TV Review: It's "pure mule" - it's the brothers in the red saloon roaring down main street of a Friday night; it's the hair gel and the sticky deodorant; it's the mammy with the tea ready, the tea to be got out of the way quick, like; it's mammy handing out the condoms like little foil-wrapped talismans; and it's the town to invade and the pints to be drunk and the fags to be smoked and the girls to be got and the night to be had. It's pure mule, so it is.
Pure Mule, a six-part series from playwright Eugene O'Brien, whose award-winning play, Eden, explored similar territory (small midland town, drink-fuelled weekends, despair and longing), began on RTÉ this week and spectacularly raised the bar for Irish television drama.
During each hour-long episode, Pure Mule focuses on the exploits of a single character over the course of a weekend. During the series the characters' stories will interlink, building a picture of contemporary Ireland, almost unchanged - bar the designer drugs - from the old ballroom of romance: an Ireland where dropping a tab of ecstasy and belting out the national anthem are end-of-night staples to be undertaken before lurching into wet and inhospitable streets, a bottle of whiskey in hand, heading for messy, desperate sex in a graveyard.
Episode one featured Shamie (Tom Murphy), the elder of two brothers who are, we learned, joined at the hip: they work together as builders, sleep in twin beds in their boyhood room, swivel in the same barber's chair, and fancy the same women. There's a rule, though, that their recently deceased father laid down when they were teenagers: they can never kiss the same woman. The result is a deadly and insidious competitiveness - Scobie, the younger brother, notches up the pelts of the town's female population with a thirsty misogyny, while Shamie, at 25, hides his virginity like a stain.
This is territory that feels painfully familiar, but what sets Pure Mule apart is the fluidity and confidence of the direction and the delicate intelligence of the acting (Tom Murphy, Eileen Walsh and Garrett Lombard are superb). O'Brien has created a moving, scrupulously observed character-based drama, where despair resides in what is left unsaid, and where love is as tenuous and startling as the bloodied and carefully embroidered hanky that Shamie is left holding at the end of a violent and revealing Saturday night.
WITH THE AUTUMN schedule kicking in in earnest, another new drama hit the screen this week, this one designed to scare the bikini bottoms off you and have you scrabbling around for a hot-water bottle and the Prozac. Marian, Again was a truly scary and aggressively disturbing story that, to give it credit, relentlessly insisted on being watched.
The eponymous Marian (Kelly Harrison) has been missing, presumed dead, for 15 years. Her boyfriend at the time of the disappearance, Chris (Stephen Tompkinson), has never quite got over her or come to terms with the mystery of her disappearance. Chris, now (seemingly) happily ensconced in middle age, a head teacher with a wife and three young daughters, is shocked to discover that Marian, although radically altered, is alive and living in his vicinity.
As a young woman, the gorgeous and wild Marian had tried to persuade Chris, then a trainee teacher, to run away and see the world with her (we knew Chris was young because he had hair extensions and a polo neck in the flashbacks) - but he'd refused. Then, on a torrentially wet and spookily dark night, she found herself locked out of her father's house; seeking shelter, she got into the car of a man she barely knew, and disappeared.
Unknown to Chris or her family, she had been kidnapped.
After years of captivity, locked in a tomb in a cellar, being fed through a tube, until she lost her will, her memory and her identity, Marian, brainwashed and brutalised, believed she was someone called Susie and had come to accept the bizarre, enslaving conditions of her life as wife/assistant to her captor (Owen Teale), a psychopathic magician and occasional plumber.
The claustrophobic, Hitchcock-like interior of the magician's home was counterpointed by Chris's light and airy family house. As his obsession with Marian grew, however, Chris risked the liberty and safety of his fun-loving daughters by inviting the magician into his home. The results of this foolhardiness were viciously compulsive.
In the end the drama was gluttonously feeding on every horror-flick moment it could lay its skeletal fingers on, and as Marian (who, with Houdini-like agility, had freed herself from handcuffs and a coffin of freezing water weighed down by bricks and iron blocks) stood over the bloody skull of her moribund captor, a hammer clenched in her fist, her blue-white feet splattered by his blood, you had to ask yourself: "Why? Why did I watch this?" It was like voluntarily bathing in a toxic lake.
During the really scary bits you wanted to say to yourself: "It's only television, right? These people are actors, right? They get paid and go to wrap parties." Unfortunately though, prior to the start, those mysterious words popped on to our screens: "Based on a true story." Oh no.
FROM THE SPINE-chilling to the sublime. In Meet The Family, a 10-part series exploring the lives of contemporary Irish families, we were introduced to Tedd Hamilton and Phillida Eves, who, in an attempt to break free from the monotony of everyday life, had re-mortgaged their home and bought a 30-year-old, 48-foot yacht. Around the World in a Boat followed Tedd and Phillida a year or so after they packed their three young children - Oisín, Cian and Soracha, aged between nine and two - their sanguine spaniel, Poppy, their schoolbooks, faith and optimism, on to their boat, Kari, and headed to the Mediterranean and beyond, looking for adventure.
Tedd and Phillida had first met when they were crewing on training ships and had spent the following decade living in Galway. Tedd's description of their state of mind prior to the decision to change their lives will be familiar to many: a feeling of low-lying dissatisfaction, of never quite being in the moment, of always yearning for something more. Since their new adventure began, the family have been island-hopping out of Barcelona, where they moor for the winter (at a hefty mooring fee of €700 a month). In a fascinating and candid look at their life, Phillida showed us their cramped living conditions, the shared beds and cavernously confusing fridge, their school room on the chart table, their pump-action toilet and broken shower.
She spoke of the difficulties of parenting in space as public as a yacht marina, and also of the joy of adventure and the enriching independence that her children were tasting.
We saw Cian, aged six, cycle his small bike (with a wheelie-suitcase towing behind) up to the marina office to collect the family's mail, and Oisín, nine, independently negotiate the streets of Barcelona to buy an Irish flag to hang from the mast in preparation for the family's next voyage - to Turkey, where Tedd, who is a marine engineer, hopes to find casual work on boats.
We left the family swimming off the Balearics, having avoided a mistral storm to get there. Poppy was doggy-paddling and the children were diving from the deck into the clear blue water. The family's tenacity and spirit in making that leap into the unknown was evident; not every day is so idyllic, but some look close to perfection.
DESCRIBED AS A docu-soap, Cut And Dry is a six-part fly-on-the-wall series that follows the "trials and tribulations" of staff at Bellissimo, a one-stop beauty emporium in Limerick. Bristling for attention while pretending to ignore the cameras, the salon staff - including the white-suited boss and the ballsy, inky-haired colourist - took a coach to Dublin and joined a ballroom full of hairdressers to compete in the Irish Hairdressing Foundation championships. The highlight (excuse the pun) of the programme was when, in the midst of frenzied back-combing, asymmetrical cuts and emotional juniors, acouple of depressing stylists looked for "chicken fillets" to augment the breasts of their skinny models.
Cut and Dry had all the drama of a limp body-wave and the fascination of watching someone else's hair dry.
