TV Review Hilary Fannin'I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my arse," barked the glowering and uncultivated Mr Killigan (Daragh O'Malley), the nouveau-riche "Paddy" property developer, bruising his brandy and digging his inelegant heels into his shagpile while the head of the "cold case" unit, "maverick high-flyer" Dr Peter Boyd (Trevor Eve), arched a quizzical eyebrow and backed towards the door.
Giddy up, chaps, there is a new year upon us and Waking the Dead has returned to our screens, confidently dragging a slew of blue and marbled corpses in its wake, for another season of forensic investigation and psychological sleuthing. While the show is usually a satisfyingly grisly if somewhat self-reverential carnival, episode one of series six chose, disappointingly, to locate itself in the rotting cadaver of paddywhackery and Celtic mysticism.
You have to hand it to the scriptwriters: with lines such as "you'd have to be a horse of a man to do that", they did not leave a single stone unturned in their Disneyesque excavation of all things Oirish. Over the double episode (it took two long nights for the team to scrape the detritus off the perished remains of a young Traveller and bare-fist fighter who had been flung into a pit of belching concrete), we were treated to a veritable cornucopia of jiggery-pokery. And while the deft and rational forensic team, in their well-laundered white coats, swivelled around the laboratory on their intelligent chairs and drew lots of dots and arrows on a high-tech transparent screen, smooth- talking garda "Seamus" had telephone liaisons with the lovely Tara Fitzgerald (the new "body farmer") and the rest of the Irish cast members painted twisting snakes on their torsos, snorted hallucinogens and thumped the living daylights out of each other.
It all became vaguely amusing. One could almost hear the echoes of excited script meetings: "I know, we'll have wren boys and Claddagh rings and bleached bones of rams and foetuses!"; "Yes, and a bloody sacrificial birth under a shrine to the Blessed Virgin Mary!"; "Oh, and I know, Traveller caravans illuminated by the glow of the sacred heart! And . . . and vengeful fathers in cloth caps spilling their blood on autopsy tables!"; "Yes, yes, and a sexually passive yet alluringly transgressive young girl bartered to a yucky builder for land!"; "Yikes, chaps, this will be a good one!" But when the ghostly teenage nun with the wimple and the stigmata floated on to the screen like a bloodied helium balloon, I'm afraid I lost my sense of humour.
"I swear by my blood you'll be avenged." Yeah yeah.
By far the most bizarre manifestation of the whole programme occurred during the closing titles when the "behavioural science adviser" was credited. The what? You can talk to her, apparently, by pushing your little red button. I tried, but my little red button appeared to be suffering from culture shock.
CULTURE SHOCK MAY be too strong a term to apply to the experiences of the Casserleys, the first of four families whose moves to start a new life outside Ireland form the stuff of The Great Escape, a new RTÉ series that has been given a prime-time slot in the New Year schedule. Up-sticks, follow-sun, swap-suburbia-for-chateau programming has abounded in the last few years as, exhausted by weighty mortgages, lousy weather and farcical traffic, our dreams of bolting find vicarious relief in the exploits of the few.
The Casserleys' life-swap from Swords, in north Co Dublin, to a bungalow outside Montpon, in the Bordeaux region of France, however, made for dull and unappealing television. In fact, so tedious was the portrayal of the family's social and cultural experiment that it almost made the back-to-back bumper lights on the M50 look exotic. Presumably, in television terms, it's a risky business following the trials and tribulations of a bunch of families over a two- to three-year period as they find their feet in new communities abroad.
But surely it must have been screamingly apparent from the off that following the efforts of a pleasant chap, as Ger Casserley undoubtedly is, to set up a pitch-and-putt course on a windy field in a British ex-pat stronghold had about as much pizzazz as a spent Christmas cracker. Oh hold on, there was that moment when a nearby neighbour opened a crazy golf course; unfortunately, however, there was no scriptwriter to topple the miscreant into a vat of plonk.
Goodness, real life can be dull. Little happened the Casserleys over the course of the filming: their lovely children went to school, they struggled for a while with the language, they put up a satellite dish, their eldest son made interesting observations about pubescent French girls ("they're gorgeous, grumpy and right strappy") and, in time, their pretty young daughters learned to gesticulate when they spoke and to sigh with a Gallic flourish.
I blame the pitch-and-putt - excuse my lofty hysteria, but whatever about the activity, those two words alone are a pesticide to the imagination.
PITCH-AND-PUTT. Dan & Becs. Fetching up on RTÉ2 is multimedia student David Coffey's self-penned and self- directed paean to middle-class youth. Like a series of televisual haikus to rugger buggers, mummy's car, strategic sex and student travel, Coffey's 20-minute pieces - which intersperse video-diary monologues from Dan (played by Coffey) and his girlfriend, Becs (Holly White) - are small and rather perfectly formed bite-sized satires (at least I hope they are satire).
Selfish, vile, cosseted, egomaniacal and heavily furnished with dental work and designer knitwear, the pair are a terrible reminder of what it's like to be on a long, slow Dart to Killiney. And anyone born before the 1980s, who queued for non-existent buses, applied for non-existent jobs and wrestled with smuggled condoms that looked like surgical stockings, has every right to hurl objects at their TVs when the glossy pair appear.
Lovely and fey as White is, chatting about her well-monikered friends, Iseult and Eimear, and about how "cosy" her six-week relationship with the Machiavellian Dan and his hairband has become, some roles, it seems, never change. To date, Becs has been the girly, romantic optimist, Dan the conniving womaniser. Like bunny rabbits in gilded cages, Dan and Becs are a pleasant diversion and you don't have to clean up after them.
LIVING TV IS, apparently, the UK's premier site for entertainment, gossip, celebrity culture (I spy an oxymoron) and, wait for it . . . the paranormal.
No surprises then that the "site" offered us The Real Housewives of Orange County, a documentary that left you flailing around for the carbolic soap to wash out your retinas.
Kicking off where the fictional desperate ladies of Wisteria Lane end, the documentary was populated by sculpted blondes and surgical brunettes up to their implants in a remorseless swill of hedonism. The women, more or less all called Bianca or Kimberly, live in a gated community in southern California, where teenagers get breast implants for their high-school graduation, no one passes through the portal without a couple of million bucks and no one chooses to leave - until they're screwed by their divorce and replaced by a younger model.
"You get to a certain age and you want a trophy wife," said Bimberly as she swung out of crossbars with her toes in her Pilates teacher's nostrils. "I'm over 40," she confessed through gritted facelift, her implants dangerously popping from the exertion of chasing youth.
"She's been given the world," explained Brad or Josh or Chad (who was tiring of counting the zeros on his pay-check), talking about Jo, his very young and vacant-looking fiancée.
"Five thousand square feet of real estate, her bills paid. I want her to step up and become the housewife I've always dreamed of." I'd swear there was a flicker of malevolence in Jo's bovine eyes before she flashed her bleached teeth at him and scurried off to hose down the gardener.
tvreview@irish-times.ie