Fool me once with a mesmerisingly boring series about a hotel, shame on you, RTÉ. Fool me twice with another bland hotel series and . . . well, you get the picture.
This time last year, when we had a proper sunny summer, and maybe fewer people watching TV, RTÉ screened a six-part fly-on-the-wall series, The Shelbourne, made by the Northern Ireland production company Waddell Media. It promised to be an "insightful, entertaining and sometimes hilarious" series about the Dublin hotel, but it was none of those things. It fell so far on the wrong side of the line that these series have to tread, between PR puffery and cool editorial, that the Shelbourne's marketing department could have used it as a sales video.
For The Gleneagle (RTÉ One, Sunday), which is set in the Killarney hotel, the same dull formula is applied. Too many random staff and guests are put in front of the camera for a soundbite, but we don't get to know them in any meaningful way. These observational workplace films stand or fall on the directors finding a star or two in the organisation to focus on.
Ideally, they should be larger-than-life characters, ones we’d like to see in the series again. Surely there’s potential for that at the Gleneagle. It’s in Kerry, where they’re not exactly famous for being colourless and shy. But there’s no sign of any must-watch character in the first episode. After a short time the interviewees blur together.
The opener focuses on a Lisdoonvarna matchmaking reunion organised for the past 30 years by Albert and Cecily Lawlor. That's television gold right there on the dance floor, but there's a sense that this is a hurried film on a workaday mission to get the shots and fill the screen time while showing the hotel in a PR-friendly light.
All of this comes with a corporate-sounding voiceover; Pauline McLynn delivers perhaps the blandest script she's ever had to read. Claridges, the 2012 fly-on-the-wall BBC series, took a year to make and was full of fascinating stories and jaw-dropping excesses. That highly nuanced film had the same amount of screen time as The Gleneagle, but with a fraction of the material.
Another supposed observational documentary series that probably looked better at the pitch meeting than on the screen is Lookalikes (Channel 4, Monday). There's a lookalike agency in Eastbourne, on the south coast of England, run by Andy Harmer (David Beckham – or at least a man with the footballer's haircut and beard), which has a range of real and fictitious showbiz looksortofalikes on its books, including Mr Bean, Colin Farrell, Ed Sheeran, Johnny Depp and Del Boy.
The agency is real, but it’s not clear what exactly it does. When do people hire lookalikes, and for what? It’s bad enough listening to someone in the pub doing his David Brent impersonation, but paying him to do it?
The shtick in Lookalikes is that business is poor and that Harmer must drum up new ideas – with the help of an archly written script and heavily directed scenarios.
As the episode goes on it becomes increasingly difficult to tell what’s real and what’s not. Is that a Gordon Ramsay lookalike or an actor with a naturally furrowed brow and thatch of blond hair done up as Ramsay? And is that old geezer with the grey hair and glasses really a Rolf Harris doppelganger or just the opportunity for a scene – the funniest in the episode – in which Harmer suggests that he and his digeridoo are unlikely to get work any more because “it’s just too on the wrong side of wrong”.
Comedy, fly on the wall, scripted reality: Lookalikes tries hard to tick all the genreboxes but ends up unrecognisable.
The BBC Sunday-night period drama The Outcast is a moody, almost contemplative two-parter about loss and unacknowledged grief set in repressed suburban 1950s Britain, adapted by Sadie Jones from her Costa-winning novel.
It’s all tea dresses, tennis parties, church on Sunday and perfect summer days – punctuated in the first part by the pivotal event in the story: the day when 10-year-old Lewis Aldridge (Finn Elliot) witnesses his mother drowning. His stiff, possibly war-damaged father, Gilbert (Greg Wise), remarries the beautiful, naive Alice (Jessica Brown Findlay), and blank-eyed Lewis (now George Mackay) grows up an odd – we’d now understand it as mentally ill – teenager in the picture-perfect village where he shocks all when he burns down the church.
This week’s second part opens with his return, as even more of an outcast, from a two-year stint in prison for the arson. It’s a little episodically disappointing, as it tries to fit Jones’s nuanced, event-filled novel into the final 90 minutes. Even one of the novel’s key plot lines – that the scion of the village, the truly odious Dicky Carmichael (Nathanial Parker), is hiding a violent brutality beneath his careful blazer and clipped beard – seems an adjunct to the story.
A bucolic musical score links the many scenes, but they don't have the seamless flow of the first part – or maybe it's that the first part is so appealing because it has, in Finn Elliot as young Lewis, the most astonishingly good child actor seen on TV in many years. He makes The Outcast a must-see, and I suspect we'll see much more of him.
BBC Three tends to repeat programmes and in Defying the Label, its new disability-themed – and broadly interpreted – series, that's a good thing if it gives viewers who missed them the chance to see two of the most thought-provoking programmes of the week. The series opens with a powerful sentiment-free, fact-based drama, Don't Take My Baby (Monday), written by Jack Thorne (This Is England, Skins). It's about two young parents, one with failing sight, the other with a muscle-wasting genetic condition, who have a baby, and social services' almost automatic assumption that they won't be able to care for her. Next up is the searingly honest Me & My New Brain (Tuesday), about three young people living with possibly the most invisible of disabilities: acquired brain injury. Neither is an easy view, but both are worthwhile.
Ones to Watch: From racing to racy
The Long Shot (RTÉ One, Tuesday), a documentary filmed over three years, follows David Keoghan – husband of Cecelia Ahern, and so Bertie's son-in-law – as he spends €400,000 on six horses and tries to become a top trainer.
The advance publicity about Life in Squares (BBC Two, Monday), a three-part drama about the Bloomsbury literary set, has focused on the amount of sex on screen – a lot, apparently – but with a good story and strong cast it should have more than artfully filmed romps.
tvreview@irishtimes.com
