TV REVIEW:
Living Lightly
RTÉ1, Tuesday;
At Your Service
RTÉ1, Sunday;
Little People, Big World
TV3, Wednesday;
Pure Mule: The Last Weekend
RTÉ1, Sunday and Monday
HAVING IMBIBED a dose of sensible and well-intentioned advice from my goggle-box over the past week, I am now tightening my belt with such rigour and commitment that I’m beginning to feel a little faint. Oh hear ye, paupers, in the light of the forthcoming Budget and having stared at the coalface of consumer programming, I can tell you lot that it’s time to chuck the Marks and Sparks ready-meals and the nightly bottle of lukewarm Chardonnay and dig out the sack-cloth and ashes. Oooh baby, as the song goes, it’s going to be a long, lonely winter.
Irish Timesconsumer affairs journalist Conor Pope and "frugal enthusiast" Ella McSweeney (I'm not sure if that is a job description or a mantra) will be turning the sod on the auld screen for the next six weeks in Living Lightly, as they follow three Irish families striving to "revolutionise" (downwards) their cost of living. The families are described as living way beyond their means and as being addicted to "must-haves", luxuries and spending practices born during the boom and refusing to die out in the current economic frost.
In the first programme of the series, one of the participating couples confessed to indulging in boutique splurges for their bevy of lovely daughters every Saturday afternoon, while another couple owned up to a €1,800-a-year cappuccino habit (which, unless you are constantly jetting off to drink alternate mugs of the stuff on cobbled Venetian streets, is pretty impressive).
If all this talk of financial prudence and constricted consumerism makes you feel like burying your head under the threadbare duvet and only getting up for the Fair City omnibus, I should tell you that Living Lightlyis just the leader of a posse of programmes with the umbrella title "Spend Clever and Live Better", to be broadcast on RTÉ television and radio, which are designed to help one tackle the recession and survive these challenging times.
There is, of course, an inherent fascination in rummaging through a stranger’s dirty little financial secrets, not to mention the thrill of seeing an erstwhile devotee of the chill-food aisles of affluent supermarkets struggle with a bag of Lidl carrots and a tin of chopped tomatoes, but one is tempted to ask just what kind of impact the band-aid of television advice, albeit entirely sound, can have on families whose lives have been blighted by the recession. One family (of the three in the series) had lost almost its entire income when the business of the husband, an electrician, dried up as a result of the building industry going to the wall. For that family the advice was not to invest in a chicken coop, plant spuds next to the decking or jettison the kitten heels and frozen cocktail sausages, but to take a long, hard look at their aspirations and spending, and to make renewed attempts to find work. Pope offered a salient piece of advice to the shocked couple, couched in terms of hope and perspective: this recession will pass, he said, but for now we must make sure to keep our head above water.
So that’s it: bleak is the new black, but as the rudderless ship of Ireland Inc crashes about in an ocean of debt, we have to do just that, keep our heads above water.
“Money and happiness are not the same thing,” the programme told us, and maybe that is the mantra we need to be chanting. I liked the shot of a fit and healthy-looking McSweeney digging up a vegetable bed in the home of the couple with all the lovely shopping-mad daughters, who, having kicked off their new heels, were flitting around in their rather fetching and sparkling-looking wellies. But one suspects that the generation born during the boom will be the most reluctant to embrace damp frugality.
Pope, however, with the devotion of a deck-side chaplain, is energetically persuasive in his attempt to keep us all afloat, and doubtless this gingerly convincing series will garner a growing audience.
I SUSPECT THAT very few of us will get through life without dining on Cumberland sausages and mashed potatoes (with the ubiquitous redcurrant gravy and a sprig of greenery) in a formerly awful restaurant in one's home town that has unexpectedly been spruced up and had pins stuck in its lazy bottom by some godforsaken reality-TV makeover show. At Your Serviceis a rather camp little reality outing presented by hotelier brothers John and Francis Brennan, who gad about the countryside resuscitating damp and empty hotels with a veritable ambulance-full of hospitality ideas, most of which seem to involve hanging baskets and goat's cheese.
This week the suited duo materialised in Co Cork, where they found an exhausted family hotel curling up with damp and disinterest. There, on a staggeringly modest budget of €1,000 (“I’ve been up all night stuffing cushions,” said the rather put-upon interior designer), they magically created a luncheon paradise, aglow with smoked salmon sandwiches and, of course, the ever-popular bangers and mash.
“Sure, it’s on the way up,” said some reluctant hostage to the production company, desperately trying to swallow his jumbo fry while attempting to fight off a camera intent on locating his nasal hair, all most likely in return for a free dessert.
At Your Serviceis a peculiarly Irish delectation: the Brennan brothers are certainly no Gordon Ramsay, bollocking forlorn chefs, nor are they Llewelyn-Bowen, swathed in velveteen and jodhpurs. This is more Brides of Franc territory, but without the brides, the dresses, or Franc. It's so "random", as my 13-year-old son would say, that I have a worrying feeling I might start finding it compulsive.
SO I WAS all prepared to watch TV3's new current affairs series, Midweek, which was supposed to begin this Wednesday. However, the show, which rather alluringly pledged to "focus on the human stories behind the headlines", tripped into some human legal quagmire prior to its inaugural outing and, like a premature bride, has had to jump into the vestry for a couple of weeks and wait for a new and permissible groom to show up.
So, pencil poised, I had been abandoned by a programme promising relevance and context, and had to do the next best thing. I therefore watched Little People, Big World, a series of documentaries about "an Oregon farming family made up of small and average-sized people" (don't look at me, I'm just quoting the press release). Anyway, TV3 seems to have got its hands on a whole darn crate of these there docs, which more or less record every waking moment of a pretty dull, white, middle-class American family who have an extraordinary number of jeeps and three members who happen to be of short stature and need extra pedals screwed on to their multitudes of accelerators.
The thing about Little People, Big Worldis that, whether or not it succeeds in illuminating the lives of shorter people, it is an unexpected source of enjoyable Bushisms, and for those of us who have been missing the blundering ex-president's malapropisms and serial inanity, it comes as an unexpected treat. "We need to exercise the muscle of resiliencing," said dad when his son failed his driver education programme for the third time, which was, by the way, after the child had crashed one of the spawning jeeps into a farmyard rock. "We gotta make sure this lesson is memorialised." I love it; you can keep your stories behind the headlines – I prefer my under-the-radar word-manglings.
tvreview@irishtimes.com
Life in a midlands town - 'Pure Mule' makes a return in a post-boom landscape
Four years ago Eugene O'Brien's memorably superb series, Pure Mule, rolled over the corpse of a putrefied, drink-heavy fictitious Irish town to examine forensically the psychological temperature of its residents. Now, against the background of the recession, O'Brien has revisited this landscape with Pure Mule: The Last Weekend.
As one central character prepared for emigration and another returned home to “bury her ma and get out of Dodge”, his creations once again revealed their apparently cauterised emotional lives in a town struggling to right itself after the explosion of the boom.
O’Brien’s characterisation is faultless, and his gently reflective script was brilliantly served by director Declan Recks and an outstanding cast, including Garrett Lombard as Scobie, the elfin Charlene McKenna as his former girlfriend Jennifer, and Dawn Bradfield in a beautifully judged performance as Jennifer’s sister, a woman rooted in duty but lightened by intelligence and sensitivity.
Hand-made artisan work of the highest quality; as Scobie might have said, “pure mule”.
