The Fantasy Club Channel 4, Sunday
Vincent - The Man Who Won the Lotto and Bought the Dole Office RTE1, Tuesday
Leargas RTE1, Tuesday
Give My Head Peace Christmas Special, BBC1, Thursday
Paths to Freedom Network 2, Monday
Spin City Network 2, Tuesday
Much of the best - and worst - of television this week was created by cameras following people about recording their lives, i.e. the documentary. It ranged from the potentially salacious, to inspiring and worthy, to local cultural beauty and on to the quite brilliantly and authentically mad.
We'll start with the salacious (why be a tease?). The Fantasy Club examined the world of the lap dancer. Now, bear with me, but I've never been entirely certain what exactly a lap dancer was or did. Wait! Wait! Hang on - I may not be the most worldly man, but I'm not a complete innocent. I'm perfectly aware that when A.N. Lap Dancer goes to work, she (or he?) has a clear image of the correct outcome of that work.
But, if you dance topless in a bar, does that make you a lap dancer? Not necessarily, it seems. If you are a prostitute, sitting bored in an Amsterdam window, are you a lap dancer? Probably not. The question is: what is the precise ratio of lap to dance which confers on the participant the right to join the guild of lap dancer?
The Fantasy Club took the train up to Aberdeen to visit what it described as the city's first lap dancing club, or, more accurately, to put a camera in the suburban house which six young(ish) English women were sharing as they worked at the club.
The club services, as it were, the Scottish off-shore oil industry (are you listening, Castlebar?), and Ronnie, the club owner and manager, explained the rules. In the £5 room, several clients could mingle with several of the girls; in the £10 room it was, pardon the expression, one-on-one. But Ronnie was quite clear: absolutely no touching was permitted between client and dancer, no phone numbers could be exchanged, dancers could not leave the premises with a customer and "when the G-strings are off, absolutely no feet off the ground". I think the Chinese State Circus would be impressed by that. Ronnie also explained that each cubicle was being monitored on video to ensure the rules were not infringed, and just to prove it we were shown at that very moment footage of some quite specific touching going on, although admittedly neither the dancer nor the client was employing their hands just then.
So back to the house the women were sharing, and guess what? We discovered, as we got to know them, that they were utterly unremarkable. Perfectly average intellectually and economically; slightly above average physically; and yes, of course, all had suffered some sort of emotional trauma or damage in their teens which left them with the sort of self-esteem that allowed them to rationalise their current career choice.
I didn't watch the second half; there could be no happy ending. The lightest possible ending might have been that one of the girls might have gone home, might have tried to get out of it. But even that was fantasy. As one of the women had said in the first half: they always come back.
Then again, what could they make of their lives if they won the lottery? In sharp contrast to that fantasy club, Vincent - The Man Who Won the Lotto and Bought the Dole Office allowed us to watch as Vincent Keany realised his fantasy of rescuing one of our most poignant historical landmarks and restoring it to its full glory (all right, he did turn it into a restaurant, not a museum, but I got a strong sense that you'd be welcome to drop in most any time).
Keany was separated, unemployed and living with his three young daughters in Cobh when his numbers came up in 1994.
If you were signing on the dole in Cobh in 1994, you did it in what had been the original White Star Line office in the town, from which, in 1912, the final complement of 123 passengers embarked on the Titanic. Keany had always had a fascination with Cobh's maritime history, and with the Titanic story, so when the lease for the building came up in 1999, Keany snapped it up.
Work began on refurbishment that October, and Keany (oh, innocence!) hoped the new beauty would be ready for that New Year's millennium celebration. Then he aimed for St Patrick's Day, then he aimed for . . . At one stage we found him on a Friday afternoon trying desperately to raise the week's £8,500 wage bill; he managed it, just.
Throughout, Keany came across as a genuinely decent bloke whose natural enthusiasm for the project carried it through much more troubled waters than the Titanic ever encountered. But by May he too had been holed by a berg of financial ice, and he was forced to take on business partners. As he put it: "However good I am at marketing and design, management isn't really my role in life."
The Titanic Queenstown, with its fine and historically accurate decor, opened last August. Coincidentally, I passed by the next weekend, and although it was closed that morning my breath left stains on the windows as I strained to study the interior. Well worth a visit, I suspect.
Definitely worth a visit is the annual Connemara Pony fair, which was warmly captured in Leargas. There are, in fact, a few such pony fairs in Connemara, but the one in question was this year's Hallowe'en (Oiche Shamhna) effort at Maam Cross (that's Peacock's to you and me).
There was nothing outstanding about this programme other than that it was beautifully simple and simply beautiful. We had a few words from a young blacksmith (gabhna), Padraic O Flatharta, about his apprenticeship and the life he leads, and more from Paraic Oibicin, a farmer and dance teacher, who hoped to sell a fine foal.
He also managed to throw in a lesson in sean damhsa for the teenagers; sure, Flatley's not in it.
As one fella put it: "You pull in, have the craic, and, as I do say, you meet a lot of disciples on the day in question, and have a couple of scoops before you go and that'll finish the day."
Speaking of scoops, and documentaries. In the final episode of Paths To Freedom, Rats's (Michael McElhatton's) band, Sperm.com, have been booked to play their first gig at a pub called Skuzzies (don't get me started on the video, although laps and dancers did feature). Unfortunately, no one told the pub's owner (not least the fat Pavarotti type Rats had given "400 squid" to up front). But help is at hand: they get a late booking for a small gay club, Brief Encounters. Backstage, as things grow more chaotic, Rats tells the film crew: "Lookit, forget the steamers and get back to the band!"
Meanwhile, Jeremy (Brendan Coyle) and Helen (Deirdre O'Kane) have had to sell the house; Jeremy is living in his tent on the golf course, where he had once (almost) been captain. As he says to his ex-captain ex-friend: "Look at the riff-raff you let in! The women were perfectly happy with the three-day week, but, Oh No!, Mr Save the Vegetarian Lesbians here . . ."
Helen, who has abandoned the glass and is now quaffing her Chardonnay straight from the bottle, has filed for divorce and moved to Paris.
If you didn't see it, there's no point in trying to explain. But Paths To Freedom was certainly the comic sensation of the RTE decade. It was one of those programmes, like The Simpsons, which was worth watching a second time on video, because you couldn't possibly catch all the genius first time round. Unfortunately, I can't see it doing well in other markets - without subtitles.
So goodbye to Paths, and a goodbye, of sorts, to another of the best comedies in years, though it has been strangely overlooked here. Spin City was in the best tradition of the American sit-com: strong characters, fine acting and, crucially, the sharpest of scripts.
This week we saw the final episode to include Michael J. Fox as the deputy mayor of New York. A year or two ago Fox was diagnosed with Parkinson's, and he felt he had reached the stage where he could no longer work as professionally as he wished. So he bowed out, graciously but movingly.
The programme continues, with Charlie Sheen stepping in.
Fox, meanwhile, has become an advocate for research into Parkinson's, including appearing before a Congressional committee. We wish him well.
jculley@irish-times.ie