. He approached the table again. "Alright mate, some coffee, yeah?" You could only root for him.
If they really wanted to go native, they should have sent the Naylors to live with the Mursi tribe of Ethiopia. In Ag Triall ar an Iargh·il, French ethnologist Jean-Pierre Dutilleux catalogues remote tribes before they drown in the global melting pot, and it never fails to make for enlightening, fascinating viewing.
What fascinated him most about the Mursi was the uniqueness of the lip plates worn by the women. The size of a woman's lip plate signifies both her beauty and the size of the dowry which must be paid to have her. Some of the plates are 10 inches in diameter, the lip split in childhood to begin the process, and the bottom teeth pulled out to fit them in. When the plate is removed, the lip flops like a deflated rubber ring. When back in, it is wide enough to cover the faces of the shyer girls. Either way, you did not want to be munching on a snack while watching the demonstration.
The Mursi were truly remote; pure in tradition compared to the Christian, English-speaking Swazis in Going Native. There was, though, one western word that the Mursi knew well. In a place not yet quenched by Coca-Cola, fed by McDonalds or clothed in Manchester United shirts, there is one brand instantly recognised. "I need a Kalashnikov to protect my family and farm," said a Mursi. "I will pay six cows for a Kalashnikov."
What a wonderful world.
tvreview@irish-times.ie
