TV Review: You're A Star is down to two finalists. It used to be that you could send a wide-eyed child in a smock to Eurovision and come home with the top prize, but these days nothing short of a full chorus line of bikini-clad supermodels and roller-skating elephants is enough to wow Europe.
Although we were taught that lesson last year, we are currently acting as if we were out of school that day. The public this week jettisoned Jean Elliott, the most obvious singer who a bit of a song and dance could have been created around.
We are left with two young men: James Kilbane and Chris Doran. Each makes the original Dana look positively international.
Doran has been handed a song by Bryan McFadden. Last year, McFadden's offering bravely took on the rhyming challenge posed by the word "Herzegovina", but lost badly. This time around he has composed a song called If The World Stops Turning.
"You can be there for about five or six hours and all of a sudden the melody and chorus just come together at once," he explained.
Thankfully, it isn't quite so long a wait. The song is sticky with sentiment, sounding just like one of those advertising jingles that you presume must be for the United Nations but turns out to be for instant coffee.
Kilbane, meanwhile, is the kind of country singer whose music videos would likely feature the racy image of him wearing a jumper and walking in a field. He has been given a song called Losing You, and his rendition so mirrored the performance of Father Dick Byrne - rival to Father Ted in Song for Europe - that you had to check to see if you hadn't unwittingly changed channel.
By all accounts, Kilbane is a decent fellow. Certainly, when he asks for our votes he does so as if appealing for funds to fix the leaky church roof. He knows we've given a lot already, but if we could be kind enough to check one more time down the back of the sofa for any loose goodwill, he would be most grateful. The judges keep telling us that he has "won the hearts of the nation". I must have been away on the day we decided on that prize, so I'd quite like mine back please. I'm going to need it for the heart attack I'll get if we choose him for Eurovision.
Here follows a lazy link: this week on SAS: Are You Tough Enough? the volunteers were subjected to seven hours of white noise.
While exposed to it, they were stripped to their underwear, had bags placed over their heads and were forced to stand and sit in difficult positions.
They were manhandled and yelled at. They were each led to a room where a big man in a balaclava insulted them until they broke down. It was the most entertaining thing on television this week.
This is the third series in which marathon runners, triathletes and the like take on the rigours of the SAS selection process. But even as it becomes increasingly predictable, the episode in which the participants are subjected to interrogation is always fascinating. They are in Namibia taking on desert training and the programme began with them going on a "mission" to intercept some enemy troops and grab whatever information they were carrying. On the way back they were hunted down, bound, bagged and dragged to a truck. From there, they were doused in water before being brought to the white noise room.
The room contained none of the gentle hiss of a TV set, but instead shook to the cacophony of alarm bells. Those who live in large housing estates will have been delighted at this point to find that there is one aspect of SAS training of which they are already hardened veterans.
When the bags were removed, the interrogators showed little sensitivity; especially in the way they spoke to and handled the females. One was grabbed by the jaw with such force that the shock ran through her body. They had their eyelids pulled open so that their interrogators could yell directly into their eyes. Several of the volunteers buckled, ashamed and broken. One gave up 15 minutes from the end of a day that had lasted 44 hours.
"It's all the military stuff. I just couldn't be bothered with it," she said, as if surprised by the content of the course.
However, Are You Tough Enough? has always shown the distinct lack of sensitivity you might expect from a programme in which several of the instructors have their faces blurred for security reasons. The participants, for instance, are encouraged to shoot wounded enemy soldiers. All the while, presenter Dermot O'Leary hovers in the background looking rested and well-fed. He regularly asks the staff sergeant if the group would all now be dead if there were real bullets in the guns. Other times he stands close to them and inquires as to just how tired and hungry they are right now, perhaps while the odour of his breakfast is still fresh on his breath. When they turn on O'Leary, we'll know just how brutalised they have become.
The lanky shadow of Hector Ó hEochagáin now stretches over all TG4 travelogues. Television may not be shy of documentaries about America, but Imigh le Sruth is currently engaged in a trip around the United States. It cannot be expected to be as vibrant as Ó hEochagáin's Amú series, so presenter Aoife Ní Chonchúir relies on a less aggressive pace and on gentle observation, which delivers some decent moments.
She visited an Arkansas rodeo. In this "red, white and blue bubble" the locals don't hesitate to break their young in to the traditions of the old west. There was a great sequence in which parents placed their children on the backs of nervous sheep, and the infants hung on by the wool for a few seconds until they were flung to the ground in a cloud of dust, tears and snot.
The series is sometimes let down by subtitles laden with spelling errors, but last Sunday's episode might actually have been best served by subtitles for the cowboys Ní Chonchúir encountered. As these easy riders prepared to hop aboard raging bulls, they drawled their yes-mams and no-mams but were generally lost against the intrusive squawk of the local commentators on the tannoy system. Nevertheless, the flush on Ní Chonchúir's face was enough to confirm that how they spoke was probably as impressive as what they were saying.
Finally, No Angels is Teachers with nurses. The latter comedy was a surprise success, featuring young folk flailing into adulthood, reluctant to accept the responsibilities demanded of them. Instead they engaged in unromantic sex and childish behaviour against a rock 'n' roll soundtrack. It was engaging and spattered with originality. No Angels makes no attempt at originality and I would remark that it tries your patience, if that weren't too obvious a pun.
This week, it began and ended with deaths, one funny, one tragic. In between, it swung from comedy to drama without bothering to stitch the wounds between the two. With its four central characters, No Angels takes the stereotype of nurses and stretches it thin. They talked about shagging so much that it was remarkable it actually took them 20 minutes to get around to doing it.
They live a disposable lifestyle. One brings her young daughter to the nightclub with her so that she doesn't need to interrupt her social life.
They drink every night. On wards muggy with sexual tension, they are sexually forthright and aggressive. The men in No Angels are pathetic. Or, if they are lucky enough to be granted some depth, pathetic bastards.
It is effervescent and surprises intermittently with a good one-liner. It wants desperately to be liked, and flirts audaciously. But if you follow it home, the next morning you'll feel a little used.
By the way, as No Angels was being aired, Network 2 was busy making up the schedules as it went along. Perhaps out of necessity brought about by a technical problem, it misjudged the nation's appetite for achingly unhip drama when throwing a second episode of The Big Bow Wow into the slot where 24 should have been. The What's On Now page on Aertel wasn'tupdated and neither, I presume, were a lot of video recorders. There will have been many unhappy viewers sitting down to watch the latest hour of Jack Bauer's adventures, only to find their tape cutting off a dozen plot twists too early.
