There's murder on the streets - and boredom on the hustings

TV REVIEW:IN ONE OF the more chilling scenes in the new series of the gangland drama Love/Hate(RTÉ1, Sunday), two thugs chase a bloke who owes them money for a drug debt and bundle him into the back of their van. All in broad daylight and with maximum menace.

It was screened only days after the body of a young man who had been similarly picked off the streets in Dublin was discovered in a field. So Love/Hate, after a soft-around-the-edges first series, suddenly seems real, more like the Dublin gangland scene it is attempting to portray. This time everything and everyone seem uglier and properly vicious, the pace is faster, and the drama is so much the better for it.

A party in the first series was a glamorous, coked-up affair in a swanky penthouse; this time it’s in a grotty pub with a stripper. Crime boss John Boy (a magnetic Aidan Gillen) has gone from being a smoothie in designer kit to a pasty-faced, paranoid cokehead whose empire is starting to crumble. He still has the penthouse, the BMW and a beautiful girlfriend, but she’s a heroin addict, the police are on to him, he loses a drug consignment and he suspects a rat in his organisation.

David Caffrey, the director, delivers a slick package: beautifully shot scenes of Dublin and a thumping soundtrack contrast with the violence and craven stupidity of most of the gang members. Stuart Carolan’s script is full of action: in the first episode alone there was a gangland hit, a drug bust, cigarette smuggling, extortion and an ATM robbery. The women are fantastic: the roles aren’t big, but the actors, particularly Ruth Bradley, Charlie Murphy, Susan Ploughman and Aoibhinn McGinnity, take their lines and make strong characters out of them. Tom Vaughan Lawlor’s Nidge, John Boy’s sidekick, has gone from being a vaguely comic character in the first series to being a seriously terrifying character in this one.

Series one ended with the gunning down of Darren (Robert Sheehan), but he's made a miraculous recovery – a pity, because his Dublin accent is rubbish, he could have least have gotten a scobie haircut to dilute his pretty-boy looks, and at times he is given bizarrely unconvincing dialogue. "You got me out of a bind," he tells John Boy. Where does he live? Downton Abbey? Other than that, a must-see, top-notch drama.

ON THE FACE of it the presidential election was a savage, bloody-nosed battle, so you'd imagine that behind the scenes there were endless meetings in smoky rooms, canny strategising, bitter recrimination, meltdowns and teary-eyed exhaustion. But if there was, The Naked Presidential Election(RTÉ1, Wednesday) couldn't find a trace of it.

Promising to be a behind-the-scenes look at the campaign "stripped of spin", it spent so much time at Montrose that at times it felt like a corporate video for RTÉ, showing in rather too much detail how a report is put together and how newsreaders whip out the Max Factor before going on air. Its political correspondent David McCullagh got as much screen time as the candidates – and although Gay Mitchell might want to forget he ever ran for office, looking at the very few shots of him here you'd believe he never did. And did only two print journalists cover the election: Lise Hand and Fionnan Sheahan, both from the Irish Independent? They're good value on telly, but there was rather a lot of them. Dana's flat tyre was covered as though it was her election Waterloo, with no mention of the discovery by my colleague Colm Keena of her US citizenship – rather more crucial, you'd think. Mostly The Naked Electionwas a poorly put-together rehash of what we'd seen before – with a voiceover for a bit of melodrama. The acid test of insider access was the Martin and Miriam face-off. After the fraught exchange on the Frontlinedebate we saw Miriam O'Callaghan's eyes widen as she was told McGuinness wanted a private word with her. The Naked Electioncameras were not invited in – says it all.

WHAT WAS Now it's Personal (RTÉ1, Tuesday) about? Answers on a postcard, please, because after watching the full hour-long documentary I'm not much the wiser. This much I could gather: the former RTÉ newscaster Emer O'Kelly is now a columnist for the Sunday Independent. The idea (I think) was to challenge one of her controversial statements and bring her face to face with some of the people whose choices she has challenged in her writing. One of her stated principles is that all mothers should work outside the home and earn money until retirement age.

Money appears to be the only currency in O’Kelly’s world – none of that modern “social capital” claptrap. She is not a mother, though that doesn’t stop her starting a sentence with “what a baby needs . . . ” and being quite the authority on what’s good for all women and their children, as if one size fits all.

She visited the homes of different mothers (all comfortably middle class and educated – there was never going to be anything too challenging here), who calmly and kindly explained their choices. Two work in the home, one outside it. Maybe the thinking was that once O’Kelly saw the reality of modern motherhood she might change or even moderate her opinions. But this lady was not for turning. She asked one of the women, a stay-at-home mother of six, if she was “humiliated” by taking her husband’s money. Another put her finger on why O’Kelly’s thinking it is so repugnant, by suggesting that she “gives money too much power”. Hearing the columnist give her opinions about motherhood and child-minding made as much sense as a priest giving a marriage course. But the programme-makers knew that before they started, so what was it all about?

DOWNTON ABBEY(UTV, Sunday) ended with record viewers and a couple of cliffhangers to carry us through to the third series. Lavinia died from the Spanish flu – prettily, and without so much as a runny nose. In the next room, Cora, Countess of Grantham was wheezing like an old bellows and sweating like a horse but she lived. In the next room, Cora, Countess of Grantham was wheezing like an old bellows and sweating like a horse but she lived. Bates has been carted off by the peelers for killing his wife – with any luck he'll hang before he bores the rest of us to death. And Lady Sybil and Branson are off to Dublin with the earl of Grantham's blessing – and one of the classic Downton dialogue howlers that we've come to love: "If you mistreat her I will personally have you torn to pieces by wild dogs." That line could have strayed in from Love/Hate.

Get stuck into . . .

Crisis: Inside the Cowen Government(RTÉ1, Monday) Part two in the masterclass in backstabbing, self-promotion and brass-neck use of the "don't blame me, I was only following orders" defence from former Fianna Fáil ministers – if you can stomach it.