The Trib (44 page)

The Situation from
Jersey Shore
, on the other hand, he is real. He should be the spur for a barrage of speculative feature articles. Here's a start: ‘The Situation – he represents all men between the ages of twenty-five and forty, he's a lover and a fighter, his stomach looks like a back-road in Cavan, and once he has deposited his milt in a gravelly egg-filled inlet, he will return to the sea to die.'

12 April 2009

I
n new cod-science-fiction cop-show drama
Eleventh Hour
, evil illegal cloners discard some human embryos, and top science guy and smouldering hunk Dr Jacob Hood (Rufus Sewell) asks a silly policeman who has questioned his authority, ‘Have you heard of Dolly the Sheep?' and I find myself really hoping that the next sentence out of his mouth is going to be ‘... for she is my sidekick and she will kick your ass!' Instead he goes on to give us an idiot's guide to cloning.

I can't help feeling cheated. A programme about Rufus Sewell and Dolly the Sheep fighting science crime would have been awesome, automatically suggesting several amazing scenes and plots. ‘How are you going to stop me, Dolly?' gurns the evil scientist in an evil voice in my evil imagination. ‘You are but a humble sheep. Aaagh! Stop eating me! I'm not grass!'

Instead Sewell's sidekick is a generic sexy FBI ice maiden who knows kung fu and is annoyed by, yet attracted to, his eccentricities. ‘He's a brilliant biophysicist but he spends most of his time in his head, so I have to watch his back,' she says, and I can't help thinking this sentence would have sounded much better coming from Dolly (although she'd have said, ‘I have to watch his baaaaaack').

Anyway,
Eleventh Hour
is a Jerry Bruckheimer remake of an English television programme of the same name, and it's also very similar to
Fringe
, another US export in which a sexy blonde FBI agent helps out a mad old genius. Like
Fringe, Eleventh Hour
is built on the assumption that science is weird and scary and thus needs to be policed by special operatives investigating ‘science crimes'.

You see, all that technology they used to make the programme – the cameras, the microphones, the trucks – these all arose naturally out of ‘nature' and have nothing to do with ‘science' at all. The lights, for example, were simply plucked by the crew from lighting rig trees, much as our hunter-gatherer ancestors might have done, and Rufus Sewell was carried from England to America, not by science-plane, but in Jerry Bruckheimer's jaws, much as a bear might have done with a fish. No, for the purposes of this show, ‘science' means big, scary stuff like cloning and nuclear weaponry and 'flu pandemics, and it always involves someone ‘trying to play God', a phrase I spent the whole programme waiting for, and which was eventually uttered in the last fifteen minutes as Sewell played midwife to a mutant clone and evil Dr Geppetto (that was her name!) made a getaway. Since when was ‘playing God' a bad thing anyway? Surely it's only a problem if the answer to the question ‘what would Jesus do?' is ‘try to illegally clone mutant foetuses'? (Oh hold on, he does that in Mark 3:17).

There's also some stuff in the bible about forgiveness, and this was the subject of
Five Minutes of Heaven
, a drama based on the real-life experiences of Joe Griffin (James Nesbitt), a Lurgan-born Catholic whose life has been changed by witnessing the horrific murder of his brother years ago, and Alastair Little (Liam Neeson), the UVF man who murdered him. And it made for some powerful viewing.

After a documentary-like re-enactment of the crime, it's decades later and a panic-stricken Griffin is going to meet Little for the first time since the murder, for a fictional television programme called
One-to-One
. Nesbitt's wonderfully edgy and frantic performance is counterpointed by the unctuous film crew, and by Neeson's own calm self-possession as the former terrorist who has made a life for himself travelling the world and talking about his experiences. Nesbitt has spent his life being blamed by his mother for his brother's death, and delivers rambling, heartbreaking and funny monologues to whoever is there to hear them. (‘Here you are, pal, a fully signed-up member of the celebrity circuit of life's victims: men in love with donkeys, twins stuck together by their bollocks, elephant women who can't get out of their chairs ... and now you.')

The script (by Guy Hibbert) takes a few hard, well-aimed kicks at the reconciliation industry, the sensation-hungry media, and the mealy-mouthed words of some former terrorists. Neeson's performance is also fascinating. There's a great trick played by the scriptwriter, in which Little's seemingly sincere recollection of the murder is chillingly undermined by his own rehearsed repetition of the same words later on. As the film progresses, however, it's clear that he's a man who finds it hard to tell his own guilt from the eloquent words he's used to express it, and that he needs the meeting with Griffin more than Griffin does.

The problem is, once these dynamics are established, the drama sort of fizzles out. After a potentially murderous Griffin backs out of their initial encounter, Little spends the rest of the film trying to re-engineer a meeting, and it begins to look a bit like this is going to be, like
Waiting for Godot
, the play in which nothing happens ... twice. Of course, this is television, so instead of nothing happening, the second act climaxes with Griffin and Little smashing through a second-floor window into a broken-boned embrace on the footpath below. Which was daft, and whatever it was meant to symbolise, it just undermined two exceptional performances from Neeson and Nesbitt, and what had been, until then, a nuanced drama about how traumatic events and complex emotions can't be resolved and repackaged into media-friendly sound-bites.

