TV Review:
So how was last weekend for you? Stormy golf course? Colicky infant? Dark bars and intrigue? I stayed home and watched the telly. And, having bathed in a slew of slight entertainment (I beg your pardon, light entertainment), I'm not planning on doing that again in a hurry.
"It's going to be a cracker," Pat Kenny promised as he signed off from his morning radio show with all the misguided enthusiasm of a baby seal on a melting ice pack. Hours later, wading through a turgid Late Late Show, I was assailed by a curious feeling of empathy for the show's uneasy host while watching a pugnaciously bored Gordon Ramsay (who had stopped off on his way to the golf) push Kenny around the Late Late playground.
Ramsay, with steel-capped arrogance and frivolous bravado, indulged in nasty innuendo about the size of Kenny's (apparently girlie) fingers and cracked a few lame jokes about the presenter's greying hair before flicking back his own peroxide locks, flexing his crotch and asking Kenny if he fancied his (Ramsay's) wife.
Then there was the TV chef's vile anti-Semitic nonsense about a contestant in the American version of Hell's Kitchen, when he described kicking the incompetent wannabe cook out of his kitchen because the man's "great big Jewish nose" was dripping into the saucepan. Kenny's tentative harrumphing about the chap's religion not being to blame for the size of his schnozzle and his culinary ineptitude had all the gravitas of a frozen pea rolling down Ramsay's insolently thick neck.
The Late Late Show is ageing rather badly. There was a time, one feels, when the programme would have had sufficient chutzpah to fire the petulant Ramsay out of the ring.
By the time Matt Lucas and David Walliams arrived, fresh from their Little Britain stage show at the Point, I was quaking in my bunny slippers for Kenny. They were, however, remarkably restrained; somewhat spent and benign, they followed their host's required etiquette, even when the platitudinous presenter offered one of his trademark cupcake comments about Lucas "coming to terms with his sexuality". The pair did, however, attempt, like snakes with a quivering duck egg, to persuade Kenny to join them on stage during one of their live performances later in the week. Kenny looked mildly flattered at first, until Lucas started talking about putting people on a lead and indulging in some "dry humping".
SNAPPING AT KENNY'S troubled but elegantly shod heels came Ryan Tubridy, the oldest new kid on the block. Tubridy Tonight, like its predecessor, Kenny Live, is the Late Late's avaricious bridesmaid, forever doomed to stumble up the aisle behind the main event.
Night two of the weekend viewing, and it was the bland leading the bland again - and the question of whether the national broadcaster is capable of sustaining two prime-time weekend chat-shows has to be asked.
At least Tubridy has ditched the swivel chair in favour of a Manhattan/Letterman-esque set complete with faux-opulent desk and jazz quartet. Unfortunately, any expectations raised by the set are dashed on the rocks of B-list interviewees and vast swathes of show time dedicated to audience members waving at the cameras and singing hello to their grannies.
With Tubridy's penchant for a merrily gesticulating audience, you've got to face the possibility that watching the out-takes from your local supermarket's security cameras would be more entertaining.
Tubridy, however, seems to be enjoying himself; with his wardrobe of well-cut suits, his flashy smile and his intractable quiff, he looks like a man in a hurry to get to his own party - though maybe he should check the guest-list first.
On the weekend of an international golf tournament and a theatre festival, the inaugural programme of series three opened with . . . Sophie Anderton.
Who? Oh come on! Sophie Anderton, her what "fought and won battles with addiction", her what "got thrown in the deep end with the Gossard campaign", her who cried and raged her way through Celebrity Love Island but who, let it be said, has been on "a journey of self-awareness". Well, thank goodness for that, and there was I thinking that Tubridy was simply trying to drag bumptious tripe out of a cranky model who didn't know or care whether she was in Dublin or Lublin.
Anderton, the little pet, is due to celebrate her 30th birthday sometime soon and she is, apparently, a little nervous about this (not that you could actually tell from the torpor of her expression or from anything that got torn from her high-maintenance lips).
"People hitting their 30s," twittered Tubridy, elbows shooting around the shiny desk. "It's the beginning of the end." You can say that again, Ryan (but have you checked the age constituency of your audience? - presumably, however, at this stage any viewer with ambulatory powers has wandered down to the pub). Spare us, please, the bony model filling in time in Montrose until Lillie's Bordello opens.
It didn't get a whole lot better. Teenage author Ruth Gilligan, who chatted for a bit about whether people wear knickers to the Wesley disco, told us that we should all "just go for it" (presumably not the knickers) and said several times that "life's too short", which was disconcerting coming from someone who's only marginally older than the Luas.
Actor Michael Madsen turned up with some reminiscences of filming Reservoir Dogs, when he chauffeured around a method actor in the boot of his car (which was relatively amusing). He also treated us to a blast of his Oirish accent (which wasn't). Madsen had to go then because he needed to urinate. It was as good an excuse as any - wish I'd thought of it first.
PARKY WASN'T HAVING a great night either, although both Kenny and Tubridy would have killed for his guest-list. Parkinson doesn't need to convince us of his convivial informality, he doesn't have to flail around in a bucket of has-beens and wannabes to convince us that he's a relaxed bloke who's capable of conducting a conversation. Parky is just Parky, although at times his avuncularity can be a little too much. On last Saturday's show, seated next to the stately and irritable Helen Mirren, he was also more than a little sexist.
Mirren was (presumably) fulfilling her contractual obligations to promote her new film, The Queen, through heavily gritted teeth, when Parkinson brought up the tremulous subject of her breasts, again.
Rather labouring the point that Mirren obviously wasn't going to be asked to get her kit off when she was playing a dowdy monarch, Parky pushed the let's-be-honest-about-your-assets angle a bit too far. One was not amused.
We were then treated to archive footage of a previous encounter between Parky and Mirren, when the younger, hairier Parky's obsession with Mirren's "accoutrements" was even more blatant. Mirren should have counted her lucky serious-theatre awards: if she'd been on Tubridy Tonight, she'd most likely have had to wave her regal mammaries at somebody's Auntie Betty.
WHITE MIST, BLACK horse, intelligent virgins and dissolute rakes in riding boots - a bit of culture is surely a useful emollient to the chat-showed-out psyche. Craggy, misty, desolate Jane Eyre - with its damp, flag-stoned interiors and unruffled, terribly serious actors with faraway looks in their eyes - seemed just the ticket. The staple of autumnal Sunday-night TV, the classic serial, is back on the box.
Soporifically pleasant and untaxing, the BBC's latest version of Charlotte Brontë's novel succeeds in bringing out the chick in the classic lit. But at one stage Mr Rochester (Toby Stephens) was doing so much striding around, kicking the doleful dog and biting back of bitter emotion that he started to remind me of Gordon Brown (which posed the question: was that Cherie Blair stomping around upstairs and setting fire to his bedclothes?).
Jane Eyre (Ruth Wilson), however, like a marble statue, was convincingly motionless and restrained. And, of course, the stunningly bleak countryside was the star turn. There could be worse ways of nursing a bruised weekend. Oh well, as the rickety old retainer said: "There's always a light burning in the tower."
