Blingtastic big day out

TV REVIEW: The Truth About TravellersTV3, Tuesday; Head ShopsRTÉ1, Sunday; Living the WildlifeRTÉ1, Tuesday; LutherBBC1, Tuesday; Coronation StreetTV3 and UTV, Monday

DOCUMENTARY MAKER Henry McKean is quiet, soft spoken with an easy manner – and people open up to him as listeners to Newstalk, where he's a roving reporter on the Moncrieff Show, know. For the Truth About Travellers, his new three-part series for TV3, he set out to explore facets of Traveller life. He moved in with a family in a halting site in Tuam (though disappointingly, we don't get to know them). We did, however, see a Traveller wedding as he documented 18-year-old Stacey's big day.

In Traveller culture, where sex before marriage is forbidden (“It would ruin the reputation of the whole family”) and a single woman in her 20s is considered to be firmly planted on the shelf, a wedding is a major event with everyone invited.

Invitations aren’t sent out – guests, even from the far outer reaches of the family tree, just turn up. It’s why a bride and groom are never able to predict just how many will be at their wedding. Stacey, who left school at 13, and who has been planning every detail of her wedding day since before then, looked as fabulous as any young bride. In keeping with a new Traveller tradition, her blingtastic white dress was huge, a great confection with hoops that needed manhandling to get her through the doorway of her family’s small house. Her magnificent glistening crown (“handmade in England, it’s Swarovski crystal,” said the teen bride) and her bridesmaids looked equally glamorous. Her mum and dad were thrilled, the groom looked nervous, Henry danced with the granny at the reception. It was a fairly typical Irish wedding (well, except for Henry and his camera crew) though the sheer lavishness of the day with its two stretch Hummers and white coach and horses was eye-popping.

No mention about how much it cost. Asking Travellers about money and where it comes from is still, it seems, a great taboo. McKean’s interviews with the young Traveller women were particularly interesting. They accepted the restrictions on their lives, no going out to clubs or dances until they were married, (“marriage gives you status”), though the boys are allowed tremendous freedom. And they saw no contradiction in the highly sexualised way some of them dress even as very young teenagers and the conservative rules of behaviour they had to adhere to.

A Traveller wedding was probably an easy, maybe even cliched, aspect of Traveller culture to start with, and McKean didn’t delve too deeply beneath the surface of the shiny sparkly day, but then he didn’t pretend to with his strictly observational approach. I look forward to parts two and three.

THEN THERE ARE those crazy young people. One minute they’re getting off their faces on illegal drugs, the next they’ve taken up horticulture and are so keen they’ll queue at all hours of the night at a manky-looking serving hatch to buy plant food. And those who haven’t acquired green fingers are so worried about personal hygiene they splash out €40 for a gram of bathsalts even though you’d buy a vat of Radox for that.

But of course, nod, nod, wink, wink, they're not really plant food and bath salts at all; in fact, who knows what's in them? But they are used as illegal drug substitutes. So what's to be done? That was the question posed by Philip Boucher-Hayes in his investigative programme Head Shops. It was an odd choice of scheduling, a May bank holiday Sunday when something a bit lighter might be expected – and it wasn't up to Boucher-Hayes's usual standard. In Buyer Beware, his consumer programme, we've seen him dig up detailed original research, and no better man to persistently doorstep all manner of camera dodgers in search of an interview.

Disappointingly, Head Shopsrelied too much on stories that have been well aired – the teenager from Bray who was hospitalised after talking stuff from a head shop (heard on Joe Duffy's Liveline), the young man who stabbed himself with a screwdriver because he was so off his head (this newspaper and others). And the interview with the 20-year-old manager of a head shop in Newbridge was interesting, but surely it would have been far better to track down and get the owner on camera.

The programme did come up with an effective visual to expose just how astonishingly lucrative this unregulated business is and it made the show worthwhile. It trained a camera on a head shop in Dublin that’s open for business 24 hours a day. In the space of four hours it had 900 customers. A minimum purchase of €20 seems to be the norm. The maths isn’t hard. It’s no wonder the 70 head shops around the country are part of the fastest-growing sector in retail.

IT DOESN'T GET more observational than waiting for days in the rain by the banks of the river to film a pair of trout mating, but such is the life of wildlife cameraman Colin Stafford Johnson who is back with a new run of his excellent and beautifully filmed series Living the Wildlife. It's as much about the process of filming as about the actual subjects – a sort of low-key masterclass in wildlife filming – and it has an easy charm. To get a better look at the fish that live in the Royal Canal in Kildare, he set up an impromptu studio and installed a makeshift fishtank in the barn of local farmer Pat Moran whose enthusiasm and impish sense of fun lifted the whole programme – they should bring him on all their shoots.

ON PAPER, LUTHER, the new and much-hyped BBC six-part crime thriller, must have looked a winner, if only because it stars Idris Elba who is TV tough guy royalty following his role as Stringer Bell in The Wire. Here he's London-based John Luther, a maverick cop with a quick temper, a problem with authority and a troubled marriage – just add your own crime fiction cliche and you'll get the picture.

It looks glossy and features TV drama heavyweights (including Ruth Wilson, Paul McGann, Steven Mackintosh and Saskia Reeves), but the plot is beyond the bounds of anything you might believe and the dialogue stilted and stagy. Returning from suspension, Luther is tasked with solving the brutal murder of an elderly couple. The daughter who found the bodies is the prime suspect. He figures out the location of the murder weapon – hidden in the dead dog.

The super-intelligent, though clearly bonkers, daughter did it and Luther knows this because while interviewing her he deliberately yawns, and she doesn’t. He charges out of the interview room to reveal the big breakthrough to his colleagues: “She did it. She didn’t yawn. Yawning is contagious; it’s to do with the part of the brain to do with empathy. No empathy. She did it.”

“And he’s back,” crows his boss at this bit of supersleuthing. Yawn.

Blanche's final journey; 'Dead? But how can she, she's in Portugal'

The sudden death of a much-loved, larger-than-life character presents a huge problem for TV soap scriptwriters although thanks to advance filming schedules there’s time to construct a plot line.

Back in December when the brilliant Maggie Jones, who played Deirdre’s mother Blanche, died suddenly, she was on screen for weeks afterwards with her snarky one liners. “Good looks are a curse,” she tells Deirdre. “You and Ken should count yourselves lucky.”

She was one of Coronation Street’s great comic turns and when she died it was worked into the plot that she was abroad with her friend May – totally out of character, but what’s a scriptwriter to do?

This week she was due to return but Ken got a call from Portugal to say she had died. “Dead?” wailed Deirdre, her neck working overtime. “But how can she, she’s in Portugal.” May (a hilarious turn by June Whitfield) arrived to explain what happened. “Who’s May?” wonders Liz. “Is she the one with the anorexic daughter?”

“No, she’s the one with the gay son with the dogs,” says Deirdre reminding us how hilarious a character battleaxe Blanche was. Enter May (when presented with a drop of brandy “is there a war on, rationing?” she sniffs) to explain why Blanche had stayed on in Portugal after she herself had come home. “She might have had an interior motive,” says May, other fish to fry, a fish called Arnold. Great comic stuff and a fitting send off for Blanche.

tvreview@irishtimes.ie