TV Review Hilary FanninCoherence is a comforting concept. One trawls through the television offerings of a given week hoping to be struck by a theme, a ribbon of consistency that might tie this column up in a neat little parcel. Forget it. Prepare to float on a bed of post-Valentine's whimsy; the offerings are refusing to wed.
The week's journey began with an informative caper around the Tropic of Capricorn, as Simon Reeve got back into his Land Rover (having, in his previous series, circumnavigated the equator) and began a 22,000-mile trip along the southerly straight line. Episode one saw the attractive, floppy-haired, best-selling author, international-terrorism and conflict-resolution expert and award-winning film-maker (say all that through a mouthful of the Kalahari Desert) skid down sand dunes at 75kph on a slice of hardboard (swallowing great tracts of sand in the process). Later, he got uncomfortably close to a pride of caustic cheetahs. Tough work if you can get it.
Apologies if I sound crabbily jealous of this entirely likeable man and his achievements, but hell, I am. Watching Reeve, I suddenly remembered that I wanted to be a leggy, self-effacing anthropologist (well, any "ologist" actually) in a pair of faded khakis, drinking beers by the neck with a long-haired French conservationist as the sun sets over a patch of pulsing scrubland. Shucks, as they say.
Reeve's well-made travelogue explored Africa's burgeoning relationship with Chinese industrialists, describing Africa as China's new frontier, and also looked at the dichotomous nature of the continent, or at least of those countries beaded on to the necklace of Capricorn. He visited the architectural sophistication and economic prowess of Botswana, with its zero tolerance of corruption, and where the government, in a bid to save its dwindling workforce from the Aids epidemic, provides workers with free anti-retroviral drugs. Reeve then travelled to impoverished Namibia, where prostitutes, lacerated by the same disease, are selling their bodies for the price of a chicken leg. With the journey continuing through South Africa and Madagascar and onwards to Australia, this will doubtless be a fascinating series. I shall attempt to desist from chewing up my liver and watch it.
'MUSIC IS A language that knows no boundaries." No sooner had the biting, purple cold of the African desert night faded from the screen than one was transported to the mean, now noticeably clean, winter streets of New York City, for TG4's Ceolchuairt, which follows Irish musicians around the world as they "explore the soundtrack of the global village".
This week's offering in the six-part series was a beautifully shot and arresting documentary, tracking champion sean-nós dancer Seosamh Ó Neachtain as he and his dancing shoes traipsed around Brooklyn and Harlem in search of the Big Apple's most innovative tap-dancers. His mission was to recreate a historic "dance-off" that took place in 1840 between a hungry immigrant and a former slave ("green man" John Diamond and black man King Juba), who faced each other on a tiny wooden platform in their adopted city, hoofing it out for the supremacy of their different dance forms.
It was exhilarating to watch young black homeboys in baggy pants and patent leather shoes seemingly hovering over a wooden palette casually thrown down in a basketball court, the speedy rhythm of their feet contrasting with their cool nonchalance, and to compare them with Ó Neachtain, equally young and laid-back, displaying in the clack of his scuffed shoes his technical mastery and improvisational skills. Moving, too, to watch wide-eyed children from Harlem's impoverished Canarsie projects get to their feet to dance with this gentle, almost translucent redhead from Connemara.
Ó Neachtain's tenacity when, under the neon umbrella of Times Square, he eventually faced his opponent and tattooed his tradition on a foreign street was admirable. This was a contest devoid of the harsh racist edge of the 1840 encounter; this time, they were just two young men, warmed by the subway steam, drawing a crowd. It felt like there was a mere whisper in the difference between the two heady forms, sean-nós and tap - they are both, as one elegant and spruce old-timer told Ó Neachtain, "dances to the drumbeat of the soul".
