TV REVIEW: Saturday Night With MiriamRTÉ1, Saturday MistressesRTÉ1, Tuesday ERRTÉ1, Sunday Flight of the ConchordsBBC4, Tuesday
THE MAGNIFICENT-LOOKING Miriam O’Callaghan began her summer job, Saturday Night with Miriam, on the studio shop floor last weekend, earnest and willing, flaxen hair shining, glittering teeth glittering. Surrounded by plump furnishings and shimmering tea lights, she displayed her hallmark confident practicality, rolling up her sleeves and getting on with the job of interviewing her first guest, friend and former colleague George Lee.
Lee, everyone’s favourite economics editor, whose exasperation with the Government had become increasingly clear, was recently lured away from the collegiate atmosphere of Montrose to the bump and grind of Leinster House. (For those who have been asleep in the bath for the last few weeks, Lee was elected earlier this month to represent Dublin South as a Fine Gael TD and has spent recent weeks being exhibited by Enda Kenny as a new brand of economic superhero, still in his pristine box.)
A gently articulate guest, Lee looked vaguely out of place on O'Callaghan's encompassing couch, like an émigréreturned for tea in the old homestead, battling now with the good china, and his pleasantries seemed to mask an urgency to be allowed to shake off his celebrity status and get on with the job. Would you want to be minister of finance, O'Callaghan asked him, perhaps a little pointlessly given that there will probably be a south Co Dublin riot (angry SUV honking and loud slamming of the patio doors) if Fine Gael juggle their way into power after the next election and he isn't offered the post. To that, and the question of whether he would ever want to be taoiseach, Lee's response was measured and, I suspect, well-rehearsed: "I'm number seven in a family of eight – I don't care who's at the top, I just want to contribute."
O’Callaghan, despite an innate briskness, is an extremely good host, but her show, on its first outing of the season, suffered from a jolting structural incongruity. Lee was followed by smoochy musical inanity from Marti Pellow, and then by the equally asinine spectacle of three Irish chick-lit authors who had all been at the same peroxide bottle and whose conversation was about as original and stimulating as a spray tan.
At last, having balanced on their stilettos long enough to exit the playground, the three lady writers were gone, leaving their complex insights (“we all need a bit of a giggle”) still hanging in the studio air as O’Callaghan’s expression changed and she prepared to bring on her final guests.
By way of introduction, O'Callaghan showed the recent, profoundly moving clip from Questions and Answersof Michael O'Brien, former Fianna Fáil councillor and mayor of Clonmel, telling John Bowman and his panel about the horrific sexual, physical and emotional abuse he had suffered as a child at an industrial school. O'Brien was joined in the studio by Tim O'Rourke, another survivor of sexual abuse at his day school, whose attempt to blow the whistle on his abuser was met with bureaucratic indifference.
Their contribution to O’Callaghan’s show shifted proceedings instantly from frothy romp to memorable and serious television experience. The gear-shift was clunky and uncomfortable, but the powerfully articulate O’Brien and O’Rourke (with his hard-won equanimity), and others among their number, continue to deserve every available platform there is to tell and retell their stories. O’Callaghan ended her opening show with tears in her eyes. I suspect her audience were no different.
OH WHOOPS! Somebody has brewed another pot of Mistresses. Chick-lit lite, the new series continues to follow the fortunes and misfortunes of four female friends as they negotiate the highs and lows of their libidos. Like a well-thumbed summer blockbuster, edges blackened with suntan oil, coarse sand scratching its pages, this absurdly corny comedy of bad manners is entirely undemanding and forgettable.
The plot is ludicrous and almost operatic in its archness. The four mates are: cuddly housewife and bun-maker Trudi (Sharon Small), sexually avaricious wedding planner Jessica (Shelley Conn), Katie the doctor (Sarah Parish), and Siobhan the lawyer (the elegant Orla Brady). Leggy Katie comes complete with a murky past (which I suspect involved the mercy killing of a dulling lover), but she began the new series with a vow of chastity, much to the chagrin of her panting mates. However, on day one of her new job at the hospital, she only goes and mistakes the damn handsome young heart surgeon for a lowly porter (well, gag me with my five-denier hold-ups!). The young doc, undaunted by status anxiety and a failing health service, and oblivious to Katie’s attempts to renew her virginity, is soon suturing his appendages to her willing apertures, leading Katie’s cabal of girlies to clap their manicured hands together in squealing delight.
