TV Review: Two weeks into the election campaign and the romper-room party is in full swing, writes Hilary Fannin.
Bashful Bertie is refusing to come out of the sandpit, Masher McDowell is banging his auspicious cranium off the walls, jolly Pat Rabbitte is on the toy telephone looking for a media consultant, and poster boy Enda Kenny is twirling his kiss curl and crawling on to the electorate's lap with his Dana songbook promising all kinds of everything.
In a manic week, which began with Charlie Bird suggesting that the PDs were going to leave Bertie and his expensive house-painting bills and go and sit beside someone else, and when Sinn Féin rubbed out its taxation policy document and copied Bertie's instead, and all the big Fianna Fáil bears took off their ties to give a press conference in their rolled-up shirtsleeves, it became clear that this is a rather old-fashioned election.
Clumsy attempts at "spin" have got into a tangle, and instead of a chrome-plated media assault going into overdrive, what we are seeing is just a lot of panting politicians chasing photo-ops and ducking crises.
As nurses took to the streets while under threat of having their pay-packets docked, a grinning Enda Kenny stood outside a hospital and gave away bottles of sterilising hand-wash liquid like a demonstration lady in Tesco. The Taoiseach chased babies around shopping centres, while Pat Rabbitte struggled to survive what must surely be the most amateurish party political broadcast in the history of television, in which he stands in a field surrounded by members of the public (actors actually, though none you'd recognise), all of them burdened by the dreadful inequities of modern Irish living. "Where are all the police?" wails one enthusiastic young actress, clutching her buggy with her pretend baby in it, as a sympathetic if rather embarrassed Rabbitte sidesteps the extra with the Zimmer frame to offer a supporting hand from the depths of his decorous pinstripe suit.
Amidst the mania, Prime Timecontinued to provide measured and grown-up coverage of events, setting the pace with special reports on the issues that matter, while the excellent Week in Politicssaw journalist Sean O'Rourke (possibly ignited by Vincent Browne's earlier tenacious questioning of the Taoiseach during the launch of the FF manifesto) worry a deeply uncomfortable Michael McDowell.
And then, unfortunately, there was the new TV3 series, Polls Apart with Cooper & Hobbs, whose first guest, jammed between vociferous hosts Matt and Eddie, was the Green Party leader, Trevor Sargent.
"Tune in after the ad break and find out which toll-bridge you'll be approaching on your donkey!" grinned a manic Hobbs as part one concluded and an increasingly irritated Sargent, in a plumped-up stripy green tie, tried to grin through his dentistry.
Part two saw Cooper display his talent for vacuous noise-making, apparently disregarding the entire weight of the scientific community when he seemed to dismiss global warming as the hysterical hallucination of woolly-jumpered vegetarians on a mission to make him relinquish his 4x4.
"Our greatest resource is wind," insisted Sargent, rather aptly in the circumstances.
HAVING BATTLED WITHthe sweaty pan-stick and affected gravity of our porous and po-faced politicos all week, watching poet Paul Durcan's tremulous, intense and unsparingly raw account of his childhood and early adulthood in Alan Gilsenan's superb film, Paul Durcan: The Dark School, was akin to closing the door on a screaming and pungent nursery and taking a walk by the ocean.
Gilsenan's film, a stylistically delicate piece of work, interspersed personal and collective images, family photographs and sterile, sanitised hospital interiors, with snatches of music and the poet reciting familiar and new work. Unfurling memories of his childhood in Dublin's Dartmouth Square with his beautiful, refined mother and his "severe, problematic" father, a circuit court judge, "a man capable of gratuitous beatings" and a man who told his young son that "Nemesis will follow you all the days of your life", Durcan, embraced by shadow, spoke candidly in his familiar metronomic, almost hypnotic voice about his troubled past.
