Drama ends as Wagner leaves

TV REVIEW: The X FactorTV3/UTV, Saturday and Sunday;  The All Ireland Talent ShowRTÉ, Sunday; The AccusedBBC1, Monday; PanoramaBBC1, Monday; Mad MenBBC4, Wednesday

SO NO MORE WAGNER (with a V), and this weekend’s

X Factor

is going to be duller place. All the same, his bug-eyed stare had become scary, and that’s only on my small telly – viewers with 55in high-definition jobs must be traumatised. Happily, though, it’s also the end of Simon Cowell’s weekly panto performance that saw him threaten to abandon the country/

The X Factor

/his high-waisted pants if Wagner was voted in again or his theories that people were only voting for the bizarre Brazilian to get at him.

A more plausible theory is that people were voting for Wagner because, weird and all as he was, he was a bit of colour. What’s there to get excited about if Mary goes out tomorrow night? Will Matt ever wear his manky hat again? Can drippy Rebecca lift those feet that seem nailed to the stage? Where does Cher get those horrible shiny trackies? And how cute and commercial are those boys in One Direction (if only they could sing a bit better)?

There's still the weekly wait to see what daft dress Cheryl has on or what colour Louis's hair is going to be, but it's hardly thrilling, is it? And what's going to happen to Wagbo, the crazed, hilarious, hyperactive mustachioed love child of Wagner and Mary on Harry Hill's TV Burp(UTV)?

OUR OWN STAR search, The All Ireland Talent Show, had a fantastic bit of bad luck this week in the shape of the live broadcast on RTÉ1 on Sunday night of the press conference detailing the bailout. The Six One Newswas extended, pushing the talent show into direct competition with The X Factor. It turns out – and pushy, stage-struck parents take note – masochists that we are, we'd prefer to watch our talentless politicians delivering devastating news than any number of cute children in their Sunday best singing Flying Without Wings.

About 500,000 viewers usually tune in to that Sunday-night slot. Brian Cowen’s bad-news conference added an extra 250,000, a huge audience for any news slot. Those who stayed on to watch the talent show were treated to the homely (“we’re doing it for the parish”) mixum-gatherum of acts. In what other show (or crazed parallel universe) would a pole dancer be up against a couple of sean-nós dancers or a grizzly-looking harmonica player hope to outdo a boy soprano?

For the purpose of the competition the country is divided into five: north, south, east, west and the Pale. Last week Dáithí Ó Sé kicked off the series in what he kept calling the Weshht – so maybe there are six regions. This week it was the east, with Bláthnaid Ní Chofaigh as lead judge. She does a great job, hamming it up and injecting a bit of fun into the proceedings. She also had two guest judges culled from RTÉ radio, Cormac Battle and Brenda Donohue.

It was Bláthnaid's show, though, with the judges pretty much for ornament. Battle's style was to chip in daft airtime-filling musings, such as "I felt like I was at a gig" or "I felt like I was sitting watching a freight train pass by", while Donohue, a little ill-advisedly, took a leaf out of Cheryl Cole's X Factorjudging book. Cole regularly tells the boys how much she'd love to hug them. It usually produces a grin of transcendent joy and a faint blush. Brenda told two gorgeous little twin boys from Kilkenny that they were so cute she'd like to "grab them in my big bosom and squeeze them". They looked terrified.

The All Ireland Talent Show's gently entertaining village-hall-competition atmosphere is broken every time one of the contestants sinks into X Factor-speak and talks about "living the dream" or "wanting to share the journey" or how winning the show "would change their lives". Looking at all those hopeful faces, it's hard not to feel a little uncomfortable about the delusion.

THE THIRD PLAY in Jimmy McGovern's Accusedseries was Helen's Story. It was less controversial than last week's army-themed one but still firing on considerable star power – and that was part of the problem. The familiarity of the actors was distracting. Juliet Stevenson played Helen, a mild- mannered teacher whose teenage son is killed in an accident at work. The play opened in a courtroom where Helen is charged with a crime that is revealed as the story unfolds. As a study in grief, Stevenson's performance was deeply moving, but the plot required her to move from passive and unquestioning acceptance to dogged persistence as she tried going through the legal system to get justice for her son.

When that failed she set fire to the factory where he died. The shift wasn't credible, and too much action was jammed into too little time. And can Peter Capaldi ever shake off Malcolm Tucker, the brilliantly foul-mouthed creation and star of The Thick of It? Just one look at his face and you expect vein-throbbing anger and a string of astonishingly inventive and anatomically challenging curses, which isn't great when he's trying to play a middle-of-the-road middle-aged father engulfed with grief and unable to communicate with this wife.

Unusually for McGovern, there were too many glitches in the plot. How does Helen get access to the factory to burn it down? Would she really be a drinking buddy of her much younger and very different colleague? How could Capaldi, dressed in a clown costume, walk into a courtroom to make an impassioned speech before the jury? Don’t these people have security guards? Sure, it was a bit of theatrical business, but it left a large credibility gap. You can usually rely on McGovern for pinpoint realism, but not here, and the drama suffered.

A REPORTER KNOWS he's done a good job when his documentary hits the headlines even before it's aired. Monday's Panoramaalleged that three Fifa officials took bribes in the 1990s. The allegations have been well aired, but Andrew Jennings, its investigative reporter, had new details. The timing couldn't have been more delicate, as it was shown only days before Fifa decided who is to host the World Cup in 2018, and England was in contention.

Jennings is the real deal, chasing down his prey, shooting questions across car parks and getting hustled out of buildings. It’s a good thing the facts and figures (which ran into millions) were compelling, because the film-making worked against him, with loud and intrusive plinky-plonky music running under most scenes either to add drama or, maybe, to make it seem more accessible. The news on Thursday that Russia had bagged the prize will have conspiracy theorists wondering if a TV dissing of Fifa’s top brass helped kill the English bid.

tvreview@irishtimes.com

Mad for it Don starts the episode with Faye and finishes it lying in bed beside Megan

To add to the gloom, the fourth series of Mad Menended this week. It has been brilliant, the final episode being one of the best in the series, which was set in 1964-1965 – and apologies to anyone who doesn't have BBC4 and has to wait for it to land on RTÉ or Channel 4.

The perfectly formed episode began with Don Draper in bed with Faye and ended back in his apartment with Don staring at the ceiling while Megan, his secretary and new fiancee, sleeps by his side. It was a busy, event-filled 45 minutes (no ads on BBC4), working in all the key characters and setting them up with juicy plots for series five.

An ingenious parallel plot (perhaps borrowed from The Sound of Music, released in 1965?) saw Megan going on a business trip with Don to California to mind his children, whom he was bringing along for a holiday. She got on so fabulously that all she was short of was running up a couple of outfits from the motel's curtains. Don (Captain von Trapp) sees how fantastic she is with the children, falls in love, proposes and ditches his chilly, super-controlled, child-hating girlfriend, Faye. (On being dumped Faye utters a classic Mad Menline, saying that Don only enjoys "the beginnings of things".) Is that way too much analysis? It could be a Sound of Musicriff or it could simply be Don being Don, having it away with the secretary as usual (apart from the hilarious Mrs Blenkenship episodes). Or maybe Maddicts like me are seeing things that aren't there and need a break from the forensic dissection of the layers of symbolism and cultural references that Mad Menencourages.