TV REVIEW: O'Gorman's SummerRTÉ1, Sunday, DisastersRTÉ1, Tuesday, Dragons' DenBBC2, Monday Addicted to Boob Jobs, BBC3, Monday
'YOU LEFT US without warning/ We'd hoped for one more show/ No one could give the love we felt/ That only came from Joe." Lacking Heaney's precision maybe, short on Durcan's wit perhaps, this elegiac little ditty, writ large on shiny black marble over the fresh grave of singer Joe Dolan is, however, a populist tribute to the singer who died last year, a man who engendered a kind of sacred bump'n'grind devotion among his legions of fans.
O'Gorman's Summer returned for a new series this week, affording the sombre, soft-spoken inquisitor another opportunity to travel the highways and byways to meet and greet the natives. Dressed for the occasion in white linen and sporting a soft straw hat, the man clearly exists in a micro-climate all of his own. Tiptoeing across the country, pulling his melancholic caravan of secondhand emotion and wary empathy, O'Gorman's first stop was at Walshestown Cemetery in Mullingar, Dolan's final resting place. Eat your heart out, Père Lachaise - Jim Morrison may have the graffiti, Oscar Wilde may have the lip-print kisses, but Joe Dolan's got the lurrve.
Traipsing through a bevy of mourners, largely female, who had gathered there on cemetery Sunday to pay their respects, O'Gorman delicately prodded away at the shattered fans' grief with his seemingly innocuous questions until, finally, one of them cracked under the pressure of his featherlight interrogation and told him how she'd thrown her scarlet brassiere at Dolan one steamy night in Drogheda, later retrieving the "touched" item, which is now a lacy souvenir of her loyalty. Apparently, on a good night, Joe could have up to 80 slivered thongs and banquette bras scattered over the stage, such was the unfettered (soon to be undressed) passion of his audience.
O'Gorman's interviewing technique is reminiscent of an eager young priest behind the grille of the aromatic confessional, bland persistence tempered with unseemly curiosity. The style works better on radio, an intimate medium where confessional orgies are almost de rigueur. Television seems to stunt his talent, possibly because there are still some people who just don't feel easy discussing the minutiae of their lives with a total stranger when they have a television camera lurching at their unadorned faces.
These could be fertile times for the whispering scrutineer, however. The rain dance for a brand new recession has paid off - those dole queues full of tender and willing subjects who had been chased away by the brutal un-analytical hedonism of the Tiger are set to make a comeback, and, if O'Gorman's microphone has been itching to worm its way back into the national psyche, this credit-crunch climate augurs well for its owner. No wonder he's celebrating with the Man from Del Monte garb.
COWERING UNDER A beach towel on a temperamental strand a couple of evenings ago, a friend (with goosebumps), who is a regular reader of the column, remarked that I hadn't seemed to like anything on the box since Arts Lives went on vacation. After throwing her into the brine for her insolence, I considered her comment, and yep, when it comes to the national broadcaster's summertime schedule, I have to acquiesce - but, in my defence, there has been an awful lot of dry filling stuffing up the holiday season cracks.
For some strange reason, there also seems to be some alphabetical fetish afoot, with a preponderance of programmes beginning with H. Of Hostage, Heat and Heist, only two remain standing in the fading summer light. Heat, a culinary pressure fest, is a feistily entertaining little nugget, while Heist barely ripples the seasonal torpor with its rehash of "the most notorious large-scale crimes ever committed in Ireland", rearranging well-chewed archive on a bed of special extras who have been raiding the balaclava box again.
Taking the brave step of launching a new programme beginning with the letter D, RTÉ presented us with Disasters, which headed straight back to the archive, wielding its cheaply emotive moniker, to unearth footage of the devastating fire that consumed Noyeks timber factory on Dublin's Parnell Street in 1972, killing eight employees - seven women and one man. The film spliced the sepia with moving interviews with eyewitnesses and relatives of the dead, their accounts capturing something of the extraordinary ferocity of the inferno, due, apparently, to highly inflammable glue coming into contact with a gas heater. It was a desperately sad tale, competently and movingly told by those who were there.
What was unnecessary, though, was the hackneyed dramatic reconstruction of a girl's feet slipping into slippers, designed to underscore somehow the vulnerability of the youngest victim, 19-year-old Patricia Gore, who died on her first day in her new job. As Patricia's sister, Louisa O'Connor, said, "Thirty-six years later, and we are still crying." Sadly, when the roll-call of the dead, to whom the programme was dedicated, appeared at the end, there were seven names instead of eight, an error that is being rectified for future showings.
Five millionaire investors, the seats of their five well-pressed suits snugly encased in five swivel chairs, were back this week in Dragons' Den, offering their usual bespoke cruelties and petty humiliations to a bunch of sweaty entrepreneurs labouring over damp business plans and soggy balance sheets. Oh good.
Dragons' Den is a clever programme and a smart little television investment. Now in its sixth series, the format has remained unchanged, with the self-made dragons, their fiery investment portfolios and manicured egos intact, listening to an assortment of perspiring wannabes who are trying to part them from wodges of their own cash.
The first programme in the new series saw the usual barrel of naive fools roll out their wares, only to be promptly rolled back down the hill again, this time with a couple of barbarous blades shot through the staves. A fine example of such folly was a couple of giggling business partners who came to the den brandishing a bed-sheet embellished with a ridged "lay line" of stitching right down the middle of the cloth, an ingenious way, they claimed, to mark one's territory in the matrimonial bed and put an end to all those nightly incursions across the mattress. Having been told that a product which encouraged such trepidatious journeys might have been worth the panel's dosh, they were duly dispatched.
The dragons did, however, invest in a couple of sweet, event-managing girls who offered partygoers talking trees and "human tables" from which to snaffle their canapés. Dragon Peter Jones also took his first steps into the music industry by offering patronage to a rather confident and articulate studenty band called Hamfatter. The Hamfatters (if the plural is appropriate) were introduced by their, em, manager, who sported not only facial fluff and a ponytail, but also one of those piercings through the bridge of the nose the sight of which is enough to make your throat sting with nausea. I dunno - in such a goatee-eat-goatee industry, one instinctively worries for the viability of such punctured functionaries when all the millionaire eyes are on the talent.
When all else fails there is always a boob job on the tube to brighten up the humid night. Addicted to Boob Jobs, another titbit from BBC3's Beauty Season, saw lofty young film-maker Louise Roe trip out of her bijou Kensington flat (which she shares with boyfriend Jasper) and stick up leaflets in shop windows, in search of a woman who had had multiple breast surgeries, in the hope of muscling a camera in on the next augmentation.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, no one came forward with an offer pinned to their amended boobs, so, undaunted, intrepid Louise interviewed Jasper instead, asking him if he liked real boobs or fake boobs. "Emmm . . ." said Jasper from the depths of his knee-length khakis. Next, Louise asked Jasper's rugger mates if they liked 'em real or fake. "Real," they roared (bar one chap, a pragmatist who was keeping his options open).
It was all getting very cosy when, suddenly, Louise's documentary sprouted wings (well, implants actually). Next thing, she was inside an operating theatre as a couple of bags of silicone were rutted into two gaping apertures on two shuddering, bloodied breasts. She couldn't take the heat, so a kindly surgeon brought a greenish Louise into the recovery room and dispatched a cranky nurse to find her a nice glass of water. Meanwhile, on the operating table the patient, glazed in yellow disinfectant, slept under anaesthetised eyelids, taped shut. Stick to the rugger buggers, Louise. Ask Jasper - the only things they stuff into their apertures are foaming pints of lager. No?
