TV Review: 'Germany is that way, lads." Week two of the World Cup and my cup runneth over with irritation: gaping, pitch-sized holes in the TV schedules and the incessant buzz of speculation, despair and schadenfraude as, one by one, overpaid thoroughbreds in knee-socks go head to head with the opposition only to be stretchered off again five minutes later, metatarsals twanging and kneecaps popping.
There is one plus, however. Although apparently preferring to "drink ink" than watch football, Bill O'Herlihy (as spookily well rendered by Risteard Cooper on Après Match) will be there with "a satchel full of pop psychology and a furry mike" (as Eamon Dunphy, brilliantly deconstructed by Gary Cook, put it) to illuminate the second round, along with gorgeously gormless pundit Frank Stapleton (as played by Barry Murphy). We should elicit a promise from the national broadcaster that if Ireland fails to qualify for Euro 2008 we get 90 minutes of Après Match a night and three minutes of football.
Steve Coogan, synonymous with his Frankenstein-like creation, Alan Partridge, has managed to crawl under the footie radar with a new self-penned, seven-part sitcom, Saxondale. Coogan's latest creation, Tommy Saxondale, is a former roadie turned pest-control officer, dealing with his "anger management issues" and recalling his halcyon days in the 1970s when denim shirts were de rigueur and Peter Frampton still needed a sound check (can you say "halcyon" and "Frampton" in the same sentence?).
Clever but overwrought, Coogan's latest creation feels more like an exhaustive monologue on the theme of turning 40: divorce, house in the suburbs, yellow Mustang and yellowing beard, flabby midriff and nothing to play your vinyls on. And the monologue, though cleverly observational, does at times become wearing ("the Vegemite brigade might throw their sandals at me," he mocks when a bunch of animal rights activists turn up as he is about to shoot some incontinent pigeons at a local car showroom). The tedium of Coogan's hyper-intelligence, however, is relieved by a strong cast which occasionally gets to have a turn in front of the camera too. It includes Ruth Jones, who plays his gorgeous and corpulent girlfriend, Magz (Saxondale to Magz: "You're not too big to go over my knee . . . I'll take that back") and Rasmus Hardiker as his drowsy assistant, Raymond, who was still "shitting rusks" when Saxondale was humming along to Band on the Run.
The script is funny (and probably very funny on paper), but we're back in self-aggrandising anti-hero territory again and Saxondale doesn't come near Ricky Gervais and the desperate brilliance of The Office, of which it feels vaguely imitative. Saxondale, however, is a neatly calculated comedic equation, a bit of well-designed verbal drollery to while away the summer nights.
Postponed last week due to the death of Charlie Haughey, RTÉ's new season of Cracking Crime began with a grim visit to the Drogheda/Donore area, site of the tragic rape and murder in 2001 of 28-year-old German journalist Bettina Poeschel. Piecing together Poeschel's final hours through a series of reconstructions and interviews with local people, the programme's brief initially seemed strangely pointless and slightly prurient. What is there to be gained for Poeschel's family or a shocked community in having an actress lie bare-legged in a forest clearing to be discovered by a pretend policeman with a face wreathed in pretend shock? This, as most of us already knew, was a savage attack on a tourist innocently walking along a country road to visit Newgrange, a woman who trusted our hospitality, was curious about our heritage and who fatally stumbled across the path of Michael Murphy, the recidivist killer and remorseless misogynist who was convicted of her murder in 2004. Where the programme eventually showed its teeth was in an interview with former Irish Times journalist Kevin Myers, who described Murphy as "a free man, free to kill".
Myers listed Murphy's previous convictions, including one for manslaughter in 1983 for the savage and unprovoked killing of 64-year-old widow Kathy Carroll, for which he served nine years of a 12-year sentence. (Murphy's plea was that the crime was an involuntary act due to his being drunk, even though Carroll was strangled to death.) Murphy has also served two further terms of imprisonment, for armed robbery and for attacking two young girls in Drogheda. Describing him as "dangerously explosive" and "evil", Myers pointed out that Murphy - who remained calm, collected and even contemptuous in court - will be a free man again when he is in his early 50s.
Instead of yet another unknown actor doing a star turn as the State pathologist and dressing up even more extras in Garda uniforms, someone should make "Cracking the Justice System" - that would certainly make riveting television.
Deep breath now while I try to outline the plot of the new American "wow", Prison Break. Okay, you've got a pretty Loyola graduate, Michael, with a cool suit and a degree in structural engineering, who has a brother, Lincoln, to whom he is deeply attached. The thing is, Lincoln is on death row in Fox River State Penitentiary in Chicago for murdering the vice-president's brother, a murder he says he didn't commit. But it just so happens that Michael once took part in a structural revamp of Fox River State Penitentiary. So, fearless enigma that he is, Michael gets the blueprint of the prison tattooed all over his body, fakes an armed robbery and gets himself and his inky torso incarcerated in Fox River too.
Although resembling a sophisticated computer game and requiring similar concentration, I suspect that this series is actually quite intriguing and that once you're hooked the creaking dialogue is less of an aural assault. How is it possible to write lines such as "I'm an anchor, I'll drag him down" and "you two have the most dysfunctional idea of love I've ever seen" and still pen a hit series? In 22 weeks' time, when this cryptic hike through the drains of the Chicago state pen has reached the perimeter fence, we'll all be older, greyer and probably none the wiser.
With mystifying scenes in an abattoir, a murder in an archbishop's velvet-encased bed, a prison doctor who looks like she just stepped off the catwalk and a governor called Pope who just happens to need a structural engineer to help him complete his model of the Taj Mahal (which he's building in his office for his long-suffering wife - what?), there is enough in this crim carnival to keep just about anyone amused.
The family pet will like it too, given that there is even a canny old-timer with a moggy and a woolly cap, who round about episode five will presumably surprise us all with his intimate knowledge of the sewer system. Oh, I don't know, I think I'll watch the football.
Auntie Richard and Uncle Judy are back on the couch for another series of, yep . . . Richard and Judy. Pull up a chair and join in the happy banter as perennially youthful Richard and his rather more human wife fluctuate between being guffawing showbiz pundits or citizens of planet outrage, depending on whether their guest is talking about their latest Hollywood novel or the lousy state of the Essex probation services.
Innocuous as they appear - tittering over Carrie Fisher's revelations about her ex-husband's homosexuality, trying to stay awake during the probation bit, or tissues at the ready to mop up a lachrymose Gazza - there is something weirdly fascinating about these two normal people. Maybe it's just watching married people on the same couch, or maybe it's just Richard.
Richard is intriguing. Which bit of the Oedipal jigsaw is he missing? Why does he never look any older? Does he still fancy Judy? More importantly, does she fancy him, her tea-time Dorian Grey?
And just when does his irritating habit of constant interruption really begin to smart? You can put your answers on a postcard next to "Tom Cruise", theanswer to this week's competition question, "Which of these Toms was married to Nicole Kidman?" (clue: it wasn't Tom O'Connor), and you too might win a romantic dinner with Craig, the pleasant 35-year-old virgin who Richard and Judy have taken under their wing and for whom they are attempting to find a girlfriend. Second prize is a luxury spa. Every cloud, eh?
