TV REVIEW/Shane Hegarty: Sometimes it feels as if nobody has learned a thing. Gerry Ryan returned to the television screens this week. He has a habit of doing that, like a fly you thought you'd chased from the room.
Ryan Confidential RTÉ1, Thursday, Only Fools Buy Horses RTÉ1, Thursday Watermelon ITV & TV3, Wednesday Recording Marjorie RTÉ1, Saturday Prime Time RTÉ1, Thursday
With Ryan Confidential he has essentially brought with him his radio-interview technique. On Thursday it was mostly just him and Michael Flatley talking over dinner.
Often, Ryan was kind enough not only to ask the questions but also to answer them. "You're a hard taskmaster. How would you describe yourself? As a choreographer, director and dance captain all rolled into one?" It was an opportunity for Flatley to speak as a true artist and successful businessman. Did you know he is a true artist and successful businessman? Should that be repeated again for those at the back? We were continually shown Ryan looking pensive, brow furrowed, hands clasped, as if facing a particularly tricky crossword clue.
There was brief footage of Flatley in Las Vegas, discussing his latest venture, which is to build the world's first Irish-themed hotel and casino. He has, apparently, spent $250 million on the land.
These were a couple of minutes that gave us a glimpse of what could have been. Flatley now fascinates chiefly because of his lifestyle: the mansion, the money, the mink bedspread. Give him to Louis Theroux and we might see something wonderful. With Ryan, though, we were rooted to that dinner table. The pair discussed the wild nights they had shared in Lillie's Bordello, the exorbitant parties Flatley threw. Naked girls painted gold and standing in fountains, that sort of thing. On radio, you describe. On television, you show.
Flatley seized the opportunity to be very dull indeed. He discussed the media's interest in his womanising. "These are good problems, Gerry. I didn't have these problems when I was digging ditches." The rape allegations were mentioned, but with legally constrained brevity. Ryan put it to him that he is a true artist and successful businessman, and Flatley seemed happy to discuss that.
When the interview ended, Michael stared at Gerry. Gerry stared at Michael. Michael stared at Gerry. Oh, get a room.
It was followed late on Thursday night by Only Fools Buy Horses. This is a crazy bit of scheduling, given that it is the mainstream debut of Hector Ó hÉochagáin, the one true star Irish television has produced in the past five years. It seems a bit like buying a thoroughbred with the intention of entering the Grand National but running him in a donkey derby instead.
In this series, Ó hÉochagáin is buying a racehorse. "I'm looking for a horse that will win a race," he kept telling people at Smithfield market, where some of the horses looked as if they wouldn't win a race out of the glue factory. Sometimes, Ó hÉochagáin gets so physically close to people that he appears to be examining their ears. The traders stared at him with a tolerant bewilderment. Look closely and the horses were looking at him with tolerant bewilderment. It's the same look he gets when he reports from the streets of foreign climes.
This might be the first series in which Ó hÉochagáin presents as Béarla, but it is comforting that he still communicates in a manner very much his own. In this opening episode, Ó hÉochagáin, with experts in tow, went to Newmarket to buy a horse. They were there, he said, to "eat, sleep and breathe horses for three days". Insert lazy French joke here. The show has 5,000 guineas to spend. For those whose experience begins and ends with putting €1 each way on a runner in the Grand National, that works out at about €8,000. If you want ABS brakes and a CD player, it will cost you more. They had their eye on a horse that had already won two races, although it swished its tail nervously and was a little jumpy in the paddock. They were outbid and without steed by the time the credits rolled. Hold on. Jumpy? Uncontrollable hair? Insert lazy Michael Flatley joke here.
Watermelon was based on the Marian Keyes novel. That its final scenes took place in an airport lounge seemed more than serendipitous. This was as throwaway as a holiday novel. You could hear the sand grind through the reels.
Anna Friel played Claire Ryan, a Dublin girl whose vivre was stuffed full of joie. Life for Claire was what happened between musical montages. The bulk of her existence consisted of mild slapstick choreographed to hip indie tunes. At her graduation, she got hauled from the stage for giving an Oscar-type speech. At a job interview, she puked into the office fish pond.
She left stuffy Dublin for glitzy London. She met James (Jamie Draven), an impossibly romantic man. She had comedy sex that resulted in a comedy pregnancy.
She didn't tell her parents about her predicament until she had arrived back in Dublin with a full pram. That she didn't tell her parents seemed odd, given that her mother was Brenda Fricker, a woman so maternal the sight of her makes you curl up on the couch and put your thumb in your mouth. Her dad was Seán McGinley, an actor who is becoming the long-suffering Dublin da of choice in the continued absence of Colm Meaney. "Ah, Jaysus," seemed to be the general tenor of his lines. "Ah, Jaysus."
Claire lost one boyfriend. Gained another. Lost him but gained a baby. Won the first boyfriend back before the second turned up in Dublin to reclaim her. The chief confrontation took the form of a fight in which the two boyfriends wrestled until they fell into a restaurant swimming pool. Yes, a restaurant swimming pool. It was called the boom, darling. Look it up in your history books.
Directed by Kieron J. Walsh and adapted by Colin Bateman, Watermelon left no aftertaste, no trace. It ended with anticlimactic nonchalance, like a scrap of paper crumpling itself up and throwing itself in the bin. It wasn't so much an hour and a half you'll never get back, just an hour and half you'll never remember having.
Recording Marjorie was a small film about the life of Marjorie Fitzmaurice, a costume designer who had worked in theatre since the 1920s. When Anne Gately, the narrator, of Passion Machine theatre company, was working on a production recently, she turned to Fitzmaurice as a source of period dress only to find her blind and living, mostly alone, in a Crosshaven house that resembled a "long-forsaken colonial outpost".
Fitzmaurice called the rats that infested the house her furry friends. As the darkness drew over her vision, she made biographical tapes, capturing her memories before they joined her sight.
It was a life unremarkable in many ways, if filled with activity. Of travels and a life working in theatre, of living through civil war as the daughter of a first World War veteran. Her father had been buried by a shell, losing an eardrum in the process. Fitzmaurice still had the nose cap of the shell, which she had mounted and displayed.
Gately's motive was to preserve these tales of an Ireland that is fading before they faded, too. As a documentary, it was awkward and unsure of itself, but the patter of Fitzmaurice's voice, speaking from another era, made it quietly affecting.
Kevin Rafter took a walk with the Kennedys on Thursday night's Prime Time. Antoinette and Jim: the royal couple of tribunals. They are remarkably similar of shape, like Russian dolls, he having popped out of her. They speak the same language, too. There are only so many times a person can say "no comment", and the interview consisted largely of the couple finding novel ways of refusing to answer the questions.
"You've some cheek asking me that. It's none of your business," Kennedy told Rafter. "This is unconscionable," he added before Antoinette topped it all by bursting into song. "You say it best when you say nothing at all," she crooned, "Now bugger off." Expect to hear this week that Ronan Keating has renounced his citizenship.
tvreview@irish-times.ie