TV Review: John O'Shea of Goal may be "bombastic" and "almost visually illiterate" (according to fellow Kerryman Jerry Kennelly), but when he received an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award and threw down a challenge to fellow recipients to create a sustainable business in Africa in a 10-day period, his words were heard.
Among the assembled brain power and prawn cocktails that evening was Kennelly, also an award-winner, who had recently sold his photography company, Stockbyte, for €120 million.
Standing on the periphery of a monumental rubbish dump in Kibera, a slum city that is home to more than one million people on the outskirts of Nairobi, watching illiterate children and skeletal women with babies tied to their backs sifting through acres of ratinfested rubbish to try and find something to swap or sell for food, Kennelly simply said: "I didn't want to leave that challenge unanswered." The Ernst &
Young Entrepreneur Challenge followed Kennelly and his small entourage, including award-winning Irish
Times photographer Alan Betson, as they attempted to establish a sustainable profit-making business, Create Africa, producing and marketing visual images (cards, calendars, and so on) of Kenya.
"I'm not John O'Shea or Bono - I am out of my depth completely," said Kennelly, when faced with the overwhelming reality of poverty and the stink of deprivation. He did respond, however, though in a more pragmatic way than O'Shea may have liked, by focusing on the "sustainable business" element.
While O'Shea's preferred option would have been to create employment in Kibera itself, Kennelly's plan was to set up Create Africa in central Nairobi, where it would be owned and managed by Kenyans and would commit a percentage of its profits to local charities, including Goal.
"This is not an NGO, it's a commercial business. Handouts are bulls***," Kennelly asserted to a disgruntled and prickly O'Shea, who claimed indifferenceto a project that didn't necessarily involve employing street-children. As Kennelly (who was himself funding the start-up of Create Africa) and
his team worked 16-hour days to be ready for their product's launch, O'Shea, seemingly frustrated and disappointed by the genie he had pulled from the entrepreneurial bottle, appeared to fade from the picture.
With memorable images of Nairobi (largely shot by Betson while hanging out of a Cessna aircraft), a board of management in place, a new office, and two young Kenyan graduates running the business, the product, both visually appealing and commercially viable, was ready to be unveiled.
Ten weeks later, back home among the dignified hills of Co Kerry, Kennelly was confident that Create Africa had made steady progress. The product was in 23 outlets in Nairobi, online trading had begun and the business was ready to expand. Kennelly had fulfilled his promise.
O'Shea has to be admired for throwing down the gauntlet and offering an opportunity for action when, so often, the monumental scale of Africa's problems leaves one feeling impotent and despairing. The series continues next week, with O'Shea accompanying food industry entrepreneur Michael Carey
to Malawi. It will be interesting to see if O'Shea's singular vision can survive the marriage with big business.
Size matters, and Dr Armand Leroi has a big one. Yep, Channel 4 is sexing up science again, this time offering What Makes Us Human?, an examination of the human brain, that most delicate of instruments, which we insist on polluting with Big Brother and TV chefs (but more of that anon). Leroi, evolutionary scientist and writer and presenter of the two-part series, is a kind of Armani-plated "rock-doc" with
a big pate and a penchant for discussing "neuroblasts" and "fourth-order intentionality" while the camera gyrates around his crotch like a moon around Saturn.
His own confident circumnavigation of our grey matter brought him to a radiantly beautiful Gujarat, to investigate microcephalus, a condition prevalent in Pakistan, which Leroi rather haughtily described as "bonsai brain", and which some believe is the missing link between us and brother ape. (Microcephalus,
despite a prosaic local explanation that the condition is a curse from the gods, is in fact a result of a silted genetic gene pool due to interfamilial marriage.) From there, Leroi travelled to the snowy US prairies, home to a religious colony of veiled women and sturdy menwho live from cradle to grave in congregations of no more than 150 people, mirroring the size of a pre-Industrial Revolution village, a population Leroi convincingly argued was the optimumsized society for our currently overstressed
brains to function within.
