TV REVIEW - Five Decades of Roses,RTÉ1, Monday,
The Rose of Tralee,RTÉ1, Tuesday and Wednesday,
The X Factor,UTV and TV3, Saturday,
TV3's autumn schedule: 'SHE WAS LOVELY and fair as the rose of the summer." In those halcyon days of dependable seasons when winters, like newsreaders, were grave and frosty, and yellow summers stretched out over hazy months, a couple of entrepreneurial chaps from Tralee set about putting their economically challenged town on the tourism map.
The year was 1959, and Edna O'Brien's Country Girlswould soon be deemed too salacious an offering for our delicate psyches, while the showbands were hatching plans to get us hucklebucking around the uplands and downlands in knee-high patent-leather boots and Crimplene miniskirts (well, not all of us, obviously). And as Dingle's purple mountains and Killarney's sparkling lakes continued to attract the much-sought lucre of holidaying visitors, it was decided that the key to Tralee's inclusion on the Kerry tourist trail lay in the chaste lyrics of one William Pembroke Mulchinock: "Yet 'twas not her beauty alone that won me,/Oh no, 'twas the truth in her eye ever dawning/That made me love Mary, the Rose of Tralee."
One might have been forgiven for assuming a somewhat sceptical demeanour when the Rose idea was first mooted. Surely, building a pageant around some idealised version of Irish womanhood just as the Swinging Sixties were curling their eyelashes and snapping their pantyhose was not the most auspicious idea . . . but lo, in the teeth of history, unto the town a heritage festival was born. The municipality of Tralee would henceforth be headquarters to a celebration of Irish culture in which gallant lassies from far and wide, many the products of emigre parents, would come to Kerry bedecked in tumbling chiffon to trot out their well-rehearsed party pieces and to indulge in a little convivial chat about what it means to them to be Irish.
Half a century later and the Sixties swingers have gone grey but break out the vestal virgins, it's the 50th Rose of Tralee International Festival! By way of marking the anniversary of this redoubtably successful festival, the State broadcaster, in addition to two long nights of Rose coverage (this year host Ray D'Arcy, now in his fifth year at the helm of this giggling ship, interviewed more than 30 enthusiastic rosebuds), also screened the thought-provoking documentary, Five Decades of Roses, a nostalgic hour featuring grainy archive of optimistic-looking girls with beehives and lots of footage of small planes taking off and landing again. The programme also featured some lively and beautiful women who have been honoured at one stage or another in the festival's long history by having an ill-fitting tiara clamped on to their back-combed barnets. One glossily lovely young bud, now an equally fragrant bloom, the 1978 Rose of Tralee, Orla Burke, told how her coronation earned her a prompt congratulatory telegram from Charlie Haughey and a cheque for £1,000 (which her mother appropriated to redecorate the family home and clothe Orla's siblings).
In the face of the festival's enduring appeal, and having witnessed once again the screaming delight of the contestants' families and friends sweating it out under "the Dome" in their frocks and hired suits, it would seem pointless to criticise this particular pantomime and to end up feeling like a crabbed old bag. The bevy of "lovely girls" (as the Father Tedparody so memorably put it) may have its detractors, but God, it's popular with the punters (the first night of Roses attracted a television audience of more than one million viewers), and doubtless the townspeople of Tralee have been thrilling to the ching-ching of cash registers over the week-long series of events. And fair play and may the road rise with them and céad míle fáilte and all the rest, as they say in this "uniquely Irish event".