Then there is Siobhan, who also has a complicated domestic life (if my memory serves me, she got pregnant after some gymnastics on the filing cabinet with the office clerk, despite being engaged to a sensitive chap with stubble). Anyway, she now seems to be married to the bristly bloke, and the compliant infant remains gurgling in its cot, while her husband pouts at the young male babysitter and she pursues anonymous sex with strangers in hotel bars.
There was a moment during the first episode of the new series when Brady’s testosterone-driven character was booting down the doors of credibility with such force that one was tempted to laugh out loud. The godforsaken woman, for the second night in a row, dragged herself out of bed in the middle of the night, exchanged her pyjamas for a cocktail dress and complicated underwear, put her make-up back on, found the car keys, and booked herself into a hotel in the slim hope of meeting some tuxedoed chap in the bar who was going to be sober enough not only to slot the key-card in the bedroom door but also to flesh out her complex sexual fantasy.
That babies wake up at dawn and that she’ll have to find a clean pair of tights in the morning, before she goes in to shake up the judiciary, was one thing (well, okay, two things), but it was really stretching the storyline when we were then asked to swallow her girlie yearning for her cosmically indifferent, somewhat tedious husband.
Without sounding sexist, it came as no surprise to see that the scriptwriter was a man. But who am I to pour a cold gin and tonic on this bubbly party? It’s well-made, prettily dressed television, everybody in it has satisfyingly frothy aspirations and join-the-dots careers, and if your brain has been fried by that unfamiliar yellow ball in the sky, then this uncomplicated drama might just be your after-sun of choice.
FIFTEEN YEARS since ERfirst graced our television screens! No wonder I need glasses to read the sell-by date. The final episode of the once cutting-edge medical drama expired slowly over two long hours, gasping for dramatic tension like a patient etherised upon a table (as Mr Eliot would say). This was a soporific affair, the series aspirating into television oblivion with the mawkish sentimentality that's become its fallback position in recent times.
You know the kind of thing: mother of twins snuffing it in childbirth, old-timer losing his wrinkled wife of 928 years, cute little Spanish kid extruding his grandmother’s rosary beads in his caca . . .
Set over 48 hours in the life of the emergency room, there were periodic longueurs when the cast sat around the donut box reminiscing about times past, until someone yelled “she’s hypoxic” or “multiple burn-and-blast victims” or “explosive diarrhoea” and they’d all scuttle off back to work.
There were guest appearances from previous keepers of the ERflame, including Dr Carter (Noah Wyle), who came back to open a medical centre for Chicago's underprivileged (a fine institute, with no expenses spared on the statuary).
He was joined by a few old faces from the halcyon days of this once quite brilliant drama, all sipping champagne from Carter’s family crystal. The final diagnosis, however, must be that someone should have pulled the plug on this series when it still had vital signs.
tvreview@irishtimes.com
Amusing antipodeans: comedy for summer nights
Comedy is an entirely subjective but big business, with the schedules awash at times with comedy duos practising “unique” brands of ultra-irony and hoping to make it beyond a hopeful pilot. It’s not always easy to separate the wheat from the chaff.
On the recommendation of someone who has been successfully surfing the comedy wave for longer than ER has been suturing wounded extras, I had a look at BBC4’s Flight of the Conchords, a Grammy Award-winning duo from New Zealand (Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement) who create a gently humorous half-hour with the help, surprisingly, of acoustic folk guitars and extremely amusing scripts. The series is worth tuning into for some rare moments of Antipodean surrealism, as when the prime minister of New Zealand is wreathed in wonder at finding a second-hand copy of The Matrix in a New York City DVD store while waiting for a meeting with a US president (who hasn’t yet realised that New Zealand is a country). It’s a quiet holiday from the volatile comedic din of less distant climes, and with a worldwide cult following hiding behind their vaguely hippie-ish exterior, the series is worth looking into on these jungle nights.
