Big fáilte for Banríon Eilís, but it was tough to fill all the airtime

TV REVIEW:ON TUESDAY morning, in my daughter's primary-school class, they turned on the TV to watch Queen Elizabeth's arrival as if it was the moon landing or some other where-were-you-when event.

The general consensus was that she “looked nice and smiley” but that there was a lot of “watching an airplane just driving around and that was boring” – pretty much spot on, for the first morning of the visit, anyway.

There was live coverage on RTÉ, TV3 and BBC; RTÉ’s was the most comprehensive and resolutely serious throughout the visit.

On Tuesday the national broadcaster kicked off earlier than the others, giving Bryan Dobson a torturous 20 minutes of airtime to fill with the help of his fellow journalists Brian O’Connell and Mary Kenny before the doors of the plane finally opened. By the time her majesty’s neat little black shoes touched the ground the trio looked a bit bored with each other; even Kenny’s curious multicoloured ensemble and brave choice of hat had stopped being entertaining.

Flicking between channels brought up the same images, mostly of Army, Naval Service and Air Corps personnel lined up outside the Áras – they looked seriously impressive – and the commentators seemed to be following the same repetitious script: “historic moment”, “the last royal visit was by her grandfather King George V” , “final act of reconciliation”, “building bridges”, “she’s 85, you know”, “six million people in Britain with Irish roots”. When there’s so little happening on screen, and so much has already been said, it was difficult to fill the silences.

At one point, on RTÉ, Dobson was discussing weighty contextual matters with the historian Diarmaid Ferriter while, over on TV3, the reporter Stephen Murphy, from his perch in front of the Áras, said he had just been handed the menu for lunch, and would Colette Fitzpatrick, who was anchoring the coverage from the studio, be interested in hearing it, "or is that a bit Hello!magazine?" Colette answered in a tone that screamed, "Hell, yes! That's the sort of stuff people are tuning in for."

RTÉ’s first-day coverage perked up when Mary Kennedy and Eileen Gleeson took over as the queen arrived at the Áras, with details on what people were wearing, colourful information about the furniture and a rundown on who was who and the protocol involved.

For nosy viewers (or the Hello!contingent) it was wildly frustrating to hear only distant snippets of conversations between the main parties at various points during the visit. Wherever the mic was, when the President was doing her meet-and-greet at the war memorial at Islandbridge on Thursday, you could just about, if you strained, hear her remark to the queen that she'd already put in a good morning's work and hoped she'd slept well last night. And what were Prince Philip and the Taoiseach's wife, Fionnuala Kenny, talking about at Government Buildings on Wednesday? They seemed to be having a great old chat. One of the most memorable bits of audio was the army officer's ceremonial greeting to "Banríon Eilís" at the Áras.

Maybe I missed it while flicking from station to station, but it seemed as though there were hardly any aerial shots of the visit, though the shot I did see of the cavalcade heading towards the Garden of Remembrance showed eerily empty streets lined with ugly metal barriers and any number of high-vis jackets – so maybe that’s why.

Bertie Ahern (remember him?) turned up on Boulton Co (Sky News, Wednesday) – nobody else seemed to have asked him – to blather on about the visit. When asked if the city was being discommoded, he said it was no bother: “I drove from the Northside to Dublin Castle in about 12 minutes.” There’s a first: Bertie driving.

Overall, though, this visit delivered some extraordinary and memorable TV images – most of us will have our favourite – and being moved by them was a particularly Irish experience; they won’t mean the same to anyone else.

It was an easy triumph for TV, though: on screen was the only way the vast majority of us got to see the queen.

THE NEW TV CHEF Donal Skehan looks barely old enough to be let hold a sharp knife – though he chopped and sliced goodo in the first episode of Kitchen Hero(RTÉ1, Monday), giving the lie to his repeated protestation that his knife skills aren't the best. It's a programme for young people cooking for themselves for the first time – and it works.

He's enthusiastic, engaging and natural in front of the camera. Filmed in an ordinary, cluttered domestic kitchen, it's heavy on lifestyle – well, not my lifestyle, but a twentysomething hipster's lifestyle. In the first programme he set off – in a Volkswagen camper van, of course – on a surfing weekend in Kerry with his equally good-looking mates, and he did the cooking. We saw them frolicking in the surf, then picking blackberries and having an idyllic alfresco meal. The recipes were far too simple and familiar to be particularly interesting for anyone who cooks at all – pasta soup, fish pie, a pretty nasty-looking beef fajita and a crumble – but for anyone whose idea of getting the dinner is dialling the local takeaway, Kitchen Herois encouraging.

IT'S INEVITABLE that at some point someone will call Skehan "our own Jamie Oliver". He is, after all, young and photogenic, although he doesn't have the Essex boy's culinary inventiveness, or indeed his forceful personality. Not that that's doing Jamie Oliver much good in his new series, Jamie's Food Revolution Hits Hollywood(Channel 4, Tuesday). It's the next step in his mission to get into school canteens to change the menu, the aim being to tackle the United States' deadly obesity crisis from the kids up.

Even before the titles rolled there was a predictability about what was going to happen: Jamie would go full of hope, he’d be misunderstood and ignored, he’d win over a battleaxe of a dinner lady and, in the end, it’d all come right and everyone would realise he is their saviour.

In this week’s first episode we only got to the ignored bit – Hollywood seems deeply underwhelmed by Oliver. He did some tricks, such as getting a digger to fill a school bus with the mountain of sugar served up in the school system every week, and there was some malarkey involving bringing a brown cow into the studio and drawing meat cuts on it, which didn’t really achievemuch more than the chance to use what we were told was “Scarlet, a stunt cow” – well, it is Hollywood. And all this in front of live audiences of 30 or so people, in a city of more than 11 million.

“Maybe it was big mistake,” said a despondent Oliver, surveying the tiny crowd who turned up for his sugar demo, “because what we got at this point in time is rubbish.” And he was right. Not that he’s going to the egg-white-omelette, skinny-soya-latte side of Hollywood; he’s in greasy-food, fat-ass territory in the burbs, and in the first programme came up against a serious problem. The Los Angeles school board, which is responsible for 650,000 meals a day, refused to let him in to one of its schools to advise on its menu and make a TV series out of it. And when you think about it, why should it?

One to get stuck into?

The Late Late Show (RTÉ1, Friday) has become a pale, irrelevant and deadly boring imitation of its former self. Can Ryan Tubridy’s final show this season redeem itself, even a little, and go out with a bang?

tvreview@irishtimes.com