SOOOO. Having established the greener-than-green credentials of this odd party, it's also possibly fair to say that the whole shebang is quite bananas. Truly, The Rose of Traleeis the strangest, most wildly anachronistic gig one could hope to witness. Neither a beauty nor a talent contest, more a gala of congeniality, from Birmingham to Brittany, from Baltimore to Bally-I'm-losing-my-reason-here, the girls all bloom in highly individual directions, which admittedly makes a welcome change from the mass-produced, post-surgical chic of most televised gatherings of young women. Among the flushed offerings in ball-gowns on display in front of the elegant judging panel (this year chaired by everyone's favourite bilingual weatherman, Daithí Ó Sé, and interestingly including Adi Roche, who may have been hired to lend the proceedings a touch of feminist gravitas) was the Texas Rose, who disembarked from most of her dress and lashed into a hard-shoe reel in her cowboy boots, while the Garda Band gave an arresting rendition of the Dallastheme tune. And then there was the Cork Rose, who (undaunted by the ghosts of the titular Mary with the truth in her eyes ever dawning) regaled the audience and a bemused D'Arcy with a story of how she sent her escort to the chemist to get her some throat medicine called Difflam and how he arrived back with a diaphragm! Oh har har, old William Pembroke Mulchinock must have been laughing so hard he choked on his dust.
Anyway, happy birthday, Rose, and congratulations to London Rose Charmaine Kenny, the self-possessed, beautiful and remarkably composed and dry-eyed recipient of the Golden Jubilee tiara. Oh Rosie, you might be little more than a successful marketing idea dressed up in ruched velvet and tight high heels, but I hope that one day we can all visit your green and pleasant island, populated by solid girls with good career prospects and weeping mothers who are also their very best friends, and swim in your mascara-proofed lakes and sup on your well-flossed conviviality.
I WOULD PAY to see Simon Cowell on the judging panel for The Rose of Tralee. I'd like to see him try his look of incredulity and mock-horror on a Dome full of proud uncles and aunties and second cousins (once removed) as some game cailín with a grin the width of Madagascar opened her throat to deliver a gusty chorus of a Mary Black hit, or adjusted her satin bustier to get to grips with her harp, flute or melodica.
The X Factoris back for a fifth season of crucifying warbling wannabes and bewildered crooners who have mislaid any capacity to measure their own tunefulness. The judging panel for this musical bloodletting remains the same: skinny Cheryl Cole, dressed in deckchair print; Dannii Minogue, attempting elegant maturity underneath a hostile haircut; a pleasantly abstracted-looking Louis Walsh, in aviator specs and new denims; and ringmaster Cowell, seething in his hot jumper. The format, however, has changed: the auditionees now have to endure public humiliation in a crowded theatre of baying spectators rather than intimate dissection at the hands of the forensic but focused judges in a relatively private studio. The cringe-making claustrophobia of the studio made for edgy, often powerfully intense television and it feels as if the formula has been disrupted unnecessarily to pander to baroque and sadistic sensibilities. Maybe Cowell is bored with his previous success and feels that a forlorn public now needs to witness some serious public humiliation on a Saturday night to distract them from their daily woes.
Unlike the thorny old Rose of Tralee, I somehow I doubt that X Factorwill be a perennial bloomer.
Going for the full Irish TV3 promises a harvest of homegrown programmes
As schools reopen, traffic clogs up, unused barbies are packed away, and we finally throw in the towel on this reluctant summer, there are some encouraging television crumbs dotting the icy path towards a long cold winter. It's harvesting time for TV schedules, autumn listings have been released and your arid plasma should soon start to bear fruit.
TV3, despite losing a tranche of staff in recent times and continuing to litter its tray with some extremely irritating imports (surely it's time for Jeremy Kyle and Judge Judy to hang up their tights), has announced an autumn line-up in which Irish programmes account for one-third of the schedule. With cautious warmth one can look forward to a second series of
The Apprentice, to a six-part series on Irish crime from the courageous Donal MacIntyre, to a couple of home-grown dramas, to a weekly business show fronted by Ivan Yates and to a prime-time current affairs show hosted by Colette Fitzpatrick. And that's before one accepts the channel's offer of advice on how to survive the recession, face death, lose flab and negotiate an AE department.
I still tread like a centipede in a minefield over some of TV3's more obscure imports, but the new season has a confident air and, as we look towards greater self-sufficiency in all aspects of our lives, it's reassuring to see Irish television following suit.
tvreview@irishtimes.com
