TV Review: The patter of tiny tiger paws are clearly audible in The Mentor, an eight-part series which attempts to resolve the commercial difficulties faced by small Irish businesses looking for their stripes. The mentoring is on offer from Jay Bourke, leisure entrepreneur, and Dr Jeanne Bolger, vice-president of scientific licensing at Johnson & Johnson.
Mysteriously filmed wafting past lichen-covered bark and tossing their voluminous locks over their shoulders in crumbling stone outhouses, Bolger and Bourke exude a spooky well-heeled otherworldliness. Mentor HQ, however, appears to be buried in the vaults of a disused abbey, where the clients are interviewed over a luminous lime-green table. The setting, although brimming with monastic chic, looks a little chilly and is probably not the best place to don your Jimmy Choos, even if you could afford them.
Other people's problems can be wonderfully soothing, though, no matter where they're set. You may be mortgaged up to the hilt and too tired to take your make-up off before you throw yourself into your unmade pit (or maybe that's just me), but it's unlikely that you're worrying about industrial embroidery and the vagaries of Pakistani tracksuit delivery.
Husband and wife Declan and Yvonne Loughnane run their sportswear business from their garage behind their house. Despite working until one and two in the morning, they have a turnover of less than €100,000 a year and Declan can't afford to give up the day job. They have a young son and a bad case of sleep deprivation - oh, and they plan to be bigger than Nike.
The mentors, in an attempt to give the couple's business a "bone structure", sent them for a personality profile (a weekend for two in a spa town didn't seem to be an option). Then the Loughnanes got motivated by sports star and successful entrepreneur DJ Carey over a refreshing cup of tea in their garden, before visiting branding consultant Pat Kinsley (purple walls, black polo-neck, very 007).
The results of the branding consultation were splendid and by the end of the programme the Loughnane business had a new name (Scor) and a logo to rival the market leader - and their dreams of seeing their product on billboards and their embroidered logos emblazoned on the chests of happy hurlers and fit children at last felt tangible.
There was one glitch, however. Yvonne, despite the mentors' advice to the contrary, wouldn't agree to Declan ditching the day job. Jay Bourke, sitting in the dusty sunlight of his restaurant in what used to be Bewleys on Grafton Street, attempted to suppress his irritation, twitching the knee which protruded gently from his expensively distressed jeans. Being reckless had worked for him, he said.
AN AWFUL LOT of people didn't want to talk to Kevin Toolis. In Dispatches: The Big Heist, journalist and IRA expert Toolis undertook the lonely job of investigating the whereabouts of the £26 million (€38.3 million) that was stolen from the Northern Bank in Belfast just prior to last Christmas, the biggest cash bank robbery in British criminal history, 80 per cent of which is still unaccounted for.
Among those who did speak up was former RUC chief Johnson Brown, who said the robbery, which involved holding the family of one of the bank's two keyholders at gunpoint, and abducting the wife of the other, "had all the hallmarks of the IRA". The gunmen, in a concerted effort to avoid forensic detection, brought their own bottles to urinate in, and scrupulously swabbed the surfaces of the houses with bleach before they left. "The Provisionals," Brown concluded, "have taking over houses and holding families down to a fine art."
Although Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness continue to deny having had any prior knowledge of the raid, the absence of a contribution from either man to the programme allowed for intense speculation that the two could not possibly have been unaware of the heist.
"Gerry Adams is god in terms of the IRA movement," said former Sinn Féin activist John Kelly in his first televised interview. "And not a sparrow falls from the sky . . "
Toolis, in his efforts to follow the trail of the quarter-ton of stolen money from the time it crossed the Border into the Republic, found himself at times skirting absurdity. Farann, in Co Cork, is home to Ted Cunningham, where £2.3 million (€3.4 million) was discovered in the businessman's wheelie-bin.
Cunningham led Toolis to "unrepentant republican" and former chairman of Bank of Scotland Ireland, Phil Flynn. Flynn, friend of Bertie Ahern, had been tried and acquitted of IRA membership in 1974. A director of Cunningham's company, Chesterton Finance, a money-lending service to farmers (a directorship that Flynn now says "was an error of judgment"), Flynn travelled to Bulgaria with Cunningham shortly after the bank raid and tried to invest £20 million (€29.4 million) in a Bulgarian shopping mall development.
Ultimately, Toolis's film was asking whether, 10 years after the ceasefire, Sinn Féin was now operating with the ballot box in one hand and bank robbery proceeds in the other. Michael McDowell, in his relentless and unapologetic fashion, argued that Sinn Féin funds its elections on "the accumulated patrimony of crime-derived money". If nothing else, the timing of the programme will ensure that it lends itself to some lively debate.
THERE WAS SOME tough talking going on in Dustin's Daily News; the geezer with the gizzard, despite his newly sharpened lapels and time slot, wasn't about to get chirpy. Introducing a laidback Keith Duffy as "a brutal actor who can't sing" was about as measured and pleasant as he got. According to the acerbic turkey, Duffy, having left Coronation Street, was in need of a new career, and Dustin's young viewers were invited to text in their suggestions. A scarecrow, offered one; an alien, suggested another, though nobody mentioned a talking turkey, which seemed the obvious choice if the former boy-band member really wanted to prolong his showbusiness career.
Then there was the "you can't be serious" slot, where children attempted to keep a straight face for 60 seconds while Dustin told jokes and threw pre-teen obscenities at them. "Pat Kenny's bottom" was a big hitter in the bird's arsenal of phrases, and almost got the contestant to crack a smile, while "Mary Harney without make-up" left the poor child looking terrified.
"Any chance of Boyzone getting back together?" asked the sour-mandibled host.
"I don't think so," Duffy replied.
"That's a relief," Dustin muttered.
Happily, there's a load more where that came from.
"CUPID'S ARROW CAME not by courier but by treasured letter." Love Story, the candid and gentle six-part exploration of love from RTÉ's archive unit, this week examined the importance of the love letter to courtship, in the days of black-and-white telly and beehives and crimplene dresses, when e-mail and mobile phones were as unthinkable as Celtic tigers in a boardroom.
Among the archive clips of agile nuns jiving with jolly girls in tunics, and ladies at the spring show in patent leather heels sporting hats like saucepans, we met love's winged messenger, postman Mike Sheehan, who wore out more than 20 bicycles cycling around Goleen in Co Cork. At a conservative estimate, Mike cycled 30 miles a day for 40 years, the equivalent of cycling 10 times around the Equator.
Joan McDonnell, at the tender age of 20, was despairing of ever finding love. Having contracted polio as a child in the 1950s, Joan was defiantly wearing mini-skirts, despite the memories of years in calipers and the built-up shoe she still required. Joan told us that shortly after she had prayed for a husband, her sister, quite by chance, offered her a pen-pal, Vincent. The couple exchanged batches of letters before they met. When Vincent asked her to send a photograph, she thought she would never hear from him again, but for Vincent it was love at first sight, between the sheets of a romantic letter.
John B Keane was there, with a springy head of black hair, talking about the neighbours: "Girl going out with a fella for nine years, bought her chips every Sunday night - Jesus girl, you have me robbed."
The innocence and credulity in this warm and nostalgic programme now feels as distant as Jupiter.
