TVReview:Oh do come on, Tim! I'm not watching any more Wimbledon this year. The irritation, exasperation and aching hope I felt for poor old Tim Henman has left me feeling like a punctured ping-pong ball.
The dear chap and his rather lovely English rose wife, with her woolly scarf and forlorn brow, have once again been dispatched to chintzy suburbia for a glass of barley water, this time by Feliciano Lopez, a bronzed and seething Spaniard (rather tetchily described from the BBC commentary box as a "handsome brute").
I can't bear inflaming hope for the underdog any more. Valiant Tim! In his hour of adversity he pulls astoundingly lovely tennis out of the bag with the kind of steely determination you used to see in submarine movies. Yeah, yeah, we've been here before, haven't we? But then as soon as the bloke senses victory, he embraces defeat.
What is the man's problem? Is it merely excessive politeness, a couldn't-possibly-take-the-last-ginger-beer sensitivity? The chap is stuck in a Famous Five novel - as soon as things start to hot up it's back to Uncle Quentin's for lashings of strawberry tart in your pyjamas.
The days of Henman's tentative, repressed little fist action grazing the air in moments of triumph are surely over. Anyway . . . he's got a lot to look forward to, like fingering his Airfix models in the potting shed and dusting off his trophies with the linted sleeve of his Viyella shirt. One suspects that the annual stiffening of the lip, as the hopes and volleys of the only tennis player who still sports a haircut rather than a bandana are ritually dashed, is finally a thing of the past.
BETWEEN A WASHED-OUT Wimbledon, an elated Tony Blair leaving the House of Commons after his last prime minister's question time (to a standing ovation orchestrated in part by the PR creation that is David Cameron), and watching their countrymen snorkel down the high street, Britain has had a busy week.
Thank goodness for the resolute David Attenborough, who confronted the knotty problem of getting us to haul our psyches out of the sand and face up to our flagrant and wilful abuse of our habitat in Saving Planet Earth.
Attenborough's offering was, of course, a desperately beautiful production, the painful truth and nerve-jangling intensity of which showed even Henman's flirtation with success to be nothing more than the ripple of an osprey wing and Blair's historic 13 years at the head of Britain's Labour Party as the equivalent in time to no more than the infanthood of a turtle.
Programme one saw Attenborough give a brief history of Earth, and, with gentle magicianship over the course of an hour, provide a kind of panoramic view of the abundance and variety of life that the planet supports. But underneath the generous footage of staggering beauty - from South American rainforests to the chilly majesty of Scotland's Cairngorms - the pulse of crisis was beating.
From orphaned orang-utans (their forest habitat cleared to make room for soil-exhausting crops) clinging to the Wellington-booted zoologists who have replaced their slaughtered parents, to sodden, doubtful polar bears swimming and drowning due to exhaustion in search of ice, to hazes of fluttering, panicked butterflies swarming unsteadily, like ornate old ladies in search of a chair, over giant modified crop circles (chilling rounds of unvaried green), this was a fantastically-made plea for our scattered and deficient attention, and enough to make you weep.
ON THE OTHER hand, Big Brother was enough to make you retch. The feckless fools behind the unmodified madness this week insisted that the beleaguered contestants (voluntarily imprisoned by their own ignorance and misguided belief in celebrity) should stay awake for around three days or face a diet of slops. Someone should bring the programme-makers to the court of human rights; this is base, reductive and cruel television.
Speaking of which (reductive, vile reality TV, that is), our old friend, that wart on the rump of junk-food lovers, Dr Gillian "look at the consistency of my bowel movements" McKeith was back with her new series, 3 Fat Brides,1 Thin Dress (which has to be the most fantastically alluring name ever for a portion of trash TV). One in four brides in Britain is obese, apparently, and can't stuff their cleavages and fat backs into their big, flouncy, corset-topped dresses - unless, that is, they have McKeith presenting them with gift-wrapped cow's livers and pulsing sheep's hearts in a bid to make them acknowledge the damage their (admittedly gross) eating habits are having on their innards.
"I'm not doing this for fun," protested McKeith as she dumped a lump of trifle into a coffin, where she had already placed an ugly satin wedding dress. The hysterical bride-to-be looked on in paroxysms of horror as she imagined her tragic death at the altar due to her years of takeaway chicken kormas and pints of warm Chardonnay.
"God designed the veg for the rabbits and the cows, and then we eat the animals," said one of the grooms-to-be, a large born-again Christian and decisive virgin who, along with his fiancee, Lisa, was growing steadily fatter on a diet of doner kebabs and chastity. McKeith, though groaning into the couple's cold fried-rice cartons, must have been as happy as a vegan in a glasshouse; in a nation where so many millions are now classified as obese (obesity apparently beginning at two stone overweight), she is assured a lifetime of these increasingly bizarre TV gigs. For those of you with the stomach for the diminutive Scot's tactics, it's all only just begun: there are swathes of big girls with big dreams out there, just queuing up to have their faeces publicly monitored.
RTÉ DRAMA IS back on form, it would appear, given the evidence of the extremely sharp and stylish Damage, written and directed by Aisling Walsh. A reassuringly seaworthy vehicle, the drama dealt with the consequences of the rape of a young woman, Emma (the truly superb Nathalie Press), on the night of her 21st birthday. The crime took place in the chrome-and-glass-plated home of Emma's parents, an edgily successful Dublin couple, boom warriors whose seemingly infallible hedonism crumbled to expensive dust when the perpetrator turned out to be a family friend, the secret lover of Emma's cold and acerbic mother.
The storyline, although here rendered tight and interesting, has been played out in many soap operas, and was probably the least of the production's parts. Damage stood out for its superb direction and the cumulative effect of the precise, poetic and delicately shot images, which evoked Emma's gratuitous Tiger world with frightening acuity. This was Celtic shopping and f***ing, a brilliant picture of cocaine-powered consumerism, of bruised fragility and of appetites too readily assuaged.
The story's conclusion involved a compromise that the film-makers probably had to make, although after such a sophisticated journey it was a little difficult to take. Emma, beleaguered by the adversarial legal system, failed to convince a jury that what had happened to her was non-consensual sex, and the rapist was found not guilty. After a period of despair, she ended up as a volunteer counsellor, working with other women who had had similar experiences. A little pat, maybe, but Damage was nonetheless a strong piece of work.
COCAINE, HEROIN, ECSTASY - these are the stuff and trade of a covert economy and the fuel behind the relentless shootings, beatings and episodes of torture among the Republic's more notorious criminal gangs. RTÉ's blatant and fascinating new series, Feud, opened with an examination of the rise and disintegration of Dublin gang the Westies. With contributions from journalists, community leaders and sociologists, the programme traced the careers of Westie leaders Shane Coates and Stephen Sugg, from the time they first came to the attention of their communities as anti-social 12-year-olds until their twentysomething corpses were discovered buried in the cement foundations of a Spanish housing resort.
The series continues over the next few weeks, illuminating many recent news stories, including the Limerick feuds that seem to have dominated the headlines. The consensus from this opener, however, is that the gangs are led by ever younger men, drug- addicted, paranoid and more arbitrarily vicious than their predecessors.
And so, time to escape. As the ominous pitter-patter of a waterlogged summer unfolds, drowning strawberries and family picnics and grassy north London tennis, I'm off to pack my holiday Wellingtons. Au revoir.
