Faster, higher, stronger . . . or slower, lower, duller?

TV REVIEW:The gymnastics programme was one to watch for the pure nostalgia of seeing Olga Korbut grown up

AS RTÉ HAS GONE to the trouble of putting together a summer season – it wasn’t to know there wouldn’t actually be a summer – you’d have to at least tune into some of the new programmes, and Truckers (RTÉ One, Tuesday) looked like this week’s most promising offering. And it had Dáithi Ó Sé, who surely would be in a blinged-up rig yahooing across the country.

But, no, he’s just doing the voiceover, opening the programme with a line worthy of Alan Partridge: “The Irish trucking industry is on the move.” And, just to complete the corniness, it went slowly downhill from there.

The first relentlessly dull episode focused on two companies doing home removals: a new one-man operation set up by a guy on a back-to-work scheme, and a well-established, successful firm.

Home removals should be rich pickings for entertaining yarns – with boxes of Waterford Crystal crashing to the ground or unusual things spotted in bedside lockers – but this was so downbeat that I’d have been happy even with a creaky old yarn about a piano careering down the stairs.

Instead we were firmly in doom-and-gloom territory. One family was emigrating. The man with a van talked about emigrating himself. Even one of the clients, an older woman who had sold her house to downsize – a good-news story, surely – was framed in misery. Ó Sé and the incongruous indie-pop soundtrack seemed thrown in as afterthoughts in a desperate effort to create a bit of atmosphere. A programme about removals has rarely felt so static.

THE UPCOMING DELUGE of Olympic programmes started to trickle this week with the four-part Faster, Higher, Stronger (BBC Two, Monday-Thursday), which told the history of the games through the evolution of four sports. The film about the 100m looked at how runners’ technique and body shape have evolved since 1924, when the race was won in 10.6 seconds, to Jim Hines, the first to run a sub-10-second race, and Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second run. It was full of facts – the original race track was made of cinder, starting blocks were introduced in 1948, and I’m now quite the expert on “the drive phase and the transition to maximum velocity” – but what I’m less clear about was why the programme was so coy about drugs in athletics. Ben Johnson’s fall from grace was mentioned very much in passing, as if that was a rare and never-again-repeated blip in the sport. It seemed if not phoney then incomplete.

The gymnastics programme was one to watch for the pure nostalgia of seeing Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci – the superstars of the 1972 and 1976 games, who had every girl at the time doing somersaults in front of the telly – all grown up. Comaneci, who famously scored a perfect 10, summed up what drives all the athletes. “What exactly is the end of perfection? There is no end.”

THE NEWSROOM (Sky Atlantic, Tuesday), the first foray into cable-TV drama for the Emmy- and Oscar- winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, came to this side of the Atlantic trailing savage reviews and a recommission for a second series.

Watching the first episode, it’s easy to see why both responses make sense. Set in a US cable-news network, it features Will McEvoy (Jeff Daniels), a bland anchorman who loses it at a college function when a student asks why the United States is the greatest country in the world. McEvoy rants, for what feels like a very long time, buffering his response with rattled-off statistics (a tiresome feature of the dialogue throughout) about gun crime and illiteracy and the rest, making his case why the US isn’t great.

What was maybe intended as a homage to Peter Finch’s classic newsman meltdown in Network came across as a pompous lecture from a smug professor. McEvoy’s speech goes viral, and he has his “aha” moment and resolves to shake off his reputation “as the Jay Leno of news” and to become like one of the great American newsmen of the past, a Walter Cronkite saving the US and journalism from a sea of trivia.

His new producer is his hated old flame Mackenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer). “I’d rather do a good news show for 100 than a bad news show for a million,” says McHale from her soapbox as she and McEvoy quip in an Adam’s Rib sort of way about Cervantes, moral values and contemporary culture, because The Newsroom is always trying to flatter viewers into thinking they’re watching something wildly intelligent, that this is TV it’s okay to admit to watching.

And, rather than create fake news stories, Sorkin uses events of the recent past. The Newsroom is set in 2010, so the first episode features the disastrous BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, not as it was reported in the immediate aftermath but as Sorkin, with the hindsight that colours all old news, thinks it should have been handled.

So, minutes after the story breaks, McEvoy, in his new truth-bustin’ persona, is live on air, accusing the guy from Halliburton of negligence, with none of that annoying stuff such as consulting lawyers or confirming his sources.

It’s pointless to pick holes in the journalism side of the programme – forensic pathologists don’t think CSI is workaday reality – and, after all, despite its current-affairs gloss, The Newsroom is just entertainment. Which is why the newsroom is staffed by attractive twenty- and thirtysomethings, including the nerd, the shy beauty and the alpha male, all glossy TV drama and chick-lit stereotypes and all flirting and firing clever dialogue at each other with such machine-gun speed that the water cooler must be dispensing Red Bull.

It’s a clever soap, for me filling the gap left by Grey’s Anatomy, so I’ll just set my eyes to roll mode during the speechifying from McEvoy/Sorkin and Mortimer.

NORA OWEN IS DOING solid work as quizmaster on Celebrity Mastermind (TV3, Sunday). The contestants, mostly well-known people playing for charity, look terrified, and Owen talks to them very slowly, as if they might bolt from the studio at any moment. In what must be a first for the franchise, a contestant got bolshie about a question. “Which Romanian leader was executed along with his wife?” asked Owen. “Ceausescu,” answered Nell McCafferty. “Yes,” said Owen. “Mention the wife,” grumped McCafferty. “She got it in the head too.”

tvreview@irishtimes.com

Get stuck into . . .

Faster, Higher, Stronger (RTÉ One, Tuesday) has the same name as the BBC series, but it is the Olympic motto, after all. The Irish Times journalist Ian O’Riordan looks at the growing impact science and technology, legal and illegal, have had on sport and asks whether it can ever regain our trust.