Redemptive journeys

TV REVIEW:
Away With the FaroesRTÉ2, Tuesday I'm A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!TV3 and UTV, all week World Cup Qualifier: France v IrelandRTÉ2, Wednesday EnidBBC4, Monday

‘YEARS OF calamitous results have not weakened the spirit.” The wind whistles off the north Atlantic as sea birds dip their yellow beaks over green and purple hills and swoop over the newly mown turf of the national football stadium. Players bend to tie their scuffed boots.

One anxious young midfielder, his ubiquitous footballer’s blond tips harried by the restless breeze, kneels to wrap tape around his footwear. Supporters filter on to the bleachers, wearing hats and gloves, their patient faces (glimpsed underneath woolly ear flaps) painted with the ghostly livery of their country’s flag.

The host team is preparing to face the opposition, the millionaire superstars of France – Anelka, Henry, Sagna, Gallas et al – who have arrived at the ground in a heated coach, emerging like aliens from the mothership, their ears decked with pulsing electronic headphones, their designer bags slung over their indolent shoulders, their much-photographed faces dulled with privilege.

Nope, for once it’s not us lot playing the role of sacrificial lambs to the slaughter of the Gallic boot (and hand and head), but the Faroe Islands, that blowy archipelago west, west, west of Norway, where the man from Drimnagh, former Ireland soccer manager Brian Kerr, has taken up residence to manage the national team.

Away With The Faroes,a documentary that followed Kerr as he prepared his team of amateurs (fresh from the fish factories, the trawlers, the colleges and the constabularies) for a match against the former world champions, was an uplifting, humorous and surprisingly moving piece of television, timed to coincide with the week's similarly moving, though much less uplifting, main footballing event.

Kerr, however harshly the Irish pundits may have judged his management style, is an engaging personality, and four years after losing his “dream job” he seems to be in a relaxed and open frame of mind.

Still buoyed up by his passion for the game, he appears philosophical about his fall from grace, consoled by a little nugget of wisdom that fellow former manager Eoin Hand once shared with him: “There are two certainties in life — you will die and football managers will get fired.” Right, well, there you go.

Kerr's departure from the Ireland job was covered briskly in Away With the Faroes, with archive of Eamon Dunphy metaphorically knitting by the gallows as Kerr's tenure became untenable. Fortunately, the documentary also featured a soundtrack of wittily uplifting songs, which distracted from Dunphy's tone of irritating certainty.

Anyway, Kerr’s redemptive journeying around the blissfully under-populated Atlantic archipelago (with a population equal to that of Carlow) was beautifully shot, featuring woolly black sheep, low red houses sheltering in the nooks of angular and dramatic cliffs, and the wild sea lapping at the edge of the national football stadium.

Although I am usually stoically unmoved by the beautiful game – which nonetheless pervades my life like a jilted religion, littering my kitchen with muddy boots and numbing my senses with endless speculative conversations – I found myself strangely moved by the Faroese team, with their hopeful tattoos, their day jobs and their kit-manager-come-groundsman who releases the islands’ 12 prisoners to cut the turf with a hand-pushed lawn-mower.

Even I found it almost uplifting when they nearly managed to hold off the arrogant French, losing just 1-0, and when, one month later, they abandoned the canning factory and went out to beat Lithuania 2-1, their first victory in eight years.

“I hope they renew my contract,” said Kerr wryly, looking vaguely incongruous in his pin-striped suit against the backdrop of the glistening fjords. I hope they do, too. I think I could become a fan. I might even take a Faroe holiday and catch a windswept game. At least the team is never expected to win. It’s probably all seal stew and a couple of nips of vodka down the local, without the spectre of endless video replays and the heart-wrenching cries of an island nation robbed.

WELL, IT'S PROBABLYraining in Tórshavn right now, but, sadly, the other side of the world is drumming out an antipodean summer. Time then for the annual migration of two diminutive comedians and a cast of fools to the Australian jungle, ready to litter the outback with wagging chins full of Botox, snap-happy breasts full of silicone, and saturated personalities dripping with vacuity and the chill rattle of fear and desperation.

Oh hell, toss us another spider to swallow there, Chuck, pass us another barrel of rats to autograph — my agent called! Okay, it's been a year, but hell, they wantme! They want me to submerge myself in a coffin of maggots and koala shit, they want me to suck cockroach through a marsupial's anus, they want me to munch on the eviscerated penis of a kangaroo called Rolf – but, most importantly, they want ME! Oh you lucky, lucky viewer – it's back, it's hot and its really, really stinky.

I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!will be clogging up your television for the next couple of weeks. There is absolutely no need to watch it – just make a little voodoo doll of Jordan (be sure to use extra icing on the lips, but kind of puncture one side) and place the effigy in the wormery. You don't have a wormery? That's okay, a septic tank will do – or just drop it down a manhole cover and see if it floats with the excrement.

Jordan, God love the blighted child, is back in the jungle where, four years ago, on the same programme, she hooked up with Peter Andre. Older, wiser, and with entirely different features, she is now back “looking for closure”, and the great British public, in a convulsive act of hatred, are voting her into every horrific bushtucker trial on offer.

“I’m soft,” she told some sceptical jungle pal (actually an interior-designer chap, who memorably went on to describe her as “a heat-seeking missile in slingbacks”), her Hiawatha plait snaking down her back, her media-savvy eye calculating the distance between her and her close-up. “[The press] can shoot me, and it’s like it bounces off a sheet.” I dunno, maybe it’s worth trying. It’s a hell of a lot more humane than watching her implants buckle under the Australian sun.

SO, TRAPATTONI WEPT. . . almost. Tardelli's lip quivered. The dry-eyed interpreter wasn't strictly necessary.

Duff blubbed without restraint. Keane threw bits of his kit into the crowd. Henry looked shamefaced. Heads were in hands. Fists beat the turf. Poor Shay Given looked like he would never stand up again.

The game that was nearly not televised was televised, and with two little flicks of Thierry’s wrist a nation’s hopes were dashed. The crestfallen punditry spilled out of the television, groping for words: “heroic” . . . “brave” . . . “robbed, robbed, robbed”! Time for the enraged nation to wring its eyes and focus once again on our threadbare economy without the World Cup to distract us. Oh hell, if things get really tough we’ll just have to tune into Jordan unblocking the dunny with her acrylic fingernails.

Bunnys and ginger beer  The tale of a tastefully neurotic Blyton

Noddy, parping away in his red and yellow car; the plucky girls from Malory Towers; George, Julian and the rest of the Famous Five, Uncle Quentin and Timmy the dog; the adventures of the Secret Seven; all those mysterious coves; and all those lashings and lashings of ginger beer.

Enid Blyton, the prolific children’s author whose oeuvre is still hopping off the shelves (long after their creator has fallen off her perch), was the subject of a highly enjoyable biopic this week, starring the delicate and tastefully neurotic Helena Bonham Carter as the delusional and disturbed Blyton.

“It’s all bunny picnics and talking bloody golliwogs,” raged her drunk and broken first husband, his tweedy neediness getting in the way of her insatiable need for childish fantasy, his grown-up rage bouncing like summer rain off the impermeable sheet of her unanswerable success.

The first of three one-off films in BBC4's Women We Lovedseries, Enidwas a pristine example of the form in a genre that the BBC does better than anyone.

There are two more to come: Jane Horrocks takes on Gracie Fields and the superb Anne-Marie Duff gives Margot Fonteyn a twirl. Well worth a look.