Shane Hegarty takes a look at the week's viewing, including news programmes on Sky, BBC and ITV, The Quest, and No Going Back
If it continues like this, we might have to look at slapping a ban on Bank Holidays. The assumption that the viewers wants no more than James Bond, a première or two and lots of things they've seen before is getting out of control. Last weekend, the programming was reduced to a fine mush and spoon-fed to us, as we slumped on the sofa, deadened under the weight of chocolate. On BBC2 last Monday night, there were three back-to-back tributes to Morecambe and Wise. There are, you would have thought, only so many times you can squeeze a tea-bag.
In a way, the coverage of the Queen Mother's death slotted easily into the schedules, where things could be moved aside easily and the nostalgia was interchangeable. It was a death pre-packaged, rehearsed, updated more than any other in British history. Now it was over to the newsreaders, people paid to emote for their country.
When Peter Sissons interrupted this programme on the BBC, he announced the news while choking audibly, as if his burgundy tie had got secreted in his sandwich. We know his tie was burgundy because there was a bit of a fuss this week over the BBC apparently banning black ties from their bulletins. Until recently, the station had them kept behind glass, to be broken out when the moment came. But, for all channels, there's been some uncertainty since Diana's death about quite how to pitch this one. So, the chief interest came in wondering at what point they would decide that people had had enough and wanted to return to normal viewing. ITV won on that score, deciding that, crisis or no crisis, to postpone Stars in their Eyes would have been far more dangerous than any act of sedition.
Sky News, gawd bless 'em, just don't know when to quit. It took to the event, as it always does, as if it was Official Station of the Queen Mother's Death. There wasn't a double-barrelled name in Britain not brought on to recall such times as when the Queen Mother politely answered a question, even though, of course, one should never ask the Queen a direct question. Sky's presenters tilted their heads and smiled warmly, just as they had been taught to do during rehearsals. You half expected a little sigh.
All other news became unimportant. Every five minutes Sky presenters urge you to press the red button on your digital remote control. It is a service unlike any other. Go on, press it. News coverage you control. For a couple of hours after the announcement, viewers pressing the red button on Sky News were met with God Save the Queen, seven blank screens and one showing a flag flying at half-mast mixed with a montage of the Queen Mother's life. For the following two days, other news was equally thin on the ground, with all screens monopolised by royal tributes. That the Middle East continued to explode was treated as an impertinence that should not be given the attention it was obviously craving. Sky News markets itself as a global news station. We give it our euros on that premise, and in return it pipes in commercials specific to the Irish market. Its nine-day period of official cap-doffing belied this. The Queen is dead. Turn over to CNN.
Nostalgia didn't so much creep into the weekend's main drama as rabbit-punch it and steal its place. The Quest was a feature-length programme based on an idea by David Jason, starring David Jason and directed by David Jason. It should have been shown only to David Jason, because it was so thin on substance you could almost make out the glow of the cathode-ray tube on the other side.
The idea which lit up a lightbulb over Jason's head came through him finding an old photograph of himself and his pals, a moment which sent him on several laps of memory lane. So he made a drama about it. One in which every time David Jason looked at an object from the past, he stared into the middle distance, the screen went a bit sepia, rock 'n'roll music began to play and the past came to life. A past of dances and quiffs, of bikes and kids playing hoops on the street. When a halfpenny would get you a slap-up feed, and 'johnnies' were sold under t'counter.
The plot, so much as there was one, involved David Jason (playing 'Dave') having his car rear-ended by old pal Charlie (Roy Hudd). The bump set off a geyser of reminiscence, and a reunion between Dave, Charlie and Rono (Hywel Bennett). The flashbacks concerned their three younger selves heading off to the Cotswolds to lose their virginity and find their manhood. I don't know how they got on, because every time I looked at the television, my eyes glazed over
Anyhow, plot was unimportant. This drama was strictly about tapping into a vein of sentimentality - and overdosing. It was an hour and a half of one of those late-night "commercial presentations" for a "Sounds of the 1950s" compilation CD. It was prime-time drama that made Heartbeat look like A Clockwork Orange.
No Going Back was about daydreaming of another kind, along the lines that on some distant tropical island somewhere in coral-rich seas can be found happiness. If it had been made as fiction it would have been decried as utterly preposterous. At times it seemed less like the fly-on-the-wall documentary it was, and more like Thomas Hardy with added palm trees.
This Channel 4 documentary was an edited repeat of one shown in January, with an extended epilogue telling us what happened next. If events only three months later were anything to go by, they could add an epilogue by the week and this story would never run out of endings.
Early last year, Phil and Jayne Gaskin sold their house in rainy Hampshire, bought a Nicaraguan island and left with her two sons and a daughter. With £50,000, they were going to build a dive resort, earn enough to keep them in coconuts and live happily ever after.
It began to a soundtrack of jolly reggae music, only for the record to scratch when Teodoro came into their lives. Teodoro was an ex-Sandinista guerrilla, hired by Phil and Jayne to build the resort. He had an eye for the ladies. Jayne, an ex-model with fire-engine red hair and a refreshingly relaxed attitude towards nudity, had an eye for Teodoro. Phil told him that he must treat the house as his own. Teodoro took full advantage.
Phil and Jayne sacked him. Not because of the affair, but because he was messing around with the cook too, and it was affecting his energy levels. Teodoro was kicked off the island, but returned one night with five men, some guns and a ransom demand of $1 million. The family escaped only after Phil threw petrol over two of the gang, setting them, and his own arm, alight.
In the meantime, ownership of the island had become an issue of national importance in Nicaragua, with matters not helped by Jayne changing its name from Lime Key to the rolling-off-the-tongue Janique (a blend of Jayne and Unique, since you ask). The president - a big man flanked by big gun ships - came to visit. When he left, an angry mob was not long in taking his place. Meanwhile, that faint rattling in the background was the sound of their money running out.
And then a very strange thing happened. Phil died. Exhausted and depressed following the kidnapping attempt, his health deteriorated rapidly until, on December 3rd last year, he suffered a fatal asthma attack. Before burying his body, Jayne and the children placed personal items in the open coffin where Phil lay, his body as green as his camouflage trousers.
We were somewhat distracted from the poignancy of this event, though, by the behaviour of Jayne. She seemed a woman utterly disconnected from events around her. When he was alive, she had treated Phil's arguments as if they were merely a hindrance to her as she painted her nails. With his death, you could have been forgiven for thinking that she enjoyed the silence. Unperturbed by the disaster wrought upon her and the children's lives since the move, this was her paradise and she was going nowhere.
Before Phil died, he had made friends with an American by the good name of Steve "The Snakeman" Hill. Within weeks of Phil's death, Jayne was already charming Steve's snake. She has now put all the family's remaining money into Steve's reptile farm, where he will breed turtles, frogs and snakes for export as pets. The dive resort will not be finished. Instead she has designed huts on a neighbouring island, where guests can sleep under a ceiling painted to replicate the night sky.
Somewhere off the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua there is an island with a half-built dive resort, regular visits by a snake-breeder and a woman with a libido so strong it makes her hair glow.
Take me to the nearest travel agent.
tvreview@irish-times.ie