TVReview:'I ken you was always a wee bit kinky." Irvine Welsh, the bad boy of Scottish literature, who catapulted his rare and viciously lovely talent into our consciousness in the early 1990s with his book, Trainspotting, returned to his familiar terrain of Edinburgh's Leith this week with his first TV comedy drama, Wedding Belles.
Welsh, who usually writes about men in various states of narcotic chaos, this time sharpened his gender pencil to tell an amusing but slightly predictable story about four mates, Amanda (who is about to marry an airline pilot) and her bridesmaids, Sharon, Rhona and Kelly.
Chick-lit on crack cocaine might best describe Irvine's latest foray, with the mind-altering first 10 minutes of the two-hour drama shattering any pastel illusions one might have had that this was going to be a zany romp around the highlands. Set around Amanda's beauty salon, "Live and Let Dye", and the girls' grim Leith local, Welsh's heroines - Amanda, intimately surgically trimmed, hosting silicone breasts, and planning the biggest wedding Leith will ever see; Sharon, administering oral gratification to the parish priest under his vestments; Kelly, who, having been abused by her father, fantasises about strangling her mother with her rosary beads; and Rhona, a crack addict who has lost her lover in a joyriding incident - are not typical girlie fodder. The drama, employing Welsh's trademark bawdy vernacular and bracing realism, was, however, extremely funny: Rhona mistakenly sniffing up the ashes of a dead Rottweiler called Charlie, thinking she was snorting cocaine, was just one of many quintessentially Welsh moments that embroidered a fairly formulaic plot.
A background of drug deals in ugly soulless tenements sat side by side with great bruising Scottish hills and with just about every sexual deviation that could be thrown into the pot, from necrophilia and bestiality to spanking the priest with the parish table-tennis bats. To pre-empt critics who might have found this Welshian pantomime over-familiar from his past work, the author included a clever midway scene in which a podgy academic, after complaining to his middle-class friends that modern Scottish authors are writing about a country he's never seen, trips over Rhona, spaced out in his hallway in a ghostly wedding dress.
With such vibrant dialogue and sullenly brilliant characters leaping from his imagination, Welsh is well able to disguise the problem that his themes (sexual abuse, gambling, drugs) are becoming a little threadbare. Still, hardly grounds for an Asbo, as Amanda pointed out after throwing up into her neighbour's recycling bin.
'I'VE GOT MULTIPLE per-son-al-it-ies inside of me/ Let my other per-son-al-ity come out of me." Granted, not the catchiest chorus line in the hoary history of popular music, but this feisty (albeit psychologically alarming) ditty represents the great hum-along hope for the revival of Samantha Mumba's singing career.
LA-based Mumba - singer, model, actress, leggy Dubliner and Billy Barrie kid spotted by Louis Walsh - is famous (although probably not in this order) for wearing a $9 million (€6.7m) diamond-encrusted spider-web dress to a film premiere, for implying ( I'm being polite) that Twink was a has-been, oh, and for selling a lot of pop albums - once.
Having disappeared into the Californian hills for the last while, Mumba was the subject of Channel 4's Get Your Act Together, a reality romp fronted by Harvey Goldsmith which sees the rock promoter mastermind the comebacks of ailing performers. Resembling the mildly deranged offspring of The Apprentice and a musical Ready Steady Cook, the format allows Goldsmith, the dough-faced tough cookie, six months or thereabouts to resuscitate his charges' fortunes. ("Resuscitate? That's good," said one management company in response to Goldsmith's inquiries about Mumba's product desirability. "Resuscitate implies that there is some life left.") Offering insights into a fickle industry shrouded in fag-ends and fishnets, and giving glimpses of taut music executives hanging around Soho sandwich bars (many with haircuts that will outlive their careers), it was all very jolly. Especially enjoyable was watching the shenanigans behind Mumba's 1,400-seat Vicar Street gig, planned for Dublin earlier this month, which had to be pulled due to a staggering lack of interest (a handful of tickets were sold).
