TV REVIEW: Ireland's Crime Capitals: Gangland LimerickTV3, Thursday; Restaurant in Your HomeBBC2, Monday; Cogar: Molly Keane – Faobhar ar a GuthTG4, Sunday; The Republic of TellyRTÉ2, Monday
HOODED GHOULS, red-eyed ghosts and bloodied youth washed up on our television screens this Halloween week. Not, unfortunately, the plastic-masked, metre-high varieties of demon who will knock on suburban doors tonight for cheap candy and pawed popcorn, but the real thing, the hooded, manic, dead-eyed youths who populate the wastelands of sink estates around Limerick city.
Donal MacIntyre, the rugged face of investigative journalism, is at the helm of TV3's new series, Ireland's Crime Capitals, which kicked off this week with a programme on gangland Limerick. MacIntyre's pedigree as an undercover reporter lends the series a kind of sexed-up gravitas, and, having recently dispensed with his sequin-covered Lurex ice suits (he was runner-up in the 2009 series of Dancing on Ice) and re-grown his five o'clock shadow, he certainly looks the man for the occasion.
However, despite the solidly made opening programme's grim statistics and even grimmer visuals (forlorn estates strewn with the detritus of impoverished lives, row upon row of nervous-looking corporation houses, some boarded up and burnt out, huddling together against the threat of "antisocial behaviour"), there was little that felt particularly revelatory. There was a sense that the information, albeit well-organised and painfully clear, has been in our grasp before (certainly there have been investigations into the drugs trade in this country, from programmes such as Prime Time, that have traversed markedly similar territory).
Still, Ireland's Crime Capitalshas enough dismal fascination to hold us in our seats, and so what if the material feels familiar to those of us who are privileged enough to view it from a comfortable distance? For the residents of Moyross and Southill, who face unemployment, social deprivation and constant threats and violence from the minority of their neighbours involved in gang warfare, the whole damn carnival must have a nauseating groundhog-day familiarity.
From hooded teenage pushers hiding AK-47s under their beds, to children “fireballed” in their mother’s car (because she refused some young men a lift to court), to one young man killed by multiple blows with a hatchet, the pain, like the blurry rainclouds that dogged MacIntyre’s visit, seems unabated. And of course this futile war spills out from the cul-de-sac of Southill and the damp encampment of Moyross. The programme remembered too some other innocent victims of the feud, including Shane Geoghegan, Brian Fitzgerald and Roy Collins.
Time and time again these forays into gangland culture point to the unassailable facts of poverty, deprivation and social injustice. One local priest, describing the crucifyingly bleak landscape as “a psychological drain”, looked away from the estate over a grassy wasteland scattered with thin horses and rusting metals, and quietly added that, living in such a place, “your eyes are hungry”.
After years of neglect the Government has recently launched a rejuvenation project, and while this has yet to have an impact on the communities, a beacon of hope exists in the shape of Thomond Park and the county’s pride in the Munster rugby team. As in Wales, the programme pointed out, all classes in Limerick follow rugby, and the team’s successes have galvanised the city and lifted some of the gloom. Looking at tentative Munster flags flying from bedroom windows on the city’s estates, the same flags that whip over the rest of the county, you might be tempted to hope that one day the sight of celebrity reporters posing against graffitied walls will be a thing of the past.
TUNING INTO BBC2 I mentally pull my socks up a little and check to see that I haven’t tucked my skirt into my underwear, behaviour that would be entirely acceptable for Channel 4 but somehow doesn’t fit with the tone of the Beeb’s more decorous sister. This week, however, the station induced me to make loud and rude gestures at my increasingly grubby-looking LCD screen (I can’t remember what you’re supposed to clean it with) when one of the most nauseatingly irritating programmes I’ve experienced for a while did its best to further murk up the view.
