Shane Hegarty 24 (BBC2, Sunday); Fergus's Wedding (N2, Monday); Lottery Liar: Real Life (ITV, Tuesday); The Abortion Referendum (All channels, all week)
With 24, the "why-didn't-I-think-of-that" idea is that each episode consists of one hour in the 24 that make up one big, bad-guy busting day for the dedicated - not to mention mesmerisingly sexy - agents of the CIA. Kiefer Sutherland plays Jack Bauer, an agent who receives a call at the stroke of midnight telling him he has one day to stop the assassination of a black presidential candidate. As is the way of these things, he's also trying to save his marriage and find out where his errant daughter has sneaked off to. Meanwhile, the assassin is jetting in to murder the candidate, who himself has taken a phone call suggesting he faces a potential scandal. All the while, Jack must root out a double agent at loose within his office. As I said, a big day.
24 is made in real time, or at least real time for American television and its regular ad breaks. A clock appears every now and again to remind you of that central conceit. Never mind that there is a little television trickery going on. Jack gets the call at home, and a mere 10 minutes later is in his office being briefed by a sexy CIA agent. His daughter disappears out of the house, meets up with a couple of no-good punks, gets drunk, fools around with one of them and heads for home all in a record-breaking 45 minutes. But if fiction was really true-to-life, as screenwriter William Goldman pointed out, our hero would spend most of the movie driving around the block looking for a parking space rather than pulling up conveniently at the doors of city hall. So what if 24 takes liberties with your credulity? It is absorbing and slick and you instantly forgive it.
There was an outrageous twist to the opening episode, but one so deftly constructed and brazenly executed that you could only admire it and hope for more of the same. It will, I suspect, be a series built on audacious cliffhangers. It also makes liberal use of split screen, sometimes to move the story to another character, sometimes just to show off. The office is dark, being lit mainly by computer screens, just like every television office is these days, but at least in 24 it adds a certain glossy claustrophobia. And the idea's great strength is that anything the characters do will have no long-term consequences. In the opening episode, for instance, it was OK for Jack to invite a fellow agent into his office, shoot him in the leg with a tranquilliser gun, blackmail him and send him on his way. Within the time-frame of this six-month long day, he's got a long time before he gets busted down to being a traffic cop
Whether it can keep this up for a whole series is another matter, although there are promising signs that it will do its damnedest to keep faith with the conceit. Apparently - and I'm not making this up - one character soon jumps on a plane, and is not seen again for five weeks.
Three episodes in to Fergus's Wedding and we should be looking for our toasters back. For all its potential, its fine cast or how nice it looks, the laughs refuse to come out. As was feared at the offset, the daft wigs and joke-shop teeth are there only to dress up characters rather than complement them. It is so enamoured with such devices - Patrick McDonald's ridiculous moustache, Michael McElhatton's entire head - that when Fergus's future in-laws turned up this week, you half expected them to wander off the ferry wearing comedy red noses and hilariously over-sized shoes.
It pays heed to all the standard, recognisable scenarios of a wedding - the meddling parents, the family rivalries, an unplanned pregnancy, the mounting cost - but can't make anything of them. Whole tracts of dialogue wander aimlessly, in desperate search of a punchline. The novelty of the swinging palled long ago, and nothing about any of the characters is convincing. It increasingly resembles a private joke that should have stayed that way.
It is a great shame that the most heavily hyped RTÉ programme of the year has failed so badly, because these are delicate times for the station and there is the fear that they'll run scared of comedy once again. But there's no escaping the truth.
By the time the end of episode six comes around, Fergus will be delivering his speech to an empty hall, interrupted only by the sound of the cleaner sweeping up the mess.
Lottery Liar was a true story to relish. It all began when Howard Wharmsley went shopping with his wife Kathy. She liked the look of an £8 pair of open-toe shoes, but knew unemployed Howard couldn't afford to buy them. He insisted she did. She said no. He had a brainwave. "Get whatever you want," he announced. "We've won the Lottery."
Howard, delightfully, hadn't won the lottery at all. But he quickly discovered the advantages in having people think he had landed £8.9 million. Debt collectors, ironically, stopped bugging him in the presumption that he'd pay up soon enough.
Banks promised to wipe away his debts if he would lodge his cash with them. He became everybody's favourite drinking buddy. "People paid more attention to me than if I hadn't won the lottery." Amazing, that.
If you are going to pretend you've won the lottery, you might as well pretend you've won big. Howard took Kathy on a continental holiday, began bragging to anyone who would listen and then thought it best to begin displaying the actual trappings of a lottery winner. He bought three Jaguars (for himself, his wife and his brother) and kept his foot on the accelerator as far as the story was concerned. "I had to lie, because if I hadn't have lied then she'd have known the truth." Well said, Howard.
He had a poker face so severe that the words had to crowbar their way through his lips, but was smarter than he let on. He took advantage of the banks' generosity, and began writing cheques to himself for £8.9 million, realising that they would show up on his statement before bouncing. So many cheques bounced that his accounts began to resemble an explosion at a squash ball factory. But it did the trick. He bought a farmhouse, had an architect design plans for a pool and some stables. He ordered a snooker table and a £17,000 kitchen. He regaled anybody who would listen with tales of what he would do with his new-found wealth. The tractor for a starving village in Africa was a particularly nice gesture.
He was, don't forget, actually flat broke. The only currency he had was optimism. He spent £70 a week on lottery tickets just in case his numbers really did come up. Reality arrived in the same car as the police, who turned up on his doorstep, charged him with 13 counts of deception and sent him to jail for three years. His fellow inmates call him 'Bonus Ball'.
Kathy stayed with him, despite discovering that he had bankrolled his Walter Mitty japes through a £30,000 loan he had persuaded a mistress to take out. Now, Howard just wants to do his time, get his life together and find a proper job when he gets out on parole at Christmas. Go on, Howard, send an application form to AIB.
You'll have noticed the referendum we had this week, but you'd have been harder pressed to have picked out the clear arguments among the chorus appearing on television. The panelists on Questions and Answers this week threatened to outnumber the audience. This debate is becoming so splintered, and the duties of the media so onerous, that if there is another referendum, anybody with an opinion and who shouts loud enough will be in with a chance of getting themselves some equal airtime.
A solution to the confusion presented itself on Tuesday. In future referenda, it is as well to avoid all Irish coverage altogether, to dodge the exponentially fragmenting arguments and to approach every nuance of the debate as you would a drunken brain surgeon.
Instead, wait until the eve of the referendum, when you can turn on the British news and get all the information you need about the ballot, condensed, spelled out in big letters for our neighbours and unburdened by any laws governing equal airtime for everyone. You will have to accept the odd mis-spelling of names (Sky News interviewed TD Mary Hamifan).
And you will also need a high tolerance to shots of elderly people going to Mass, young people sitting at sidewalk cafés. Nuns standing beside punks, that sort of thing.
Your brain, though, might thank you for it.