TVReview Hilary FanninIn a largely curmudgeonly and depressingly joyless pre- Christmas TV week there were a couple of unassailable truths to be reckoned with. Firstly, you're not a man if you're a king and you're not a salmon without a dorsal fin. And secondly, you're most certainly not the Republic of Ireland soccer manager when you fail to qualify for the World Cup - but more of that later.
UTV kindly told us a fairy tale this week. It concerned an over-privileged but damn popular chap, Edward (who liked to be called David), and a skinny and insouciant American who liked to shop a lot, called Wallis. Wallis and Edward, the retelling of the abdication of Edward VIII, was an entertaining Sunday night slice of revisionist soap opera, complete with great dresses.
The clue was in the title, with Wallis's name first. Wallis Simpson - twice married, twice divorced, a "commoner and bigamist", as she was described by prime minister Stanley Baldwin - dropped carelessly on to the British royal family like a discarded match on a hill of dry gorse.
Elegantly portrayed by Joely Richardson as a woman who obediently trotted after her fate in fabulous shoes, this particular Wallis came across as a sympathetic and intelligent pragmatist. Told from her point of view, the story was fascinating: happily married to a rich American industrialist, she and her husband were having a whale of a time hanging out with a bunch of aristos when they met the future king. When Wallis ended up sleeping with the Prince of Wales, her husband offered his tacit approval, as it's not bad for business when your wife is in the scratcher with the future ruler of an empire.
Wallis, with the careless indifference of the over-privileged, enjoyed the attention and frock opportunities until Edward broke the rules by falling in love with her. Suddenly, her husband, in deference to royalty and to Wallis's dismay, was persuaded to move sideways and agree to a divorce.
The king's mother and all the blackbirds and doyens of the counting house tried to get rid of the American arriviste, and the newspapers scalded her, while the infatuated Edward started threatening to abdicate unless he was allowed to marry her. What's a girl to do? (A suggestion by one member of the British establishment that she be a respectable whore who was visited twice weekly in the afternoon somehow didn't seem to wash.)
THIS STYLISH YARN was given psychological depth by an excellent Richardson and was so artfully assembled that you almost ended up feeling sorry for the star-crossed pair, just a man and a woman after all. But, as the ubiquitous Baldwin pointed out to the simpering Edward: "You are not a man, sir, you are the king."
If you're reading this on Christmas Eve while you're not washing your turkey and you are rolling bits of bacon around a couple of bangers, I apologise (I also take my hat off to you for such dextrous multi-tasking). Dispatches: What's Really in Your Christmas Dinner? was shocking enough to have you running screaming into a wilderness of veganism. Journalist Jane Moore set out to examine the hows and wheres of a traditional Christmas dinner, starting with farmed smoked salmon. With footage of metal cages the size of an average bathtub, with thousands of claustrophobic fish swarming around blindly in them like scaly rats, it was no surprise that when the fish were slapped on to a metal surface to be examined, they were missing various fish accessories, such as dorsal fins (useful for doing salmony things such as swimming and leaping and obviously not much use when you're incarcerated in a darkened box).
NEXT UP WAS the turkey - and here the fatalities started kicking in. Some 200 people a year (a conservative estimate, apparently) die in the UK from salmonella poisoning and, staggeringly, as many as one in 20 birds may be infected with the virus. The message seemed to be: if you want to stay healthy, incinerate your bird and preferably know where it comes from. What made the programme truly gut-wrenching was the footage of thousands upon thousands of intensively reared turkeys, kept in the dark to minimise injurious behaviour, each with a space about the size of a tabloid news-sheet to eke out its dreadful existence. Fat and almost blind, these albino birds are unable to support themselves on their flaccid and underdeveloped legs.
As with the salmon, there are alternatives for your table, but they are often prohibitively expensive. Organic birds, wild salmon, bacon from happy, rutting, sociable pigs who play hide-and-seek and read their Wibbly Pig books at bedtime, will not be on special offer in your local supermarket. We are what we eat, or so they say, and ditching the trans fats and the fin-free fish and the terrified turkeys could be a new year's resolution. On the basis of this ugly exploration, the sooner we consumers refuse to swallow this mess the better.
If soccer is your passion and you're still reeling from Ireland's failure to qualify for Germany next summer, Final Words: Brian Kerr's World Cup Story may have come as a bit of a disappointment. The much-heralded documentary was as lacklustre as Kerr's disappointing stewardship. Afflicted with the same caution as its subject, the documentary, filmed over 18 months, never got into the danger areas. Yes, there was jumping up and down in the dugout and a bit of shouting - "Make it stick, make it f***ing stick," he roared at his assembled talents - as well as one or two jibes at the Football Association of Ireland, whose support Kerr felt was withering away as early as last March. Overall Kerr, in his well-cut suit, sunk into the sombre depths of a leather sofa, recalled his experiences with a tranquillity bordering on narcosis.
There was an underlying feeling of dissociation from his former squad, "individually a decent group of people", as he confusingly characterised them. Describing the changes in players he had known since they were youths, he said they were "more mature, more selfish and earning more money". As Emmet Malone of this newspaper pointed out, it was Kerr's inability to motivate these more mature individuals that led to his downfall, their errors compounding his own tactical mistakes in the morbidly depressing and ultimately crucial Israel game when Ireland squandered a 2-0 lead in the bosom of Lansdowne Road.
"I mightn't have been completely successful," Kerr admitted. "No regrets though, no regrets. Only the results, of course, but no regrets in how I did it." Right then, glad we got that sorted.
THERE WAS ONE wonderful hour of television this week. David Attenborough's ballet of invertebrates, Life in the Undergrowth, came to a close with an exploration of "super societies". Bees, wasps and ants of every kind were investigated, as well as vegetarian termites that create mounds the height of a bungalow (and with better ventilation) to protect a supersonic queen who produces 30,000 eggs a day and who can spend as long as 20 years with the same partner, being washed, fed and mated (not much room for a career then).
Elsewhere, there was the more neurotic queen bee, who suppresses the sexuality of her numerous daughters with chemical substances and who eats any threatening male before he can make it out of his egg (and you thought EastEnders was over the top).
There are approximately 10 million species of invertebrate on the planet, nine million of which, apparently, remain undiscovered. If human beings and other "backbone animals" were to disappear, Attenborough said, the world would carry on pretty much as before, but if these invertebrates were to disappear our pastures and fields would be covered in dung and carrion, other species would cease to exist and human life would become untenable.
Attenborough travelled from the Amazon to the Alps in search of some of these life-giving creatures on which our ecology depends. He remained unfailingly curious and enthusiastic, whether he was beingsquirted with acid by angry ants or winched up trees to observe giant bees in Malaysia.
Life in the Undergrowth was surely among the best television of the year, and if you missed it, BBC2 is repeating the whole series next week, starting at 10.30am on St Stephen's Day.
Just the ticket with a hangover and a turkey sandwich. Happy Christmas.
tvreview@irish-times.ie