TV Review: From 1963 until 1985 lunchtime radio was home to the familiar husky voice of Frankie Byrne, the radio agony aunt who smoothed the ruffled brows of Irish men and women as they battled to find love in a world of Catholic absolutes and twitching net curtains
True Lives: Frankie Byrnewent behind the public persona to reveal the complex life of a woman who paid no heed to her own advice.
Working and socialising in a world enjoyed only by a cauterised elite - Jammet's Restaurant, the Gresham Hotel, private parties with Dublin's literati - photographs of Byrne showed a statuesque woman with carmine lips and sooty lids, a glass in one hand and a fag in the other.
Byrne lived a life unlike the majority of her listeners; a rarity for her time, she was an independent professional woman unrestrained by marriage or children. But, much like the rest of us, she was flawed and full of contradictions.
Although "she knew everyone" and was highly capable (when organising a visit by President Kennedy to Wexford, she managed to provide 140 phone lines for his entourage), she was also, according to members of her family, "crippled with self-doubt". Which is hardly surprising, given her inauspicious start in life: born into a family of journalists, her mother was discommoded by Frances's arrival on December 27th, as it meant she had to miss the races. Byrne then spent most of her childhood in boarding school, and hence didn't meet some of her siblings until they were adults.
Despite the common sense approach to life that she espoused on her radio show, and maybe as a reaction to some sense of abandonment, Byrne was an incurable romantic.
Byrne's tragedy - which has been revealed as a common one as we lift the veil on our recent past - was that when she became pregnant she had to give up her baby daughter, Valerie, for adoption. She then endured severe post-natal depression, became addicted to Valium and began a long battle with alcoholism, a condition that claimed the lives of two of her siblings.
What was deeply affecting about True Liveswas watching, from the dry vantage point of our new century, the painful choices women were still having to make in the second half of the old one.
Extraordinarily, Byrne happened to be introduced to Valerie purely by chance in the 1970s and realised straight away who she was. She then spent years observing her daughter from afar - she read of her wedding in the press.
Their eventual reunion, initiated by Valerie, worked for a time, until Valerie had a daughter of her own, when their differing experiences of motherhood seemed to cause difficulties.
True Liveswas more than an exercise in retrospective prurience or nostalgia. At its moving conclusion, Frankie's niece described visiting her in hospital the week before she died, having been admitted suffering from dementia aggravated by alcoholism. "Someone," Byrne said, desperately clutching her niece's arm, "has stolen all the words out of my head".
'WE ARE STARTING with a blank canvas, a canvas without history." Arts Lives: Art for Salewas a comprehensive and fascinating look at the Irish art market, a market so new that it could auction its birth caul for a six-figure sum.
In 1973, when Adam's auction house began selling contemporary Irish art, five grand would have bought you a nice little investment to hang over the sofa. Last year we spent more than €40 million on visual art in this country, be it an impulse buy from the railings on St Stephen's Green or €96,000 for a piece by Robert Ballagh. The appetite for art in this country, as witnessed by the healthy crowds of spectators filtering through the RDS for art shows, is growing.
Art for Sale, graciously navigated by journalist Ann Marie Hourihane, attempted to steer the uninitiated through the often intimidating language of the art world, basically asking: what is art, where do you get it, how much is it, who buys it, and is it any good?
The answers, of course, were as obtuse as the questions weren't. Jack B Yeats said art is nothing without "the living ginger in it"; in other words, if it doesn't have passion, it isn't a work of art. With the roar of the Celtic Tiger refusing to abate, the flip side of the living ginger may be, we were told, the "golf club effect" on value, whereby "Rainy Day in Ballyconneely" will sell by the dozen, given that it's the view from the buyer's holiday home.
From the evidence of the programme there couldn't be a better time to be a painter or sculptor in this country. As a nation we are developing a visual sense, stimulated by travel, money and the advent of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Imma), which opened as recently as 1991 and has introduced us to a more sophisticated palette. The Office of Public Works (OPW) has designated 1 per cent of construction costs on any public building to be set aside for the purchase of art, so it's time to take down your Che Guevara posters and confirmation photographs and hang your SSIAs.
But what do we hang? The assembled pundits, including AIB art buyer Frances Ruane, all advised that you should buy what you like - art's intrinsic value, after all, is in the eye of the beholder. Some beholders, though - the ones with heavy wallets - can shoot an artist's career into the stratosphere. Irish artist Graham Knuttel, under the patronage of Sylvester Stallone, has made a lot of money, but nothing like as much as the notorious British artist, Damien Hirst, whose shark in formaldehyde sold recently for $11 million (€9 million) - though, let's face it, even if you had the money you probably wouldn't have a sideboard big enough to put it on.
The answer is that there are no answers. The good news is that we are buying paintings, and that the country apparently is flooded with cash.
WHO'D WANT TO fight in a pair of €140 runners? The Axis Arts and Community Resource Centre in Ballymun, Dublin, was the venue that kicked off comedian Des Bishop's new series, Joy in the Hood. Bishop has been running comedy workshops in various disadvantaged areas around the country, essentially to enable participants from those communities to develop their comic voices and stand up and perform. It's a bright notion and the series, despite a hint of sentimentality, looks interesting.
After being put through their paces for three weeks, the seven Ballymun performers had one night to strut their seven minutes of stand-up material.
Some of it was very funny: Donna, the youngest and only female participant, overcame her nerves and brought the house down with her "Ballymun excuses" to the teacher for not doing your homework: "Sorry, Miss, I was strung out." Or: "I had to mind a horse."
Bishop also did a spot, giving an account of the time he spent living in Ballymun's Joseph Plunkett Tower (the doorman and the view, he observed, would cost a lot in Manhattan). "I stood out in Ballymun," he said, "because of my health." He joyously described his first "ghetto tourist" assignment as the Disneyland of estates. He's in Cork next week - certainly one to watch.
I'M SORRY, BUT there is an awful, fantastic, prurient pleasure to be taken in watching other people being weighed. Celebrity Fit Clubhas finally found a berth: it stole in under cover of darkness in a week of serious and responsible health programming and is currently masquerading as proper, concerned telly. It's not.
It's great, though. It's got Anne Diamond - who is fat, thin, fat, thin, depending on the weather - plus all 133kg (21 stone) of Russell Grant (for whom every day is a finger fest), who has already had a hissy fit and won't do his press-ups.
And then there's the staggering mammoth in a kilt, Jeff Rudom, who eats like a tyrannosaurus and weighs more than 203kg (32 stone). Watch this programme - it'll make you feel much better about breaking your resolutions.
tvreview@irish-times.ie
