With summer over, it's time to settle down to an autumn of new television. The new schedules have some welcome returns, but others that would be better staying off air, argues Shane Hegarty
Take a look at the new autumn schedules and it's easy to see how Irish television is suffering from a financial crisis, but a little harder to see that British television is suffering a crisis of identity. ITV is leaking viewers fast. The BBC is accused of engaging in a ratings war while shoving its more cerebral content onto BBC2 and new digital channel BBC4. Channel 4 has decided it has drifted too far from its original brief. That Channel 5, a station once famous for naked game shows and prurient sex documentaries, now shows successful prime-time documentaries on Valasquez and Bruegel the Elder in between Australian soaps and US TV movies has only compounded the angst.
Glance through the schedules and there are good documentaries and decent comedies, but look at prime-time and it will all begin to blur into one. Light entertainment and television drama have become derivative and formulaic, with channels acting like bees around the same honey pot.
If you love the Popstars-type format, you've probably already auditioned for one. If you don't, then look away now. They will dominate the schedules until Christmas and beyond. RTÉ has adapted the formula for You're A Star, in which it attempts to give the Eurovision vision a jumpstart, by picking Ireland's entry from the populace. It will run for 20 weeks from October. At least Louis Walsh won't be involved, but he will be on Popstars: The Rivals, ITV's mating of Popstars and Big Brother, in which a boy and girl band will emerge with the aim of being number one and two in the Christmas charts.
Channel 4, meanwhile, will run a second series of Model Behaviour, in which young girls compete to win a life of bulimia and catwalk tantrums. The BBC may turn out to be the smartest of them all, however, with Fame Academy, another talent hunt, but this time with the winners becoming BBC presenters rather than a money-making machine for a pop svengali.
It's a formula RTÉ might have looked at, given how its own Star Factory seems deeper in recession than ever before. This is the 40th year of the Late Late Show, and that it will once again be hosted by Pat Kenny will undoubtedly both cement his reputation as a presenter from another era, but also highlight the lack of choices further down the generations.
Perhaps the most interesting move from RTÉ is the poaching of Hector Ó hEochagáin, the most natural star to emerge on Irish television in recent years. The success of his new series Only Fools Buy Horses, in which he attempts to buy and train a successful race horse in only six weeks, will test RTÉ's legendary ineptitude with new talent. That he has managed to get this far without being given a supine game show or badly conceived chat show should make no one complacent.
Elsewhere, Colin Murphy will get another bite of the cherry with X-it Files, which follows on from X-it Poll, a series which may have proved popular less for its patchy humour than for Pat Shortt's brilliant spoof election candidate. Tommy Tiernan's Walking Tour of Ireland will at least see a series handed to one of Ireland's more renowned comedians, and his ramble around Ireland could prove a highlight of Network 2's Monday night comedy strand, one of the station's most promising innovations of recent times.
We should be grateful, though, that we have yet to see an Irish version of the reality game shows with a celebrity twist. Celebrity Big Brother has a lot to answer for. I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here is already in its second week on ITV, and it will be followed by Celebrity Fat Club, in which some D-list celebs attempt to slim their waistlines while piling on the publicity. Encouraged by the planned punch-up between Les Dennis and Bob Mortimer during this year's Comic Relief, the BBC is also planning bouts of Celebrity Boxing. And Celebrity Big Brother will be back to rescue/destroy some careers.
As far as drama is concerned, it will be the season of the Living Dead, with British television's reliance on ex-soap stars hopefully reaching its peak. That it has proven less than successful in the past seems not to have deterred anyone. There will be a burst of costume dramas, a dramatisation of Jeffrey Archer's life and times, and Channel 4 has developed a four-part series from Zadie Smith's literary phenomenon, White Teeth. But as a rule, be prepared for glossy, well-produced dramas with no soul.
Sarah Lancashire has had more misses than hits since leaving Coronation Street, specialising as a tough mother struggling against the odds, but finds herself in both a cancer drama, The Lucky Ones, and a legal drama, The Insiders.
Ex-Eastenders abound. Tamzin Outhwaite gets two dramas for the BBC. Ross Kemp plays an SAS commando in Ultimate Force. Martin Kemp gets his first post-soap role as a father who may have murdered his wife in Daddy's Girl. Not ex-soap, but equally over-exposed, Fay Ripley turns up yet again, this time as a murderous wife in Dead Gorgeous. If she married Martin Kemp's murderous husband, they could perhaps cancel each other out.
IT says so much for the respective budgets that while the British channels can portion out two dramas per star, RTÉ can only manage one per channel. Aside from the new series of Bachelor's Walk, On Home Ground returns for a second chance to get things right. That the two dramas - three if you include Fair City - are all returns rather than originals does present the cupboard as being a little more bare than it might be. It's been a quietly consistent year for RTÉ drama, and it insists that more is to come, just not all at once.
"If we had more money we would love to have more drama," says Claire Duignan, head of independent productions, "but the bottom line is that it's expensive to do. We would like more soaps and more single dramas. But part of the challenge for us is to spread the programmes over the year. We don't have enough resources to fill the schedules all year round. If we put everything in at autumn, it would come crashing down around our ears at Easter."
Compared to the TV3 cupboard, of course, it looks like a positive Aladdin's Cave of entertainment. TV3 has a single new home-grown programme, a series of one-off documentaries, Matters Of Fact. The newly acquired football rights are its biggest selling point. "There's no point in saying that there's lots of Irish made programmes, because there's not," admits Gillian Rowntree, TV3 public relations manager. "I suppose we've only been here for four years and we're giving the audience what it wants. The tried and tested formula for us is drama and movies. Yes, long-term we would like more home-grown programmes, and it constantly gets thrown back at us. But it is very expensive, and besides, you can't run before you can walk."
On a lighter note, The Sopranos is back with a delayed but much anticipated fourth series. The Office finally returns after over a year of mouth-watering repeats. And I'm Alan Partridge also returns to bring us television that satirises television, but at a time when it's often difficult to tell the difference.
