Magic on the ice

TV REVIEW:Winter Olympics BBC2, all week, RoyRTÉ 2, Monday, FiorscéalTG4, Thursday, On ExpensesBBC Four, Tuesday

THE WINTER OLYMPICS have become something of an obsession – the new ski cross event is particularly enthralling – but we knew quite early on that the games had their overall champion. She is as talented as she is brave, faultless in a tight corner and blessed with the stamina and focus of a star. That’s not half enough about Clare Balding, who emerged as the leading presenter of the BBC’s Winter Olympics not so much by a head (she usually does the racing) as by a length. Clare has to extemporise across a couple of time zones when the Winter Olympics schedule is upset by the fog closing in, or a competitor being carted off in an ambulance. This she does with the effortlessness of the great.

Clare Balding is not the only impressive thing about the Winter Olympics, which have proved surprisingly emotional. On Sunday, during the Men’s Combined, the Canadian commentator Kerrin Lee-Gartner was explaining the Tao of skiing very fast down a mountain. “He has caution in his heart,” she tutted of one competitor. “This is not racing with freedom,” of another.

The Winter Olympics is sport for people who hate sport. All the events are lovely and short – except curling. Curling really is mad, and so unlikely as to make synchronised swimming look the most natural thing in the world. At first curling seemed to have been invented for women: the ice is brushed a lot, in a sort of parody of housework; you wear full make-up; earrings are compulsory; and you get to discuss every shot with your mates – but then it turns out that men play curling as well. Thomas Ulsrud, the Norway skipper – or skip, as we Winter Olympics types like to say – was extremely handsome in an A-ha sort of way. I kind of lost interest when he wasn’t on screen.

That’s the good thing about the Winter Olympics. It’s on at such peculiar times that you don’t feel bad about taking a break and watching two episodes of King of Queens (it’s on the Comedy Channel and very good) back to back. And you can miss things too; I missed our women’s bobsleigh team twice, which I am sorry for, and they didn’t too badly in the end. I just hope they were wearing nail varnish like the other bobsleigh girls.

Back in Vancouver at some point – early on Tuesday morning, I think – I watched two Russians in the worst costumes ever to have been worn on ice win a bronze medal in ice dancing. Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir of Canada won the gold. The camera caught Moir saying something to Virtue as they lay panting in their final clinch. It was extraordinarily intimate, like seeing a couple in bed, although Moir and Virtue are not a couple at all – allegedly.

By Wednesday we were all pretty well institutionalised, and knew about poor Joannie Rochette’s mother, who had died after arriving with her daughter at Vancouver airport last Sunday. Joannie, a Canadian, decided to take part in the figure skating anyway. Joannie cried, I cried, I think Sue Barker cried, the whole of Canada cried. I couldn’t even watch the repeats without crying. It was fantastic, and a welcome distraction from the wretched fate of Britain’s Jenna McCorkell, who fell about 30 seconds into her short programme. “Too close to the boards for my liking,” said the terrifying Robin Cousins who was in the commentary box with Sue Barker, just before Jenna crashed.

Robin liked Joannie, though. “Oh, well done, you,” he said as the rest of us sobbed. Robin’s cool, just like Kim Yu-Na, the South Korean reigning world champion, who has pop star status in her own country, Sue said. Kim Yu-Na and Mao Asada are tiny Asian women who seem to float on the ice. Only in the slow-motion replays can you see the grimaces of effort, the sweat and the steel that goes into being an ice princess. These three young women, Kim Yu-Na, Mao Asada and Joannie Rochette, went on to win gold, silver and bronze, in the order in which they had skated on Wednesday. “That was gorgeous,” said Robin as Mao Asada finished. I love everything about the Winter Olympics. I even love the graphics.

I HAVE ALSO grown rather fond of Roy, a cartoon boy in a normal family. Monday was Roy’s first day at school in Ballyfermot. The headmaster had only been told Roy was coming the week before. The games master wanted to know if Roy was special needs. Roy’s mother wants him to have a normal education. Of course, it’s hard to feel accepted when your eyes are different sizes and the kids in the playground are taking photos of you with their phones. Roy is really funny, with a wonderful cast headed by Cathy Belton, Simon Delaney and Mark Lambert. On Tuesday, Roy and his new friends rescued two frogs from dissection and Roy noted their different characters – “he’s deep, that fella”. This is wonderful writing, from Paul Smith, with both adult and child actors making the most of it.

TG4 HAS SHAMED other channels with its intelligent use of foreign documentaries. On Thursday, Fiorscéal showed Halima's Mobile Phone. The film started in 2000 with its greatest asset, Halima herself. She was the first person in her Bangladeshi village to get a mobile phone. "I've been told there's another one near the river," Halima said later. To buy the phone, she took out a loan from the famous micro-bank, Grameen, started by the Nobel prize winner Muhammad Yunus. Halima had already paid off a Grameen loan she had used to buy a cow. Now she was going to charge her neighbours for using the phone, and pay back Grameen at €2.25 per week over the next two years.

Halima’s enterprising spirit, the beauty of the Bangladeshi countryside and the handsomeness of her neighbours made this a lovely thing to watch. But, in the second part, things began to unravel. Returning to Halima in 2007 we found her son and daughter, whom she had wanted to become an engineer and a lawyer respectively, married with children. Although her family now owned a shop, Halima was taking calls from unseen creditors. Despite the closeness of the filmaker Olga Prud’Homme to Halima, or perhaps because of it, there was no explanation for any of these surprises.

It seemed extraordinary that Prof Yunus explained that his bank had six million female customers, but that in Halima’s village she was the only female we saw using, or even touching, a mobile phone.

Moats and votes

BBC Four is the crack cocaine of television. One minute people are telling you that they only use it for special occasions, the next you realise that they are locked in their houses and you haven't seen them for six months. For this reason I won't have it in the house. So I had to travel to watch On Expenseswith Brian Cox and Anna Maxwell Martin, two of the best actors on British television.

On Expenseswas posh telly: a much-publicised docu-drama with a hard news story to play with – the MPs expenses scandal in Britain. With material like this, the programme makers were spoiled for choice. Strangely, they decided to go with plucky female journalist (Maxwell Martin, pictured) versus Speaker of the House (Brian Cox). Now I'm as fond of plucky female journalists as the next person – I love to watch them as I munch biscuits on the couch – but this tactic was a mistake.

It was interesting to realise that the MPs who had passed the UK’s Freedom of Information Act then fought the application of it to themselves. It was interesting to see the story being stolen from under the plucky female journalist’s nose. It was interesting to see that the Speaker played the bagpipes, apparently at his office in Westminster.

But, you know, it wasn't that interesting. Despite its self-congratulatory air, On Expenseswas not half as good as Scrubs.

tvreview@irishtimes.com