Just who is the target audience that RTE has in mind for its much-hyped four-part adaptation of Deirdre Purcell's Falling for a Dancer? It's coming our way on a prime-time slot four Sundays in a row from tomorrow and, judging by the number of trailers, is one of the mega events of the autumn season.
This is the first of Deirdre Purcell's novels to be filmed, and she is rightly delighted and proud of the fact, particularly as she also wrote the screenplay. "I can't blame anyone else for the script, since I wrote it myself," she said at the launch party earlier this week. Purcell's most recent novel, Love, Like, Hate, Adore, which was shortlisted last year for Britain's prestigious Orange Prize, is currently in development with the same team which produced Falling for a Dancer.
Falling for a Dancer is set in Cork of the 1930s: both Cork city and the Beara Peninsula. It is primarily the story of Elizabeth (Elisabeth Dermot Walsh), a young girl who becomes pregnant by a roving actor, and who is subsequently married off to a lump of a widower with a clatter of kids far out on the Beara.
Neeley - short for Cornelius - her husband (played by Dermot Crowley) has a deceptively cute-sounding pet name. The pet behaves with all the predictable grace of an agile bull. He rapes Elizabeth, cuts her hair off, seriously injures her child, curtails her freedom and carries on in this endearing manly fashion throughout. Ah, but what goes around, comes around, as Neeley eventually discovers.
To offset this, there is the brooding presence of Mossie (Liam Cunningham) on the opposite hillside, who keeps sheep and seems to have learned a lot about their eyes in the process, since this is what he makes at Elizabeth for the duration of the series.
But will Elizabeth recognise a good chap when she sees one?
There are sub-plots which involve the stepchildren; a young hotheaded lad who falls for Elizabeth at a dance (hence the title of the production); whist drives; Tilly, the long-suffering and ubiquitous foil of a neighbour; Elizabeth's estranged parents; and feuds over land.
Falling for a Dancer was produced by Parallel Films for BBC Northern Ireland, in association with RTE. It has already been sold to the US, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, and no doubt other countries will follow. It airs on BBC 1 from September 13th, a week after RTE. This all represents serious money for the RTE coffers.
RTE's autumn series does not seem intended solely, or even primarily, for an RTE audience at all. It has been made with both eyes fixed on a much wider and more lucrative global Irish-roots audience, using all the cliched cultural short-cuts en route, which conveniently pass as "period drama". Hence the presence of dancehalls, horses and carts, remote seaside locations, multiple pregnancies, priests, nuns, misty hillsides, and, of course, lots of sheep.
The first episode of the four-part series of Falling for a Dancer is broadcast tomorrow on RTE 1 at 9.20 p.m.