The four-part television drama series set in Kerry during a general election, The Running Mate, is the best-kept secret in the country.
You would think that, in a nation as rich and as self-obsessed as ours, any sophisticated comedy about our political masters would be the talk of the place.
But no. The response to The Running Mate has been remarkably muted. Because it is in Irish, and broadcast on TG4. The final episode will be shown next Wednesday and repeated on Saturday.
The story told in The Running Mate is simple enough: ruthless and corrupt Fianna Fáil TD (Paudie Counihan, wonderfully played by Eamonn Hunt) squashes the chances of our hero, Fianna Fáil foot-soldier Vincent Flynn (Dennis Conway), who is a decent, ordinary kind of fellow, notwithstanding the fact that he drives a Mercedes.
Vincent decides to run as an independent candidate, helped by alcoholic ex-schoolteacher, Willie Costello (Don Wycherley). So far, so unremarkable. To paraphrase Peter Cook on rape and sodomy in the theatre, we can get this at home - or at least on the news bulletins.
I'm going to repeat myself here - but there should be more repetition in Irish television, which has always failed to stick with a good idea, so to hell with it. I said this on The View on Tuesday: the makers of The Running Mate were clever enough to see that there is as much drama at the bottom of the political ladder as there is at the top. We spectators, blinded by the tribunals (and there is a tribunal in The Running Mate, off stage) tend to forget the toe-to-toe, bare-knuckle struggles which go on within every party and within every constituency.
But there's more to a drama than its story and it is the sure tone of The Running Mate which makes it stand out. It seems extraordinary that this is the first Irish drama to actually name the political parties it is describing, but this is the case.
From its treatment of the Sinn Féin candidate - "he's more a ladies' man than an IRA man" - to the Labour candidate's wig, to Paudie's shameless sentimentalising - "like Whitney Houston, I believe that children are our future" - The Running Mate is very sharp and the first two episodes were an unalloyed pleasure.
It's interesting to note the moments in which Irish speakers reach for an English phrase: "over my dead body" for example. On the other hand "the dirty, double-crossing whore" seems to trip off the tongue in Irish, which also has its own word for cod.
The idea for The Running Mate was first brought to RTÉ, as an English-language drama set in Dublin, by the playwright Conor McPherson several years ago. A young producer, Rebecca O'Flanagan, then revived it and brought it to TG4. TG4 held its fire and then submitted it, with other ideas, to the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland (when the television licence fee went up, the BCI got a percentage of the raise for funding less commercial programmes under its Sound& Vision scheme). "The other broadcasters weren't as hungry as we were," explained Micheál Ó Meallaigh, commissioning editor at TG4. As it was, The Running Mate got the green light in the same tranche as the recent Irish language film, Kings, and the successful teenage series, Afric. The Running Mate, according to Ó Meallaigh, was made for about €2 million. It was shot in seven weeks.
The main writer on the series, Marcus Fleming, doesn't speak Irish. Nor does O'Flanagan. Nor do Nicky Murphy and Mark Canton, who wrote episodes three and four. Fleming, who is from Kerry, worked as a writer on animation films for the Magma company, which is based in Galway. The director, Declan Recks, has already spoken in this newspaper about how important he thinks it is to make dramas set outside Dublin; Recks was one of the directors on Pure Mule, set in his native Offaly.
TG4, our Irish language station, is another story. Even those of us who abandoned the First National Language (along with our ink-stained copy of the hated Peig) find ourselves watching it much more than we expected to. For one thing it shows great westerns, and for another it shows great documentaries. And then there are the TG4 weather girls, who have done more to promote Irish amongst the urban male population than Pádraig Pearse ever did.
I don't know anyone involved in the making of The Running Mate, by the way. Nor do I think it perfect - episodes three and four lack the gleeful abandon of the first two. But the genesis and happy delivery of The Running Mate is a lesson for us in the Dublin-centric media. It is an important triumph for the courage and common sense of TG4, a station which must be one of the strangest success stories in European television. Ó Meallaigh plans to show the entire series again over Christmas. Personally, I'd like a second series - with production values this solid there is no reason why the The Running Mate should not run and run. As we say in Ranelagh, An Riocht Abu.