TV Review:There's something about watching the New Year's Eve television countdowns that makes even the most rounded and self-fulfilled viewer feel like a bit of a loser. It's practically a diagnostic for the state of your existence.
Do you kiss life passionately on the lips while swinging upside down from the chandeliers? Or are you the kind of person who sits mousily on the sidelines in your slippers, watching other people having fun? You decide. Traditionally, New Year's Eve telly offers a parade of carefree celebrity party people, all glossy lips and dazzling smiles to camera, cartwheeling their heedless way towards the New Year, which you just know that - for them - will be packed with hot, fun things such as helicopter rides and, er, dog-food endorsements.
Meanwhile, over your own solitary half-glass of tepid white wine, you cast a cold eye on the high jinks, struggling - and failing - to feel a vicarious sense of participation in the communal love spilling from the screen. Perhaps letting off a party popper will help. Or not.
Luckily, this year, the high jinks on offer were - for the most part - anodyne and manufactured enough not to pose any kind of threat to your personal equilibrium. I mean, who could be jealous of the invited audience at Gerry Kelly's New Year's Eve Party? For a start, it looked as if there were only about eight of them, arranged uncomfortably around a whorish-looking Christmas tree, while Gerry lathered up the real guests - Dana, Patrick Kielty and Dickie Rock - with his usual fawning soft-soap approach. "Spit on me Dickie!" That's the weird, fetishistic catchphrase that young female fans used to shout at the old boy, back in the day. But there would be nothing so gloriously insurrectionary at this torpid soiree. Spitting by Dickie Rock? In front of Dana? That's never going to be allowed.
Over at the Celebrity Jigs and Reels party on RTÉ 1, there was plenty of high-kicking, but again the jinks were in short supply. Tame, very tame. There's a limit to how much you can take of sort-of-celebrities galumphing prettily around the dancefloor, while Marty Whelan and his regrettable tie look on. Yes, even if it's for charity. The awkward moment at the end, when Whelan got in a bit of a pickle over exactly who had won - yes, well done, Damien Farrelly, or no . . . wait a minute, is it Eoin Murphy? Yes, yes, it's Eoin - at least marked it out as genuinely live telly, where such clumsy glitches will happen. But no matter: up stepped Peter Corry in a frilly shirt to bore us gently into 2008 with some tender crooning and a decorous shower of ticker tape.
So far, so ho-hum. BBC1, with New Year Live, presented by Nick Knowles and Myleene Klass, offered similarly bland fun. Katie Melua, sweetly clad in a red beret, took on the Peter Corry role, wringing every last drip of honey-laden emotionalism out of What A Wonderful World, while ice-skaters twirled on the rink below her. With the Big Ben chimes and masses of fireworks, this was safe, warm and very dull. At least Jools Holland's Hootenanny on BBC2 had a bit more pizzazz about it: especially when Kylie Minogue (yes, her again) began writhing about on Jools's piano in a knowing parody of loucheness. Jools gazed up at her, with an expression that hovered somewhere between puppyish adoration and stern paternal caution. Maybe he was worried she would damage the piano with all that pseudo-frottage. And then (hooray!) Madness popped up - dark shades, a slightly chunkier Suggs and all - with their stomping 1980 hit Baggy Trousers. Although the effect was slightly spoiled by the image of Rory Bremner and Doctor Who (aka David Tennant) bopping away in the background like a pair of embarrassing old uncles. Oh wot fun we 'ad.
It says a lot about the New Year's Eve coverage that you felt almost grateful for the contribution of that rancid pair from Ballydung Manor, with their scurrilous Bogmanay celebrations. Podge and Rodge were busy interrogating Miss Ireland, Blathnaid McKenna. Why, they wondered, had she agreed to pose in her bikini on Bray seafront holding a giant Japanese spider crab? Is it because you're Miss Ireland that you have to do shit like this, they asked, not unreasonably. (Next year, let's hope they get to give Katie Melua their special treatment. All that'll be left is a tear-sodden red beret.) Later, it was over to Mr Methane, "the only performing professional flatulist in the world" to herald in the New Year in his own unique fashion. Yes, it was filthy and puerile and utterly crass but - whisper it - a curious relief after all that milky, insipid fare on the other channels.
THE FOUNDING PREMISE of Singlehanded - tousle-headed toddler snatched from his home - was the only predictable thing about this absorbing two-part rural police drama. Invoking the stolen child scenario, especially after the saturation coverage of the Madeleine McCann story this year, can come across as a bit of a lazy trick: delivering the requisite unreflective clutch in the stomach to viewers, but failing to stimulate the imagination. Luckily, the show's producers turned this worn-out trope into a fine, satisfyingly multi-layered and intelligent story, with convincing performances from Owen McDonnell as Garda Sgt Jack Driscoll and Ian McElhinney as his father (and retired Garda sgt) Gerry. In fact, the two men's differing approaches to the challenge of policing an isolated rural community - although technically a sub-plot - was actually the most compelling part of the drama. The bluff, autocratic Gerry - "an old-fashioned guard", who, it seemed, was not above a bit of judicious fiddling if he thought the situation warranted it - was fighting for his reputation at a tribunal set up to investigate police corruption.
Meanwhile, his son Jack struggled with the frustrations and demands of the job he had inherited, at times veering close to similarly unorthodox tactics, but just managing to wobble along on the straight and narrow. He emerged as a slightly more morally evolved form of his father, yet the line between principle and practice was constantly blurred.
But who snatched the baby? The child's resentful, drug-addled father? A suspected local paedophile who had been on the receiving end of Gerry's idea of natural justice? Neither of those obvious suspects. In a clever twist, it turned out to be the respectable, affluent grandparents of the child who were planning to whisk young Conal away on their yacht to a wonderful new life. Again, there was the pleasing crunch of moral ambiguity here: while the child was removed from the arms of the renegade grandparents, it was made clear that he would not be returning to his methadone-dependent parents, but to foster care. So there were no easy answers, no glib closure, and all the better for it. Aside from the complex narrative, the thing that really marked out this drama as different from run-of-the-mill cop thrillers was the setting.
Really, the shatteringly beautiful Connemara landscape was more than just the backdrop to the action: it flooded almost every shot, emerging in doorways, scrolling sumptuously out across car windscreens. In fact, the wild and vibrant scenery did eventually play a decisive part in the resolution of the drama, when Gerry lost control of his car and soared out over a steep river valley to his death.
WITH THE MANTLE of reverence that has posthumously settled around the shoulders of George Best since his death, it was mildly interesting to follow the story of Jack Doyle, another Irishman with great sporting talent who crashed and burned in the ruins of his grandiloquent lifestyle. Jack Doyle: A Legend Lost was a benign appraisal of the boxer known in the 1930s as "The Gorgeous Gael", a fighter, singer and lothario who threw his fortune away and ended up homeless on the streets of London. The parallels with Best's life were striking: the early glamour and hero-worship, swiftly followed by alcoholism and allegations of domestic violence, and - more particularly - the strenuous rehabilitation of his tattered reputation by his fans and supporters, especially in his birthplace of Cobh. For Jack Doyle, as for George Best, death transformed him from a shambling and abject figure - a red carnation stuck forlornly in his lapel - into a glittering icon of almost supernatural ability and power, all the flaws that made him human conveniently forgotten.
Hilary Fannin is on leave