Restaurant in Your Homeintroduced us to husband-and-wife team Mike and Tina Pemberton, who have turned their sumptuous and staggeringly clean home into a fish restaurant. Tina, who has the grating over-confidence of a battleship in a bubble bath, and her theatrically long-suffering husband, who wears portable headphones to drown out his cantankerous wife's commands, appear to make a substantial living out of opening their spotless doors four nights a week to a host of deadly serious foodies.
Crossing their threshold in this week’s programme were angrily intelligent-looking women with well-moisturised faces and expensive footwear, and dumpy men in organic cotton shirts, sniffing at the wine with the gory sense of entitlement of pedigree bloodhounds over a shrapnel-filled grouse – and all of them went home sated after a ruddy good supper in the Pembertons’ Norfolk home.
The Pembertons, despite their rather acrimonious relationship, which plays itself out as a leaden drama over the crab claws, have won some fish-restaurant-of-the-year award or other, so some bright-spark TV type has decided to make use of their talents by getting them to mentor other wannabe restaurateurs, people who are prepared to have a load of cutting-edge eaters traipsing through their homes to pick at their food, peruse their bookshelves and sniff at their toilet facilities.
The first mentored couple, planning to turn their narrow one-bedroom Hackney basement flat into a restaurant, consisted of a tall, media-ish chap and his pretty and diminutive girlfriend who worked in public relations or, as she herself described it, as “a tits-and-teeth person”. The link-up between the two couples appeared to be a recipe for disaster, with the younger Londoners apparently having an allergic reaction to the Punch and Judy Pembertons and the stern advice they administered amid much glee and cackling.
However, the gung-ho wannabes reluctantly followed the Pembertons’ advice, gutting their flat of personal effects and filling it with borrowed restaurant furniture. They then spent a fortune on ingredients, hired a marquee, unblocked a sink, and eventually washed up after a room full of strangers had eaten and left. The diners, having brought their own wine, paid what they though was a fair price for the food, and the wannabes made a profit of around 200 quid for their troubles.
Personally, I’d rather gut mackerel with my teeth than open my home to a bunch of ravenous Hackney sophisticates, but there’s no accounting for taste.
WHEN THE SEPTUAGENARIAN Molly Keane was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 1981, for Good Behaviour, her glitteringly taut novel about the madly contrary experience of Anglo-Irish life, her local postman in Ardmore, Co Waterford came up her drive and gave her a great big hug. Suddenly, according to her daughters, the ageing novelist was reborn, rejuvenated, partying until the small hours in London town, living the life of a celebrated writer nearly 60 years after the publication of her first novel and after a long, long literary silence.
Cogar, a superb strand that has been responsible for some outstanding documentaries this year, continued its unblemished run with Molly Keane – Faobhar ar a Guth, a portrait of the artist as an elderly woman. Alongside contributions from family and neighbours, and from poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (who talked candidly about the challenges that face a writer in midlife), there was footage of a smiling Keane, sitting up in bed writing her last novel, a little dog shivering with excitement under the crook of her arm.
This was a vivid and timely documentary, reminding us that Keane’s achievements far exceeded the expectations of her era, that a gal should be “beautiful, able to sit on a horse and, of course, behave well”.
Tripping through Tellyland: Roving comedian channel hops for laughs
Comedian Neil Delamere has a terrific face for his chosen profession, a good-humouredly glum visage cut with a tincture of wacky desperation. His new sinecure on the increasingly comedic RTÉ2, Republic of Telly, seeks to send up some predictably asinine television broadcasts with some equally predictable one-liners. For example, "Fair City finally runs out of dialogue" is his comment over footage of one of the soap's characters saying "blah blah blah".
An unspectacular, peculiarly unmemorable half-hour, the programme has, however, a certain confidence and an easygoing appeal. The set looks lively and is suited to the bubbly brief and the breezy presenter, who, with the use of high-tech wizardry (a computer programme), manages to “insert” himself into various talent shows and soap operas, altering them for the viewing masses.
Not much danger of splitting your sides with mirth, but in the context of this channel’s unsteady comedic canon, at least this won’t kill you.
