TV Review:'Viewers are advised there will be strong language from the start . . ." "You are a f***ing w***er! You are a f***ing tit!" Is it f***ing pipeable? Is it?" Apparently, about 200 kitchen staff have been trialled and rejected by chef Dylan McGrath at his Michelin star-winning restaurant, Mint, since it opened in the decorous Dublin suburb of Ranelagh less than two years ago, writes Hilary Fannin.
Two hundred - my my, is that all? Pressure Cooker, an entertaining if mildly disturbing fly-in-the-soup documentary, followed McGrath in the run-up to this year's Michelin awards, revealing a driven, emotional and caustic man who learned his trade by being pilloried and abused in British celebrity kitchens, a lesson, it seems, that he is passing on, with interest, to his beleaguered and nervy Dublin staff.
Winning a Michelin star is obviously a mighty difficult task, and Mint's achievement, in January of this year, brings to just six the number of restaurants in Ireland which can claim the honour. McGrath's precocity, belligerence and originality have been chewed over in the Irish media ever since he arrived back from London in 2006 and proclaimed his Michelin ambition.
Since winning the star his profile has been, well, prolific, a fact which left Pressure Cookerin a bit of a pickle: we already knew McGrath had won, and we knew that those at the tighter end of the luxury food market had been a little sniffy underneath their floppy caps, muttering about consistency and tenacity and long years of slaving over a hot clientele, the prerequisites deemed necessary for achieving such an accolade.
Yet, despite having all the tension of a collapsing baked Alaska, the programme did manage to reveal something of the darker side of celebrity cheffery and to offer a taster of the madness that can prevail in the pursuit of "high-art food" (the kind of food that one critic, rather dismally, admitted is "stuff a lot of people don't like").
This film was never going to be about the food; it was about the man. At one point, McGrath was (somewhat daringly) asked whether winning the coveted star would make him happy; in answer, the chef, a culinary equivalent of Roy Keane (tenacity bordering on psychotic disdain), walked away, seemingly overcome with anger, or sorrow, or maybe just the vicious pain of wanting something so badly it hurts, yet realising that no trophy will ever satisfy a self-driven manic perfectionism.
Pressure Cookerthrew into question the whole notion of culinary stardom and its collateral damage around the chopping boards, a kitchen-sink TV format personified by Gordon Ramsay, who looks like a mewling pussycat next to McGrath.
Maybe for McGrath, a Belfast boy brought up on sausages and brown sauce (and, for a treat, Andrews' Liver Salts stirred into the orange squash), displaying a temperamental artistry is all part of the fun, a payoff for surviving the vicious environments created by his former employers, which he compared to "being in the trenches".
It is a persona which undoubtedly brings notoriety and attracts newly minted gadabouts, with their body-shapers and shady capers, to his expensive table. To give him his due, McGrath, in the face of a somewhat curmudgeonly community of critics and fellow chefs, didn't bother pretending to be likable.
"Don't whistle," he admonished a uniquely relaxed worker in his kitchen. "This is not a f***ing building site." Quite.
'PRIMITIVE, DULL AND dim-witted" is how we homo sapiens apparently perceive cold-blooded creatures, the kind wrapped up in reptile skin. Life in Cold Blood is the final instalment in David Attenborough's peerlessly brilliant survey of life on earth, a swansong featuring hood-eyed baby turtles, waxy monkey frogs and deer-swallowing pythons.
Getting up close and personal with a couple of funky little side-blotch lizards offers startling insights into just how many characteristics we share with our reptilian cousins. For example, lady side-blotch lizards prefer hanging out with smooth-croaking lizard blokes on their big hot rocks in the sun, while the neurotic, Woody Allen-esque lizards have to scuttle around in the shady undergrowth bemoaning their lack of sexual success.
Life in Cold Bloodis mesmerisingly shot and jaw-droppingly fascinating, as one has come to expect from Attenborough's films. Salt-water baby crocodiles with manic, toothy grins toppling into moonlit creeks; fey turtles applauding each other with their frond-like flippers; luminous frogs carefully applying their sunscreen; haughty leopard geckos checking out the competition; and absurd old tortoises warring with each other on the sand like gummy Punch and Judys at the seaside - you could weep at the wonder of it all. Now, I know that last week I also waxed lyrical about Around the World in 80 Gardens, only to see the second episode degenerate into a rather tedious suburban trawl around New Zealand - but this time I really do implore you to tune in to Attenborough as the gracious old wizard makes use of his entire box of tricks.
DAVID BOWIE'S SONG Life on Marswas my teenage anthem, a beautiful, angst-ridden lullaby that we played again and again while we rolled up the tea leaves in cigarette papers. His more glitzy Ashes to Ashes just didn't pull at the post-pubescent heartstrings in quite the same way. The same can be said for BBC's spin-off series from the inventive and highly successful Life on Mars, an intelligent cop show which saw a noughties detective inspector, Sam Tyler (John Simm), stuck in the neanderthal 1970s working with a fuzzball of machismo, DCI Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister).
Developing the theme, Ashes to Ashes sees police psychologist Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes) shot at point-blank range in 2008, only to wake up in suspenders and red stilettoes on a riverboat party in 1981. Throughout most of the busy opening episode, which included a pantomime shoot-out on the Thames and back-combed baddies hurtling around in tangerine Fiestas, Hawes was denied a costume change (to distract viewers from the flimsy plot, one suspects), maintaining her "shag-worthy" image. Hawes has great legs but not much charisma, and her will-they-won't-they relationship with a muted Glenister is already looking as tedious as a New Romantic's quiff.
It was never going to be easy for this London-based sequel to top Life on Mars, and this attempt, without Manchester or Tyler, looks set to straggle in its predecessor's shade. Still, there is the pale amusement of blokes in skinny ties making Klingon gags and listening to Ultravox belting out their tonsil-revealing Vienna. As "subconscious constructs" go, however, this is one "cranium hallucination" probably not worth getting your shoulder-pads in a flap for.
THERE WERE NO fat people in Belsen, my father used to say, with his habitual bluntness, as my mother threw herself headlong into yet another diet. There was the banana-and-milk diet, chicken-and-white-wine diet, the red-meat diet, the no-red-meat diet, the PLJ-and-Ryvita diet (a perennial favourite) and there was the shag-the-diet diet, which always won in the end. Science Friction, RTÉ's new series presented by a determinedly sombre Liz Bonnin, examined, in this week's opening programme, our individual propensities for obesity, which, you can hardly have failed to notice, is the hot topic on the box this month.
Bonnin, a science graduate who has spent a significant proportion of her television career trying to lighten up, whether by hanging out on kids' TV or by propping up a decaying Top of the Pops, has not always been the warmest or most relaxed of performers. She appears, however, to have found her metier, and back in her laboratorial comfort zone she is a competent and confident host.
The bottom line is that some of us are more prone to obesity than others, and the genes dictating our levels of appetite are gradually being identified and translated from our DNA. Doubtless there will soon be T-shirts printed with "I'm a victim of my DNA" printed on them, under which we can hide our girth.
The other bottom line, however, the wobbly one, is that the more you eat and the less you exercise, the fatter you get, whether or not you've got an "FTO variant-one" copy in your genes or just a copy of the Beano in your jeans.
Oh, I don't know - right now, the white-wine-and-chicken diet is looking pretty appealing.