True Lives: Private Dancers (RTE1, Monday)
Blood On The Carpet (BBC2, Tuesday)
Silent Witness (BBC1, Monday & Tuesday)
There must have been a great splutter of tea and half-chewed Rich Teas in the north Dublin household which this week discovered that those nice young ladies who live next door are in fact bona fide, card-carrying, fire-eating lapdancers. That kind of thing can affect property prices, you know, although it's hard to say in which direction. We can only hope that the girls have plenty of sugar in the cupboard, because there's going to be a lot of empty cups appearing on that doorstep.
Alan Gilsenan's Private Dancers turned out to be the great disappointment of the week. I had a plastic glass with my name on it glued by the office water-cooler all week in anticipation, only to find that just because this was filmed in Dublin didn't make it any different to any of those sexumentaries that fill up Sky One's evening schedule, and which Channel 4 and the BBC have taken to showing in recent years. Ordinary girls lolling about the house, telling us how it's just another job, that they're doing it to make the cash to get through medical school, how they'd rather the men went to these clubs than went out and did worse things, that they're not prostitutes. It's all staple fodder for the Tricias and Esthers and Kilroys of this TV world. Anybody who was shocked obviously doesn't realise that the viewing watershed now falls sometime in the midmorning.
No amount of opera patched over dancers writhing for men whose wardrobes consisted of the entire Celtic Superstore collection could take this out of the ordinary. There was also an uncomfortable sense of Gilsenan not having full control, as Bertie, the girls' manager (think walrus with a Cork accent), never left their sides. But it was mainly about missed opportunities, about fly-on-the-walls that might have been. Samantha, the Dublin girl with an accent that could cut steel and an attitude that could level entire cities, deserved to be more than a bit player. We learnt nothing about club-owner Jerome, or how he managed to find his way into the lapdancing business. I can't imagine that they learn it in college. And then there were the bouncers. There are always the bouncers.
`Have you, by any chance, in recent times gone out to buy a suit, other than a tux?" "Yeah. Why?" "Where'd you get it? Frawley's or Arnott's?"
"Either one."
"I have to get a proper suit, like."
"Arnott's, actually. You get a better fit, you get a better selection. If there's a problem with it you can bring it back, you know wha' I mean."
"It'll be a while before I'm paying Louis Copeland a visit, like."
"Well then you're better off going to Frawley's."
"I think Frawley's will be more my budget then."
So that's what keeps bouncers awake at night.
If Craig, John and Ken are representatives of youth, then slap a knotted hankerchief on my head and call me "Pops". In Blood On The Carpet, these fine examples of American manhood, reminisced about their trip to Woodstock. That's Woodstock 1999, you understand. The Three Days of Peace, Love and Music that ended in a full-scale riot.
Craig, John and Ken spoke for their kind.
"This is us. This is how it be. You're going to die soon. Don't set up laws that we're not going to abide by." Whenever George W. Bush leaves the White House, he might want to take the nuclear button with him.
In 1999, the man behind the original concert, Michael Lang, wanted to do Woodstock all over again, just like it had been before. Except this time it was $150 a ticket. And a bottle of water cost $4. And a burger $8. And a pizza $12. At least he kept the relaxed attitude to authority, with no police on site in case it was seen as incitement.
Instead he booked acts, such as the delightfully titled Insane Clown Posse who told the crowd to "break stuff", simulated the beating of a cop and sang songs such as F--k The World. Lang's definition of incitement was never quite explained.
When the revolution came, they went straight for the Grilled Chicken Sandwich stall. In 99 degree Fahrenheit temperatures, three days' of rip-off food, expensive water, over-flowing toilets and a growing rubbish mountain were only ever going to lead to one thing. That the organisers decided to hand out candles to every concertgoer was enough to convince you that the dodgy brown acid must have had lasting effects. Woodstock 99 went up in flames.
Wavy Gravy didn't approve of the violence. Wavy was in charge of making sure the vibe was all peace, love and harmony at the original Woodstock, and had managed to keep control of 400,000 people with the aid of only a bear suit and a rubber shovel. Kids today, they just don't know how to respect authority. As things began to get out of hand, he took to the stage to calm things down, dressed in his best psychedelic jumpsuit, with a multicoloured lollipop in hand.
"Ram. Ram. Ram," he chanted. "Let's get our engine started. Ram. Ram. Ram. Till we're all in one voice, one sound. Build it, build, build, and send it out for peace on the planet." Maybe the crowd thought he was Insane Clown Posse, because they ignored him and broke stuff instead.
IN case you haven't seen it before, Silent Witness is another one of those drama series in which a forensic scientist goes moping around middle England solving murders. In fact, it's worth watching just to see what excuses they come up with to have Prof Sam Ryan do all the jobs that everybody else should really be doing themselves. For instance, being Middle England, everybody is terribly polite, so the victims' families come to thank her a lot for all she's done, and just happen to mention something in passing - say that their brother was once banged up for lopping the head off a nun. And, of course, all the cops have their ties knotted so tight that it has cut the blood supply to the bit of their brains that spots the bloody obvious, meaning that the good old Prof is the only one who can ever point out the clues that matter.
This week, the chief copper's excuse for not using a police profiler on a serial killer was because he once used one, and his name was Colin, and he didn't like the name Colin. The same cop got into a lift at a vital moment and disappeared for half an episode. I'm not making this up.
Amanda Burton, who plays Ryan, deserves some sort of award for this week being out-acted by not just one frozen corpse, but three of them. She is so relentlessly cheerless, cold and smug that you feel the only reason that everybody keeps confessing to her is to drag some sort of emotion out of a face that looks like it's been dunked in muscle relaxant. But of course, this is a serious drama, and it requires a serious character. It's yet another example of how TV executives think that just by throwing in some choral music, nasty violence and a glum hero they can call something "dark" and "deep" and "challenging". Silent Witness is really just Quincy without the brown corduroy suits. Maybe the 1980s weren't so bad after all.
Script-writers know that across the country's sofas there are people guessing, "The travel agent's the killer. I bet you it's him. No it's the mother. Or the vicar." So that when it turned out to be the gardener who dunnit it was no surprise, seeing as he only popped his head into the frame about 20 minutes from the end. Why bother writing well-rounded characters when you can just hoodwink the audience with a whole new character in the final chapter? In the closing scene, the mother of a victim came to say thanks to Ryan for her help. As the theme struck up and the credits began to roll I half expected her to go: "Hold on. It was me. I was the real killer all along." It'll happen one day, bet on it.
