TV Review: Big Brother has found the right balance of idiots this year. The house has played host to quite a lively bunch of self-obsessed, deluded, pathetic, dim-witted, vain, thoroughly entertaining wannabes.
There have been expulsions, tantrums, breakdowns, paranoia, duplicity, arguments. There has been an overtly sexual relationship and a borderline orgy. There was a fist-fight at a fancy dress party between a muscle-bound panto dame and a stripper-policewoman. This week, there was a "military coup" during an army-themed task, which involved a hypochondriac Somali having a row with a topless Geordie, interrupted occasionally by a Portuguese transsexual.
I know, I know. It can be a little subtle for some tastes. But the original of the reality shows had become a crashing bore. Quite regularly, something happens on television to spark the media into asking that most jaded of modern questions: has reality television gone too far? The problem with Big Brother was that it hadn't gone far enough. Its contestants had become too savvy; a constant rotation of people too concerned by what their mothers would think to fully indulge themselves in the demands of the show. They spent all day sleeping or sunbathing, and too much of the evenings being very friendly too each other, but never that friendly. The highlight of sexual activity had involved a couple holding hands under a blanket. It had little bite to it and none of the delightful cruelty of I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here. It was dragging itself through the summer months, exhausted.
This year, though, it has perked up enormously, a nightly burst of wholly disposable drama. It is trash, but it's high-quality trash. On these nights when there is little else on the telly and the only thing that doesn't seem to realise that it's summer is the weather, Big Brother has once again found its place.
Thanks to Father Ted, "the word feck" has been recognised by the Oxford English Dictionary. "That's the legacy," Pauline McGlynn cackled in Comedy Connections. "The Oxford English Dictionary defiled!"
It's a pity Comedy Connections didn't debunk the myth that RTÉ turned down Father Ted, but then you couldn't expect the BBC to be concerned with such parochial in-fighting. However, that its snazzy graphics managed to skip through the Father Ted family tree without mentioning Dermot Morgan's previous guise as Father Trendy was less understandable. Otherwise, this was a brisk journey through to the life of a comedy series that, it said, Channel 4 wasn't sure it wanted and the critics didn't welcome. Hey, lay off the critics. We don't take kindly to criticism.
When a reviewer described Father Ted as "one of the most predictable things I've ever seen", the show's producer, Geoffrey Perkins, drew up a list of things in the first episode that weren't at all predictable. He stopped at the point when Father Dougal is at the window, peering through binoculars. We see stock footage of ants scrabbling about a nest. Dougal puts the binoculars down, turns away from the window and, very matter-of-fact, says: "The ants are back, Ted".
As the constant repeats on E4 and Channel 4 have proven, Graham Linehan and Arthur Matthews's show remains a delightful surprise, as well as utterly dependable, even after you've already seen it a dozen times. It didn't have to wait so long to be appreciated, of course. By the end of the third and final series, it had become so revered that after filming, the make-up lady would tour the audience, handing out Mrs Doyle's moles as souvenirs.
In Rose and Maloney, Sarah Lancashire and Phil Davis play a pair of odd couple coppers. She is a sullen maverick; he is socially awkward. They work on their cases until their chief inspector tells them they've gone too far this time and if they expect her to save their arses again they can forget about it and they're off the case. All of which happens just before they solve the case.
Lancashire plays Rose as a moody teenager. She smokes like she's behind a bike shed. She holds her conferences in the toilets. She gives one of the best performances by hair that you are likely to see this year. It is heavy and cheerless, dragging her head down a notch, a constant strain on her brow.
She dominates Maloney, who Davis plays as a man who is most comfortable when being kicked about by life. There is something hunched and beaten about Davis that has seen him play this role before, most notably as Archie in the television adaptation of White Teeth. The script thrusts the two characters together and expects there to be pathos in their kinship as outsiders and comedy in their contradictions. But neither occurs. Worse, for as crime thriller, it lacks thrills.
Rose and Maloney work in a branch of the police dedicated to resurrecting old cases. This week, they managed to free a nanny wrongly convicted of infanticide, before looking for the real killer. It all hinged on the premise that nobody had told the truth in the original case. The pathologist didn't do a proper report. The lawyers didn't bother asking the right questions. The parents didn't admit their child had been a surrogate. The nanny withheld vital evidence about falling asleep on the night of the murder because she preferred a lengthy jail term to being unable to get a decent reference. "Viewers might find some scenes distressing," we were warned beforehand. Perhaps they might instead consider warning us when some viewers are likely to find the plot ludicrous.
Winging It was a short film about some west Cork men obsessed with throwing themselves off perfectly good mountains, or launching themselves into the air on untried aircraft. It was unfortunate to suffer some technical hitches during its first half, a little television turbulence that might have left you too queasy to stay tuned. It was also quite twee, with John Creedon narrating it in much the same way he reads his requests on the radio; like he's reading the parish news from a pulpit.
Nevertheless, it contained a healthy quota of eccentrics; such as John Davies, who is building a plane in his shed to mark the centenary of the first powered flight. He has never flown a plane before. "I'm going to have to learn to fly this plane in about five seconds flat, otherwise I've had it." Perhaps sensing a lack of commercial appeal, he has placed only one seat on the plane.
Three of these men, for some reason are originally from Britain. Perhaps, the Biggles gene is dormant in west Cork. The lone Irish guy, Alan, was learning how to paraglide. His first flight sent him careening into a fence. His second saw his chute fly away while he remained firmly on the ground. For the third he simply ran off a cliff, which did the trick nicely. He soared over Inchydoney strand, and watching it made you feel a little light-headed, even as you stayed firmly anchored to the sofa.
Time Machine reminds us to be ever vigilant against the Earth's most insidious weapon: time. Time, it turns out, moves very slowly. Far too slowly, in fact, to make for decent television. This makes glaciers far less interesting than they should be. It makes deserts somewhat less vigorous, rock not so energetic. But with the aid of computer graphics, time can be speeded up and suddenly even the dullest, most slovenly of glaciers becomes prime-time entertainment. But it also reveals the nature's stealthy deceit. "These frozen juggernauts grind down mountains, crumbling rock like biscuit crumbs." Crumbs!
Narrator Jeremy Vine has set his vocals to doom. He turns the seemingly benign into the wantonly murderous. He could make the winning Lotto numbers sound like the beats of an executioners drum. Time, it turns out, has been an accomplice to lulling you into thinking the Earth is a nurturing Gaia. It is no such thing. "A single raindrop is nothing. It's when they join forces that things get serious." The Grand Canyon lures visitors like a giant Venus sand trap; appearing to be dry and dormant, until sudden floods strike. "Tourist attraction becomes hell-hole in a matter ofminutes!" The enemy is everywhere. "The thin desert soils put up little resistance." Cowards!