Stimulating material from Leroi, unquestionably, but the information was dwarfed by spinning camera work and endless moody portraits of the doc gazing skywards towards some phallic urban landmark. Which left you to speculate on just whose TV sensibility insists on the poor chap presenting his
material through the gauze of a Duran Duran video, and begged the question: if Leroi followed his own advice and lived in a community of 150, just how many of them would need to be stylists? Anyway, cheerily, it all boils down to a future where a cognitive elite with the genetic constitution of oxen run a ruthless meritocracy fuelled by market-driven eugenics and genetic screening and where your lovers will be more turned on by your intelligence gene and the circumference of your crown than by the
glint in your baby-blues or your bank balance. Think I'll stick a tea-cloth over my noodle and join the folks on the prairie.
The late poet laureate Sir John Betjeman's reputation has, it would seem, taken a lash from those who like their poetry bleak and their poets bleaker. Now, on the centenary of Betjeman's birth, and possibly in an attempt to redress this balance, the BBC is showing three films investigating his life and work. The first of these, Betjeman and Me: Rick Stein's Story, saw TV chef and Padstow resident Stein perambulate along the beautiful Cornish coast, where Betjeman summered all his life, in an attempt to muster his impressions of a man he never knew but for whom he has always felt an affinity.
And of course, given that cookery writers are bigger sellers than poets, to cook a meal that the poet would certainly never have eaten but may well have approved of. It was a pretty slim premise for a 50-minute film, but a robust vehicle for Stein to articulate his love of his adopted village and a good excuse for him to crack open a couple of lobster with some of the town's terribly nice plimsoll-shod residents.
Despite the affinity on which the programme was built - both Stein and Betjeman had eschewed London in favour of Cornwall, both had read English at Oxford and both had German antecedents - one couldn't help feeling that Betjeman needed Stein's gleeful imprimatur like a fish-head in a Cornish pastie. It was difficult to swallow the chef's sycophantic appraisal of the poet: as Stein was reduced to
helpless giggles by Betjeman's verses, his little dog, Chalky, shuffled about looking nervy and embarrassed at this literary departure from digging up lugworms.
What was alluring, though, was archive footage of the poet wandering around his summer haunts in absurdly high-waisted, girth-covering trousers, reading from work inspired by Cornwall ("speckled shells like the nose of a tennis girl"), evocative of languorous, secretive childhood summers.
Stein, who owns not one but three restaurants in Padstow, ultimately chose to make fish pie for the
celebratory centenary dinner. The guests at the strangely formal dinner (which was a long way from "sand in the sandwiches, wasps in the tea") included the poet's daughter, Candida.
Stein is a very successful restaurateur, and dinner in his gaff apparently does not come cheap. The camera crew wrote him this little poem, which he gracefully shared with us: "Hey, dad, what's salt-and-pepper squid? Forget it, son, it's 40 quid."
Meanwhile Big Brother grinds to a close like a dry tryst against a damp bicycle shed. As I'm so hopelessly inept at predicting winners in this mindless festival of lobotomised bikinibottom-holders and metrosexual boyz, I won't bother telling you that I assume sexy Pete - the man who's done more
for Tourette syndrome than Oliver Sacks - will win the tawdry competition. The real star of the show, however, has to be Russell Brand, the foppish, Dickensian, back-combed filth merchant
with the less-than-oblique eyeliner and tight leather pants who presents Big Brother's Big Mouth, a studio discussion on the antics of the housemates. It involves telephone contributions
from flatmates, proud fathers and passing psychopaths, all orchestrated by Brand, wielding a skinny mike and a scatological obsession worthy of expensive and long-term therapy.
Riffing from Pol Pot to Evel Knievel via flesh-eating maggots, Brand's outrageous poetry and cruelly indifferent concentration span brings a strange kind of art to Big Brother's murky proceedings. With his mucky London inflexions complementing his impressive erudition, his hair extensions plugged into the zeitgeist and the tiniest bum on telly, Brand is set for media domination.