At the close of play, a taciturn Mumba, having performed a lukewarm lunchtime showcase for "industry insiders" in London's Pigalle Club ("Babe, that was fantastic!"), was plugged into the back of a taxi on the way back to Heathrow, accompanied by Roy, her (seemingly) purely decorative American manager, who appeared to be in possession of a wide variety of hooded sweatshirts but very little business acumen. Mumba, however, the busy closing titles announced, is in talks with some pale and interesting record labels (no, it didn't actually say that) and was the bookies' 3/1 favourite to replace Louis Walsh as a judge on The X Factor. Good God, will it ever end?
SPEAKING OF SEARCHING for the holy grail of fame, Scannal!, the wryly entertaining strand with the exclamation mark, which illuminates our recent history with the lurid delicacy of tonsured monks bent over crispy parchment, this week reassembled a juicy little story from the dark ages of the last millennium (well, 1995, to be precise) for our ever-so-sophisticated 21st-century palate. 1995 was the year Waterford-based priest Fr Michael Kennedy (with a divorce referendum looming) told his congregation that a promiscuous and vengeful Aids-infected woman had returned to her home town from godforsaken England and slept with around 80 blokes in town, infecting a number of them with the virus. Shock horror - the streets of Dungarvan were running with sleaze, tabloid editors were booking hotel rooms, an hysterical and uninformed public was swallowing Kennedy's tale like it was nectar, and any poor unfortunate woman unlucky enough to have returned to her Waterford home from England was under suspicion.
Kennedy, a distant relative of the Massachusetts dynasty, had administered the last rites to Rose Kennedy and was a regular visitor to her Boston home, so he knew how to handle a close-up - but such vicarious fame was obviously not enough for the snap-happy bouffant priest.
This fantastic and fantastical story, of national gullibility and a shamanic priest who wanted to be a star, is crying out to be made into a movie by someone with time and money on their hands. Mr Goldsmith? Samantha Mumba's requiem to multiple personalities might even make a fitting theme tune.
SO, WHILE 40 Mumba-crunching muso insiders ate baby bellini canapes in a damp London club, lashings of learner brides, L-plates pinned on to their ample bosoms, queued up in the Brighton sunshine for admittance to "The Adonis Cabaret". Complete with bevies of red-hot bridesmaids (little plastic devil horns sticking out of their blow-dries), the soon-to-be-brides were queuing up to squeal at male strippers; a must, apparently, for a clucking good hen night. In a television week awash with documentaries examining some of the trickier aspects of male identity, including, as part of BBC3's body image season, F*** Off, I'm Small and My Man Boobs And Me (both feel-good, love-yourself, size-don't-matter-but-there's-always-surgery documentaries), Channel 4's The Crippendales stood out for sheer ballsiness (if you know what I mean).
The Crippendales followed the attempts of John, paralysed from the waist down after a car accident in his teens, as he fought to assemble Britain's first disabled stripper troupe.
Five blokes with various disabilities came through the audition process (including John and his mate, James, recently blind) and began working with a voluptuous strawberry-blonde doyenne of the "London School of Striptease", who had six days to teach them to eyeball their audience and wiggle their bits.
Unfortunately, with the notion of crip-strip still in its infancy, the troupe was reduced to three with the departure of two of its members (sorry). The first was a devout and humorous Muslim, who realised he couldn't get his kit off without offending his religion. Then there was the devastating news that "Randy Andy", John's most vehemently enthusiastic apostle, who suffers from a muscular condition that makes him fall over if he moves too quickly, had actually fallen over and couldn't continue with the routine.
Undeterred, however, the three men left standing (despite crumbling spines, chronic pain, a wheelchair and sightlessness) threw themselves on the baying bridettes with vigour. "If I say 'duck'," said John to blind James, "it's because they're throwing things - and it's not their knickers."
"What do you need to be a successful stripper?" John had asked the Adonis professionals, Tristan and Richard, at the start of the doc.
"Big chopper and secret confidence," they replied without batting a well-manicured eyebrow.
The ladies were enthralled. When asked after the performance if it mattered to them that the men were "disabled", one of them replied: "I don't care what they are, it's all about the size of the willy." Right, that's that sorted.
