TV Review:Since Ballykissangel bit the dust, the verdant hills of Co Wicklow have been biding their time, filing their firs and plumping up their hillocks in anticipation of another wellington-ed film crew advancing on their greenery, dragging cameras and catering vans in their wake.
And now their patience has been rewarded by the new RTÉ/BBC co-production, Rough Diamond, which looks set to take up where BallyK left off. Set in the competitive world of elegant stud farms and precocious racehorses, the stylishly shot series kicked off with a solid (and extremely busy) narrative and confident performances from the drama's comfortably familiar protagonists.
This equestrian tail - sorry, tale - of blood and turf opened on Firebrand, a stud farm owned by Charlie Carrick (Stanley Townsend), who, basking in silk-shirted wealth like a gorgeous and malevolent iguana, was poised to eat the tatty, burnt-out neighbouring stud that his defeated and erstwhile rival, Aidan Doherty (Conor Mullen), was about to sell him.
Until, much to Charlie's gold-plated chagrin, cloppity-clop on the cobblestones, Doherty's planned Antipodean escape went up in smoke as he suddenly found himself in possession not only of a coltish son he never knew he had, but also (and possibly more significantly) of a highly-strung horse whose "liquid intelligence" and staggering lineage (grandson of Shergar, apparently) would potentially reignite his formerly successful stud. Oh whoops, Mr Carrick, there's your wife tripping over her spurs with suppressed delight.
Deciding to give the place a go again seems likely to earn Doherty a couple more canters around the ring with the female constituency of Bally-Go-Horsey, where his reputation as a ladies' man seems unscathed (nay, enhanced) by the fact that he rides into town and tethers up his mare outside the picture-postcard bookie's office. Which brings us to the strange, vaguely seductive but wholly unbelievable fantasy that English television-makers again seem set to perpetuate about rural Irish life. Once more (and probably harmlessly) we are being portrayed as a nation of whitewashed geranium-lovers marooned at a crossroads of Celtic feistiness and ivy-covered eccentricity. But with the excellent Mullen and Townsend scattering this entirely palatable bag of oats, I'll eat my jodhpurs if Rough Diamond isn't a dead cert. It's good, clean, feel-good fun, and crying out, one feels, for a cosy Sunday-evening slot when we can ponder the pageantry of the scarlet-coated grooms at our leisure and fantasise about living with a bunch of stallions in a dower house.
'YOU CAN'T FILM a real trial, but this is as real as it gets." On Sunday, Channel 4, with perilously scant thought for bushy-tailed Monday morning, offered us 120 minutes of Consent, an entirely uncosy television hybrid, a docudrama that began with a reconstruction of a fictional crime and went on to try that "crime", a sexual assault, in a "real" court.
The assault was alleged to have taken place after a man (Steve) and a woman (Becs) - competitive, unsympathetic work colleagues - were seen dancing, drinking and flirting at an out-of-town office bash. We observed them kissing in her hotel room and were then fast-forwarded to the next morning, when Steve was at the breakfast buffet and Becs had left the hotel. Later, Steve was arrested and accused of rape, an accusation he vehemently denied.
With the dramatised reconstruction out of the way, the programme went on to explore the aftermath of the incident, using real-life professionals (police officers, doctors and judiciary) who interacted with the actors as the case moved to court to be judged by a jury made up of ordinary men and women, plucked from the electoral register, who had their deliberations filmed.
What was in the dock in Consent was "date rape", that inadequate and flimsy term, a sweetmeat on the sexual assault table that is often treated with faux-hysteria or a smirk and invariably sets in train a wary cynicism. Although one could sense the programme pushing hard against such prejudice, it ultimately failed to avoid prurience and sensationalism.
As Becs was subjected to a barrage of questioning from the real-life female defence lawyer as to the exact angle of her bottom when her knickers were being removed, and as we watched her lingerie being passed from juror to juror in a cellophane bag, the experiment began to feel tawdry, though it was presumably an accurate portrayal of an adversarial system that militates against women bringing their cases to court in the first place.
