Eurovision Song Contest - RTE1, Saturday
My Hero - BBC1, Monday
TV To Go - BBC1, Monday
Sam's Game - ITV, Monday
A History of Britain - BBC2, Tuesday
Poor old Gary O'Shaughnessy, his name will be on the lips of pub quiz teams for a long time to come. But his true legacy will only become apparent in a year's time. A couple of years back, RTE used its young and funky network and its young but fogey continuity presenters to pitch the Eurovision Song Contest as the Niagara of naffness, instead of the low-grade local talent contest that it really is. Let's see how ironic it is now. Next year we are faced with a Eurovision in which we don't even have a national interest. We can't get rid of the contest, because we're all one big European fondue of bad television now, and if we want to add our cheese to the pot yet again, RTE has to show it, whether we're competing or not. I thought there was supposed to be some sort of Eurovision Division 2, in which Ireland will have to slum it alongside pub singers from Andorra, Tadjikistan and the Vatican in a rusting town hall on the Faroe Islands. A competition with entries from the kind of countries to which irony is still about 20 years of cultural development away. In which doo-doo-doos go on for hours. Where dance routines usually end in a performer whirring off stage like a banjaxed helicopter. If the Eurovision is indeed such a treasure of hilarious bad taste and cheesiness, then this thing should be organised and shown. We can look forward to 37 hours live coverage on RTE next May.
FATHER Ted once did the best job of parodying a Eurovision that seems beyond parody, and Ardal O'Hanlon's Father Dougal turned up presenting and making it near the top of Channel 4's Greatest 100 TV Characters last week. He's still pretty early on in his career, but playing one of the most loved sitcom fools of all time may yet prove his undoing, if My Hero is anything to go by. It's like the producers isolated his popularity as that wide-eyed, stiff-shouldered gape from Father Ted, and then decided to write an entire series around it. This is the second series, and even though he's tried to stretch himself with the straighter Big Bad World, it is here, on prime-time BBC1, that the true post-Ted career will be judged. The basic premise of My Hero sounds pretty smart: Ardal O'Hanlon is a superhero. It's only when you put it in a phone booth and it emerges naked that you realise it's not quite as super as it thinks. He plays Thermoman, although maybe he should be called Takes-Everything-Literally Man, because whenever somebody says something such as, "I'd rather poke my eye out with a large stick than watch My Hero", he will promptly hand them a large stick and follow it with some wide-eyed, stiff-shouldered gaping. It's a single joke sprinkled liberally with tiresome sexual innuendo and misplaced surrealism. After a while it turns you into a sort of superhero even while you're slumped on the couch trying to find the remote control. You can see the jokes coming before they happen. Punchlines bounce off you without effect.
PAULINE McLynn fares better in TV To Go, a sketch show unlikely to break the mould, but which may at least stem the tide of people lining up on the streets to shout "Go on! Go on! Go on" at her for the rest of her life. There are no catch-phrases as yet in TV To Go, unlike The Fast Show which, in the main, simply repeated sentences over and over again until you found yourself wandering out of the toilet one day, saying "Today I have mostly been eating corn" in a Cotswolds accent, but not really knowing why. These days, all sketch comedy has to be labelled post-Fast Show, which is why TV To Go is sensible to go back to straight, variety stuff - what if men were women, that kind of thing - with the only proviso being that the subject matter must be contemporary. It misses more than it hits, but there's an eagerness to the performers - including McLynn, Hugh Dennis, Mina Anwar and Ricky Grover - that's sort of winning, and which makes you think that, even when it isn't that funny, there's always the chance of a better sketch just around the corner.
ED Byrne must have been about the only Irish comedian not to have appeared in an episode of Father Ted, but this week he got his first real go at primetime in Sam's Game. Actually, it isn't his programme really, but a vehicle for Davina McCall, a TV presenter whose aim seems to be to get into every corner of the schedules until she's playing the national anthem on guitar, mouth organ and with a pair of cymbals tied to her ankles. As a presenter she is a bossy, camp ladette, and for a sitcom she is not about to stretch her talents beyond getting out of bed in the morning and turning up in the studio, so she plays Sam - you've guessed it: a bossy, camp ladette. This is a new phenomenon, the one of presenter-turned-actor. Michael Barrymore has his moments in Bob Martin, Denise Van Outen had only bad moments in Babes in the Wood, and Davina McCall . . . well, she'll be selling porcelain cottages on the Shopping Channel for a long time to come, so let's give her her moment. Sam lives with her flatmate (Ed Byrne fine as cheeky Irish wimp), in a building in which people waltz in and out of flats without knocking. There is farce a-plenty, as people burst in at the wrong moments, everybody shouts very loudly, people say things that are taken up completely the wrong way and lead to crazy goings on. Basically, it's Friends, or at least it wishes it was, and even goes as far as to practically replicate the set. That wheeze is already being played out brilliantly by Ant and Dec every Saturday morning in Chums. But Sam's Game has more in common with Babes in the Wood and the recent, flat Two Pints and a Packet of Crisps, in which any joke with the word puke in it was reckoned to be a good one. This sort of stuff is aimed squarely at the yoof market, and you can usually gauge how much by how quickly somebody drinks out of a beer can that's been used as an ashtray. In Sam's Game it came in at a little over three minutes.
There had been so much advanced press on Cutting Edge: 57 Screaming Kids that it could only turn out to be pretty ordinary, and in the end there was little about Screaming Jay Hawkins and his bedroom athleticism that we didn't learn from the trailers. The line from one club owner, though, was unintentionally priceless. He was number one on the totem pole as real lover. He certainly was.
IF you watched that, you may have missed the excellent A History of Brit- ain by Simon Schama on BBC2 at the same time, now in its second series, and as consistently hypnotic as before. This week dealt with the rise and eventual disgrace of Oliver Cromwell, an army general who swept in to replace King Charles and became best known here for slaughtering 3,000 people in Drogheda, but who ultimately, if posthumously, fell out of favour with his own people after he did the unthinkable. He cancelled Christmas. There is something about the name Drogheda that foreigners can't quite get their mouths around. Barbara Stanwyck spent much of The Thornbirds calling it Drokeeda. Simon Schama's pronunciation of it as Drokta was the only thing that jarred in an account of Cromwell's crimes that did not shirk. There's no point in side-stepping this, he said, knowing that this kind of history rarely gets told. No eye-witnesses ever confirmed the butchering of defenceless women and children, but the cutting down of 3,000 mostly surrendered and unarmed soldiers was described in horrendous detail, Schama acknowledging in stark terms that the massacre has bled all the way through subsequent generations. Cromwell was a narrow-minded, pig-headed, Protestant bigot and English imperialist. His statue stands tall outside Westminster. A History of Britain always plays like a thriller, with Schama's wonderful turn of phrase and the unobtrusive snatches of reconstruction. But it has an intellectual core that makes it truly satisfying. Cromwell's body was dug up three years after his death, publicly hanged and then re-buried in a deep pit. After over a decade of wanton massacre, a harsh campaign of righteousness through the land and a coup d'etat, he had died in his bed. On that night, a black tempest tore through the land. It was, the old wives said, the devil coming for his soul.
tvreview@irish-times.ie