TVReview: Weirdly compelling and refreshingly unfestive, Stew has boiled up a concoction of absurdist and melancholy comedy for its second bite at a successful sketch series.
Stew's cast, including Darragh Kelly, Tara Flynn, Barbara Bergin and Patrick McDonnell, create, at a time when television is gagging on good cheer, some gleefully unpleasant, delusional and despairing characters. All of our island is in the pot: the cruelly extremist gaelgoir, with his tweed jacket and gleaming Fáinne, allowing a man to drown because he can't ask for help in his native tongue; the awful, malicious mother in the pink velour tracksuit and hoop earrings and her doltish young son with a chainsaw; and, most memorably, the sadly optimistic former showband singer, Brendan, drowning in Grecian 2000 and the aural defecation of his drummer. Brendan is a balefully recognisable and delicate creation: he has a framed photo of Twink on his piano, a song he's trying to peddle called Leitrim Lady, I'm Guilty of Loving You, a rejection letter from Johnny Logan ("it's shite"), and a quiet, unwieldy passion, one suspects, for his hairy percussionist.
Stew doesn't always hit the spot, however, and it's guaranteed to be unpalatable for those who like their comedy sweet 'n' kooky, looking as it does (happily) like the gristly, unappetising offcuts of the national psyche. But the characters are subtle and the ideas satisfyingly bleak: trim couples inhabit Ikea kitchens while a zoophiliac handyman menaces the decking, and as Armageddon rages outside a parlour window the drink is hidden before the walking dead can come back and swallow it.
It will be interesting to watch how the assembled talents - including Arthur Mathews (editor) and Paul Tylak and Paul Woodfull, who devise - dissect the country over the coming weeks. On the basis of the first in the series, Stew is certainly worth a taste.
WITH ABOUT A week left to lose a stone and screw in the fairy lights, there's a plethora of how-not-to-look-like-the-turkey shows on telly. Pop Idol winner Michelle McManus was top of the hit parade in You Are What You Eat, the update we've all been waiting for on the singer's weight-loss journey from "McMassive" (blame the narrator) to McMicro or some such riveting conclusion.
McManus was 22 stone (140kg) after she won Pop Idol in 2003. The magnificently proportioned chanteuse could have silenced a choir of angels under the folds of her stomachs - until last Christmas, that is, when wisp-like Gillian McKeith sprinkled her "holistic nutritionist" fairy dust all over Big Mc and turned this monumental mass of good-time Glaswegian girlhood (who partied the weekend away with crates of wine, a couple of mates and a stack of microwavable pizzas) into an alco-free, mango-munching fish-lover. One year later, McManus has lost Christina Aguilera (not literally, you understand, just her equivalent in weight) and, at just 14 stone (89kg), is attempting to rebuild her career.
To pad out a rather slim hour, You Are What You Eat conjured up some brittle girl from Heat magazine to tell us that the only celebrities who were allowed to be fat were comedians or those who confined their work to radio. Then, somewhat disingenuously, we were shown warning photos of those who have "gone too far" in their crusade against their own spare flesh, such as the post-yoga-haven't-eaten-for-most-of-the-year Geri Halliwell, looking like dried-up raffia in a bikini.
To get her telly time, McManus too has done more than swallow an unwanted Dover sole. She's undulated her cellulite for us, had her colonic irrigations filmed and stuck her head in her oversized bra cup - the girl deserves a medal, or maybe a battered burger and chips. McKeith, though, is still furious with her protege, who has broken the golden rule and gone back on the booze, albeit in moderation. McKeith, queen of the avocado smoothie, is determined to reel McManus in and, to be fair, her stated aim is health rather than skinniness. McKeith might consider sprinkling her fairy dust elsewhere, however - this is one fat lady who's determined to sing.
OVER ON THE State broadcaster, it was bling bling bling as the fashionistas on Off The Rails tossed their reddened locks, purred over hair accessories and growled at the latest bit of makeover fodder to have been dragged screaming from her home and out of her hoodie. Is it just my palsied vision or do all the formerly fine and attractive contestants end up looking like great big Crolly dolls wrapped in the curtains?
Of some seasonal importance, though, we were told how to look terrific with a hangover. The trick is as follows: before you go out you have to slice up some potato and cucumber and possibly some other salad ingredients (the therapist person did say "salad" but she was pretty non-specific); then, as far as I can remember, you put these in a jar and leave them beside your bed; and then, when you fall into your pit at 3am (having removed your eye make-up), you put the mixed salad on your eyelids. (This probably wouldn't be a great time to tell your partner that his karaoke technique stinks and you'd rather sleep with the Labrador.) Anyway, next morning you're going to look fresh as a daisy. So. That's handy to know then.
The other big relief is that Celia Holman Lee says it is "entirely up to yourself" if you want to run around in your pyjamas all through Christmas Day (actually, that's your "jammies", as Celia likes to call them, but hopefully not the same "jammies" you were wearing when you put a side salad on your peepers, unless you want to spend the day with a wilting lollo rossa leaf clinging to your cleavage). Celia recommended some very expensive jammies with matching slippers and some kind of underwear attachment that Celia also said would make you want to ditch the Xmas Day movie and just sip on champagne. Way to go, Celia, I'm right behind you: women across Ireland should all abandon their turkey-basters and pungent aunts and feverish toddlers and loll around all day in their silk jammies sipping bubbly.
MEANWHILE, BACK ON planet earth . . . Jacqui Jackson and her seven children - four boys, all with autistic spectrum disorders, and her three "normal girls" - were the subject of the memorable documentary, My Family and Autism, broadcast in 2003. Jackson came across as an inspirational figure, a single mother battling a society that insisted on defining her sons solely in terms of their condition. Her story was the basis for this week's moving and largely unsentimental drama, Magnificent Seven, in which Jackson was played by a believable and smudgily beautiful Helena Bonham Carter.
Magnificent Seven began on Christmas Day with Jackson warily bringing her troupe into the next-door neighbour's for a festive buffet, only to be shown the door when one of her sons, with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), trashed the hostess's bathroom and another, wearing goggles and a nappy, attempted to eat the carpet tiles (because he craved the gluten in the carpet glue, as Jackson tried to explain to her distraught neighbour).
Winter, spring, summer, autumn - the metronomic anarchy of Jackson's life went on and on, as she handled her boys' predilections, demands, allergies and fears (of certain colours, of loud noises, of clowns). The yearly assessments, the locks, the checks, the sleeplessness, her daughters' attempts at sociability and normality, would have driven most of us to insanity. And then there was her extraordinary son Christopher's Asperger syndrome, which required a constant explanation of idioms and phrases and a weeding-out of any language that didn't mean exactly what it said.
Sandy Welch's fine dramatisation ended on the following Christmas Day with Jackson having a beer at her kitchen table surrounded by her family (whose innate abilities she was learning to trust), friends, and the bloke she had kissed at a fireworks display, all singing Beatles songs. I hope this Christmas is as harmonious for the real Jacksons.
