Vatican tour guides probably don’t mention Catholicism as much as Simon Reeve does in his tour around Ireland. “This is a land steeped in religious faith,” he says in Ireland with Simon Reeve (BBC Two, Sunday). “It’s a country generally considered to be overwhelmingly Catholic and conservative.” And he’s always “thought the Republic of Ireland to be profoundly Catholic”. For a presenter so young and worldly-wise – he has fronted many BBC travel programmes – he sure does have some old-school ideas. When he thinks of Ireland, he says, “faith and identity are high on the list of words that spring to mind”. Really? Does anyone think of the bookish word “identity” when they think of a country? In the end credits, historian Diarmaid Ferriter is listed as one of the series consultants; maybe that accounts for it.
Actually Ireland with Simon Reeve is one programme where it pays to see the end credits first because once you do, it starts to make some sort of sense. The two-part series is made by the Religious and Ethics section of the BBC – a parallel might be Gay Byrne's Meaning of Life show, which is from a similar division in RTÉ. If you didn't know that, you might wonder why the veteran chat-show host purses his lips and asks questions like, "Do you pray?" or, "What would you say to God at the pearly gates?"
Reeve’s Ireland is a jarring mix of random travelogue (the Penny Dinners centre in Cork to posh Crom Castle in Fermanagh) and religious programming. So when he interviews a surfer in Lahinch he turns the conversation to the spiritual benefits of surfing; the organic farmer in Cork is asked, “So your organic faith is a replacement for your religious faith?” (The bemused looking farmer is far too polite to tell him to get up the yard.) And the mountain Reeve visits is, inevitably, Croagh Patrick on a bare foot pilgrimage day.
There are also potatoes. Of course there are, because “the potato remains an object of affection even reverence” in Ireland “though some actually said the famine was a punishment from god”. It gets to the stage that if there are comely maidens dancing at the next crossroads he comes to, I won’t be the least bit surprised.
He visits a startlingly hairy fairy expert, Eddie Linehan, who claims he meets people regularly who have met the fairies and the feeling of being Paddywhacked over the head by a TV programme is painful.
“In modern Ireland with church attendance falling, is there more space for the fairies?” Reeve asks, and he’s not even trying to be funny. “A surprising number of rural Irish still believe in the little people as they are known,” says Reeve as tea-drinking viewers all over the country splutter and spray their screens.
But Ireland looks gorgeous – this island really is extraordinarily photogenic – so that’s nice. Even this programme couldn’t get that wrong.
The third series of The Bridge (BBC Four, Saturday) arrives so quietly I almost miss it. But there it is, the first two episodes back-to-back and instantly familiar, from the dreamy opening credits to its signature look – everything in the Nordic noir could be matched on a grey-to-murk colour chart, the mood and the clothes, the steely water under the Øresund Bridge that links Denmark and Sweden.
It's a crime drama and the first artfully staged murder is of an LGBT activist. But we don't watch The Bridge for the whodunit – you can get that in many places – it's for one of TV's most intriguing detectives, Saga Noren (Sofia Helin).
The engine of the first series was trying to figure her out. She’s rock-chick gorgeous and cool (the baby-poo coloured vintage Porsche, the leather trousers) and she’s entirely without empathy, blunt, with few social skills and painfully logical.
In series one her personality was tantalising. It took a while, helped by hints from her boss, to come to understand that she is on some point on the autism spectrum. It’s the hints and nuances that pulled us in. In this series Helin lays on the oddities in Saga’s character with a trowel. She has facial tics, a strange almost robotic verbal pacing and she obsessively rearranges her bookshelf to calm herself after a fraught meeting with her estranged mother.
There's still enough going on to keep The Bridge compelling – her secretive new Danish detective partner, the kidnapping of her boss, seeing how she'll manage without her pervious partner, the solid and lovely Martin Rohde, and a killing spree to solve – I just wonder if without the previous subtlety in the main character it'll be quite the same. I'll be watching though.
There is no subtlety of any colour in Capital (BBC One, Tuesday), the almost allegorical drama about the folk who live on newly-gentrified Pepys Road – a London cul-de-sac where house prices are rising by the month (a meter appears on screen periodically, the numbers whizzing around, while fairy-tale-friendly music plays).
Older residents such as Petunia (Gemma Jones) – people of modest means who’ve lived there for 60 years – are dying off, their places taken by city bankers such as Roger (Toby Jones – not boorishly bankerish enough for this), lurching from one million-pound bonus to the next while his odious and cartoonish wife Arabella (Rachael Stirling) deals with her day job, which consists of ordering about the cast of Polish builders – “wet rooms were so last year, how do you feel about cedar cladding” – Spanish nannies and assorted other helpers in her immaculately made-over multimillion-pound home.
Then there’s a Pakistani family who run the corner shop, an illegal-immigrant traffic warden from Zimbabwe with a PhD, and a rough-looking grandson. All their lives intertwine when notes saying, “We want what you have” start popping though letterboxes. Who wouldn’t want a slice of this upwardly mobile living? And that’s the premise of this enjoyable enough three-part adaptation of John Lanchester’s critically acclaimed, more acerbic novel.
The most uplifting TV I’ve seen all year is Adele at the BBC (BBC One, Friday). If you’re feeling Novemberish, YouTube even five minutes of it – the bit where she pranks a group of Adele impersonators at an audition is simply brilliant. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll sing along to Adele. What’s not to like?
Ones to Watch: Death and life
Airing on three consecutive days, The Murder Detectives (Channel 4, from Monday) follows a real police investigation (right) into the murder of a teenager in Bristol. Directed by the Bafta award-winning David Nath, it was filmed over 18 months.
Fern Britton Meets . . . (BBC One, Sunday) is a lot like Uncle Gaybo’s God slot, in that she asks guests about their spiritual lives. Back to mark Advent, it this week features the former Boyzone star Shane Lynch. Karren Brady, Paddy Ashdown and Linford Christie will follow.
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