MUSIC MAY KNOW no boundaries, but certain musicians should be encouraged to recognise some. Lily Allen, the feisty Londoner with the catchy faux-girlie songs about love and sex and agoraphobic siblings ("Oh, oh dearie me, my little brother's in his bedroom smoking weed"), is quite pleasant company when she's safely tucked up in the CD player; unfortunately, however, some bright spark in the BBC3 playpen has decided that her bubblegum insouciance and party-frock tartiness are a winning combination for a chat-show host. Wrong.
Allen, daughter of actor Keith, is probably too young to remember her father's abortive attempt at hosting a show for the infant Channel 4. Whatever You Want, a short-lived, punky, agitprop chat-show, in which the exhibitionistic Allen snr kept his clothes on, bit the dust in the early 1980s. Its anti-establishment posturing may have been flawed and naive, but it could hardly have been worse than the tripe his daughter is flogging.
Based on the online social networking that helped launch her career, Lily Allen's show is populated by "friends" who have logged on to her website or communicated with her through her Facebook page, and who have been invited to fill in online questionnaires and come into the studio to share interesting titbits from their fascinating lives.
Here's a truncated, paraphrased version of this week's conversational highlights: "Whaff's the most embarrassing fing that ever happened to you?" "Eh . . . I had a wet dream all over my best mate!" "Yay! And oi, you, you the one who has sex wif women for money?" "Yeah." "Yay, man-whore!" Cue much studio whooping as these two "friends" are plucked from the audience and invited to cross the floor to the "celebrity bar" to have a warm glass of Chardonnay with an egocentric actor and several moody bands that have yet to make it.
The show also features YouTube clips (a masturbating grizzly bear in a zoo) and a Lily home video featuring "me and my mate" chatting in the gym of a posh hotel ("food makes me happy, but shoes make me happier").
This is awful, depressing, lazy fare disguised as cheeky innovation (the technological "yoof" angle, man - wicked). It's dull not just because it's noisy and pointless and a dilution of Allen's talent, but because it portrays an entire cyber generation as being a bunch of vacuous, humourless airheads with all the individuality of a basin of frozen peas.
One can only hope that Allen doesn't give up the day job.
THE INTERNET HAS been in the dock this gooey, fondant-filled Valentine's week; one of broken hearts and stressed postmen; of seasonally-modified bouquets and crotchless panties; of disappointed wives and bitter teens, and flanks of cuddly Teddy bears who will spend the rest of their moribund year gathering dust under sticky valances.
Oh, the treacherous web, with its wilderness of spatial pathways and dangerous lonely roads down which the lovelorn and vulnerable do stumble. Lest you should fall prey to "cyber crime" of the "dating scam" variety, heed the dire warnings of To Catch a Love Rat: Tonight, a programme which, like its subject, promised much but delivered little.
Meet June, a 46-year-old divorcee from Felixstowe. "He said I had a kind face and looked nice," she said, pulling her fleece tight, her eyes misting behind her spectacles, her cautious hairdo tensing in the wind. June had fallen in love online with a handsome, patrician-looking chap of the square-jawed, knitting-pattern-catalogue variety. His name was "Mark".
After much typed tenderness, "Mark" asked June to send him almost £3,000 via Western Union to Lagos in Nigeria. Whatever his fabricated reasons for needing the money, June agreed to withdraw almost all her savings, happy in the belief that she was helping the man she loved, the man who, any minute now, would jump out of the ether and land in Felixstowe in his craggy crewneck to sweep her off her tired and lonely feet. Oh chicken, life's not like that.
The knitting-pattern man turned out to be just that, a face plucked from a modelling site by a scam that runs telephone sweatshops in Lagos, where poor and vulnerable people spend their days inventing ways to relieve lonely divorcees and widows, from Felixstowe to Florida, of their hard-won cash.
So that's the Valentine's week package then. The world is full of giddy young things in hot television studios banging on about their bellybuttons, and well-educated boys in rumbling jeeps excavating the unknown, and the beautiful and the talented tap-dancing in Times Square - and there's just not much space left for the kind of romantic fairytale June believed in.
Roses are red, Violets are blue, My money's in Lagos, But where are you?