"He must be guilty beyond doubt or he must be acquitted - the media do not understand this, but you have to," the defence lawyer instructed the jury in her summing-up. There was a depressing inevitability to the unscripted outcome of the trial, as the majority of the jurors moved to have Steve acquitted.
"It was abundantly clear that she enjoyed rough sex," claimed Steve, and the jury, smugly confident and more than a little censorious, chose to interpret the bruising on Becs's body as consent. After Steve's acquittal, we were finally allowed to see the missing frames of the dramatic reconstruction, a sequence in which Steve, his hands over Becs's mouth and neck to quieten her screams, raped her.
The format of Consent had the feel of a murky parlour game, but the programme made its dispiriting point effectively enough - that justice for rape victims is scant and elusive.
'ONCE AGAIN, THE streets are running with blood," said Fayed, his brown eyes shining with princely fervour, and once again the big US drama 24 is revelling in the mayhem, putting "the war on terror" slap-bang in the middle of its highly entertaining, gruesomely visceral and politically questionable heart. Yes, Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) is back, bearded and pasty-faced, fresh from 20 months of invigorating torture, mind-numbing isolation and a serious lack of a decent barber, all courtesy of the Chinese government.
Poor chap - no sooner had he emerged like a broken sparrow from under the wing of an aircraft-carrier than he'd been handed as bait to Fayed (Adam Alexi-Malle), who in return for being allowed to carve up Jack had promised to lead the CTU chaps to Assad (Alexander Siddig), an "Islamist activist" apparently in the throes of "victimising" the US.
"Jack Bauer has to be sacrificed so this country can survive," said President Palmer (DB Woodside), so off went Jack, handcuffed and (thankfully) clean-shaven, to the terrorists' lair to offer up his traumatised body for further retribution (you know the kind of thing: a little severing of nerve-endings, a spot of muscle-shredding - don't ask me, I was under the carpet).
Anyway, it's only 6.48am and Jack has a long day ahead of him if he's going to save the US from the bevy of suicide-bombing fundamentalists who all look like they've been shopping on Bond Street. "They're tearing up the constitution in the name of national security," bleated an obligatory liberal as Jack (despite his months of compromised dental maintenance) bit one of his captors to death and escaped through the sewer, spitting out bits of neck as he went. It's 6.49am and, God, I'm exhausted already.
You know what to expect over the coming weeks: beat by beat, minute by minute, episode by episode, Jack will save his homeland from extinction at the hands of the infidel, until, 24 hours older, he will emerge to trace his scars and count the cost of his heroism. Why am I watching this? And what's next? Jack saving his country from invasion by overheated polar bears, or infiltration by bands of Eskimos in bikinis armed with rotting herrings? I doubt it, somehow, but it would make a change.
"COMING UP NEXT: the corruption of an entire generation." Skins, the sharp new comedy drama series from the folks behind the peerless Shameless, snuck in under the cover of E4 this week.
Featuring a bunch of insolent and voraciously experimental teenage schoolfriends on a mission "to expand our world beyond our field of dreams" ("Is that Shakespeare?", "No, Dawson's Creek"), the gang is led into charming, sexualised mayhem by the charismatic and beautiful Tony (Nicholas Hault). Episode one was a pretty fantastically written salvo, tight, impudent and extremely funny (Tony, to his virginal and geeky mate, Sid, who is about to celebrate his 17th birthday: "We are going to present Mr Happy with the keys to the furry city"; and again, explaining why Tony himself can't be the one to collect a great big bag of hash for the birthday party: "Sorry, mate, I've got T'ai-chi, choir audition and psychology").
If you prefer your teens under wraps and under the thumb, Skins may not be your cup of cider; otherwise, if the series can sustain the vivacity and ballsiness of its opener, it'll make you long to mis-spend your youth all over again.