Central to his recollections was a sense that (in what he described as "a hugely male world") he was seen as a "funk" and a "sissy" by a breed of men whose idea of manliness could only have been embodied by some kind of "military priest". As a teenager, Durcan, who never fitted into that rigid armour, was committed, against his will, to St John of God's Hospital in Dublin, where he encountered "profound cynicism" and a loose and unsupported diagnosis of schizophrenia.
"I have met some bad people in my life, Paul," one psychiatrist told him, "but you are the worst."
What followed was a terrifying incarceration for the 19-year-old in various hospitals, where he was subjected to 27 sessions of electro-convulsive therapy, shots of Mandrax and the threat of leucotomy, a neurosurgical procedure that allowed a doctor to bore a hole in the temple of a psychiatric patient and remove troublesome grey matter. Durcan's survival, albeit scarred by the melancholia and insomnia that have stayed with him, saw him find his voice after being befriended and supported by Patrick Kavanagh, through whom he eventually met his future (now former) wife, Nessa O'Neill, the mother of their two children.
When his reminiscences reached the early 1970s, a time of personal optimism now recalled with palpable grief, Durcan stood up from his chair, his conversation with Gilsenan spent, and the viewer was left not only longing for more but with a sense of the fragility and desperate speed of life, and the beauty of moments fossilised in memory but ultimately lost: "The kitchen walls painted yellow, the typewriter on the table, a little person in a bath on the floor."
FEATURING A PAIRof identical, virginal, anorexic Dutch twins (and let's face it, you don't come across that very often) struggling to free themselves from their unique and rather disturbing bond, Channel 4's Cutting Edge: Trapped By My Twinpromised to be a ghoulishly fascinating documentary with which to round off the bank holiday weekend.
It was, however, a dismally depressing and inconclusive trip around the damaged psyches of two 35-year-olds, Angelique and Liesbeth, whose shared DNA appeared to have consigned them to a life of intense and relentless competition.
The women, stultified by self-absorption and a kind of terrible, murky, helpless vanity, fought the battle for control over the issue of food, crumbling potato chips into equal-sized piles and, by resorting to licking each other's spoons and forensically examining each other's portion sizes, trying to ensure that one did not consume fewer calories than the other. They were dicing with slow disintegration and death.
There were vague, generalised and unexplored murmurings within the film that twins are particularly susceptible to anorexia, and we were also told that mothers of twins are twice as likely to be affected by depression and parents of twins twice as likely to split up. The film also recorded Angelique and Liesbeth's dour and hostile trip to a French twin convention, where the gloomy gals berated a couple of sets of middle-aged identical twins for wearing something resembling matching gingham pinnies, before retiring to the marquee to measure each other's fish fingers.
Watching so many identical twins in one French field was rather disorientating and, with no real exploration of Angelique and Liesbeth's past, no interviews with their family nor indeed any real effort to find out if their woebegone depression was entirely and only due to their twindom, it was difficult to find sympathy for the film's subjects.
WATCHING A STREAKof Dutch neurosis, however, was a piece of cake compared with the endurance feat of viewing 28 vigorous musical contenders strut their Helsinki stuff in the Eurovision Song Contest Semi-Final. In a glittering concert, the interval act treated us to a terrifying glimpse into the Finnish psyche, with the metaphoric undoing of a substantial operatic diva by a skinny little man wielding a ukulele (more or less).
Indeed, there was very little relief to be had in Euroland during a long night of painful pop-rock passion. Predictably, the show was dominated by large, blond, hairy men in troll armour roaring incoherently about chewing up vampires and straddling werewolves (actually, I have no idea what they were crooning about, so distracting were my own groans of boredom).
In the end, our old friend, the eastern European bloc vote, dismissed the old-timers. Denmark, which fielded a boy in several pink dresses called Drama Queen, bit the Helsinki dust, as did the Netherlands and a lot of Belgian boys with zoot-suits and sunglasses and anyone who ever swam in the Mediterranean or didn't queue for borscht.
If you have the stomach for a bevy of warrior princes with hair extensions, you're in for a good night tonight. With blessed relief, I can report that I won't be joining the party.