Media-friendly sound-bites are exactly what
Yes We Can! The Lost Art of Oratory
was all about, despite a lot of claims to the contrary. The premise was that Barack Obama had brought oratory back to political discourse, and so Alan Yentob led a pool of academics, politicians, spin doctors and authors (including the crankily brilliant Gore Vidal) in analysing the history of public speaking and critiquing what made great speeches so great. It was a ‘greatest hits' nostalgia show in which the usual suspects (Winston Churchill, FDR, Martin Luther King) were all dragged out to stir the souls, amid some incoherent theorising about the importance of oratory and a well-modulated voice.

The programme was really about how Alan Yentob finds Barack Obama ‘dreamy', so he didn't even notice how it didn't have a core argument, and reduced famous speeches to the sound-bites he claims to distrust (‘I have a dream'; ‘ask not what your country can do for you'; ‘we will fight them on the beaches'; ‘you do the shake and vac').

Furthermore, Yentob didn't seem particularly worried by the more troubling side of oratory unearthed in his own programme: that some classical scholars thought it was a form of dishonest subterfuge; that a well-crafted speech from Tony Blair tipped his country into an unnecessary war; or that the insidious oratory of Adolf Hitler had horrific consequences. No, these things were no match for the fact that Yentob thinks Barack is just brilliant. So the official message of
Yes We Can
! was: ‘words are great!', but this was undermined by plenty of evidence that words were cheap, and that Obama's oratorical skills could eventually prove to be as relevant as Brian Cowen's singing voice. In fact, I'd say it's possible to work out how important oratory is to good governance statistically. But I won't, because statistics are a form of science, and as I've learned from
Eleventh Hour
, using science would make me some sort of witch.

10 August 2008

P
anic spreads quickly through the RTÉ canteen. ‘They're coming! They're coming!' shrieks Dave Fanning as he pushes and shoves Marian Finucane out of his way and starts a terrified stampede for the door.

‘Oh my God! Oh my God!' wails a hyperventilating Kathryn Thomas, standing on the hands of a collapsed Ryan Tubridy, who's groaning a decade of the rosary in a heap with Myles Dungan and Maxi.

‘AAAAIGH!' yells Caroline Morahan as she knocks Anne Doyle out of her escape path and bites a piece off Aonghus McAnally's ear.

Then. Suddenly. There's silence. Not a bird can be heard. The air is sucked from the room. Philip Boucher Hayes turns, opens his mouth as if to speak, but simply points to a distant hill. The RTÉ board members have appeared on horseback, in full body armour, silhouetted in the evening sun.

The presenters begin screaming and yelling again.

But the board-members are silent, steely-eyed and carrying nets. They look to their leader for a signal. Cathal Goan, director general of RTÉ, sits straight-backed on his horse. His face is a grim death mask. Almost imperceptibly he nods. Then with a horrific war-cry the entire board of RTÉ ride down into the canteen. Horses snorting, their nets aloft. It's like a scene from
Planet of the Apes
as they cut through the terrified presenters. When the dust settles, two figures are slumped in the nets. The director general raises his right hand. It is enough. It has been a good hunt.

And that, no doubt, is how RTÉ got otherwise dignified people like radio person John Creedon and weather-lady Evelyn Cusack to be on
Fáilte Towers
, a reality TV show in which bottom-rung celebrities try to run a hotel for a couple of weeks.

As for the other ‘famous people' on display – glamour model Claire Tully, Eurovision losers Donna and Joe (for the purposes of this show Donna and Joe count as one full human celebrity), yer one from
The Apprentice
(Jennifer Maguire), and that R'n'B singer nobody's heard of (Luke Thomas) – they probably got onto it as part of some sort of Fás course.

As for Brian Dowling? Well, word on the street is that he's been living a sort of Truman Show-type existence since he won
Big Brother
. As far as he's concerned he's just got a new job in a hotel.

Anyway,
Fáilte Towers
isn't so much scraping the bottom of the televisual barrel, as it's finding there was a false bottom on the barrel all along, beneath which there was a secret room filled with poo.

In each episode, three of the celebrities are voted by the public to face the judges, Sammy Leslie of Castle Leslie, chef Derry Clarke and TV personality/hotelier Bibi Baskin. This trio decide who stays and who goes based on their ‘work', but because the show is edited by monkeys, thus far they mainly make their decisions based on things we haven't actually seen.

Indeed,
Fáilte Towers
is defiantly, uniquely and impressively badly put together. There's jumpy edits, bizarre sound-level problems, disjointed storytelling, and no coherent narrative.

And there's also loads of repetition. Every dramatic episode is shown at least four times. Whether it's Brian Dowling cleaning a piss-filled urinal, Joe McCaul dropping a tray of potatoes, or Don Baker angrily jabbing his finger at Derry Clarke while repeatedly saying ‘are you calling me a liar?', we're shown a flashforward of the event before it happens, then it's shown ‘properly', then it's shown again in flashback, and finally it's presented as part of a montage when someone is jettisoned from the hotel.

They also show things bizarrely out of sequence. In Tuesday's episode, for example, Jennifer Maguire refers to cleaning up vomit earlier that day, but the incident seems to happen in the next episode. And unless RTÉ has managed to twist the laws of space and time, that's just plain lazy (who could blame them, sez you, the way they're hunted by those dirty apes in management).

Anyway, thus far the hotel has been visited by hen parties, nudists, room-wrecking wannabe rock-and-rollers, hotel inspectors and people from Kerry. But they're all just distractions. Everyone knows this show is really about self-righteous judges, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God presenters (Baz Ashmawy and Aidan Power), and famous people cleaning up vomit, sniping at one another and crying.