Love in a Cold Climate (BBC1, Sunday)
Glenroe (RTE1, Sunday)
Ally McBeal (N2, Monday)
Boy Meets Girl (Ch4, Tuesday)
Hair can say so much about a heroine, especially in a delightfully lush, big-budget costume drama. Fanny (Olivia Compton), the beautiful, waif-like protagonist of Love in a Cold Climate knows all about bad hair days. Her hair is clipped, like her accent, and limp, like her romantic prospects. She is besotted with a fat, red-faced barber from the village, while her cousin Linda (Elisabeth Dermot Walsh), with her thick, dark, lively mop, pines after the Prince of Wales. At their coming-out ball, Fanny sits on the sidelines while a dashing young man glides Linda around the dance floor. But Fanny has a good head on her shoulders. Her hair may be straight. But, oh, how that mousey fringe swings with the quiet reassurance of a pendulum.
Fanny, despite her plain-Jane mane, has one sterling-silver entre into impolite society. Her mother is known as The Bolter. As the neglected Fanny says: "My mother was too beautiful and gay to be burdened with a child." Her absent mother cuts a ghostly, enigmatic figure through this society of primped and preened dowagers. Her cousins tell her: "Oh, you are lucky Fanny, having such a wicked mother . . . she must be copulating all the time." One can only hope. Constant copulation is the very most we should expect from part one of Deborah Moggach's adaptation of Nancy Mitford's books, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. These titles speak of love. But they actually allude to its painfully elusive nature.
Love soon vanishes like a mirage into the flattering glow of the yellow afternoon light. (Except where one's pets are concerned.) Polly (Megan Dodds), probably the wealthiest woman in this pre-second World War England, is a mass of Jean Harlow-blonde curls. They tell us she is brooding yet mysterious, cynical yet warm. She does not believe in love (or, perhaps, the love of a man). She asks Fanny on her return from India: "Does everybody talk about love all the time?" And laments: "Oh, bother! I thought it would be different in a cold climate." Her mother, Lady Montdore (Sheila Gish), a fierce bulldog with an unkempt grey tuft atop her head, spits: "Love! Whoever invented love should be shot". Love is for grown-ups, we are told, and has nothing at all to do with marriage.
But, as that fringe of Fanny's indicates, she may yet find her heart's desire. Alfred (Tom Ward), with his jet-black, slickedback coif, is a smooth operator and bright as a new penny. He tells Fanny: "I should like you to be on the verge of love, but not quite in it." That's a very nice state of mind while it lasts. No sooner does he marry Fanny than her hair is twirled up into a nice, tight bun. Fanny and Linda's breathless, fawn-like capers are, like their youthful blush, destined not to last: Linda married for love, so the odds are stacked against her. Gathering Linda's wedding train, her sister muses: "You'll never fit all that into your coffin". Chastised for being a ghoul, she insists: "Women always get buried in their wedding dresses". Finally, Linda grimaced. It was the smartest thing she did all day.
SUCH grim traditions do not appear to have made it to present-day Glenroe. €1, Sunday). It is difficult to know if Biddy Byrne was buried in her wedding dress because, quite frankly, it's difficult to know if she was buried at all. (And what, may I ask, have they done with the body?) We have but one modest black cross, glimpsed in the first episode of the current and final series as dubious proof. Did she not deserve a funeral? Miley (Mick Lally) and the audience need to grieve. There has been no emotional catharsis AB (After Biddy). Glenroe's days were obviously numbered, not because the coffee in the RTE canteen was getting weaker (or the scripts, for that matter), but because it has limped along, shunning its duty as a drama series. It shamefully overlooked Biddy's death, a story with the most dramatic potential in the series' history.
Perhaps RTE refused to bury Biddy in consecrated ground because they deemed the actress (Mary McEvoy) to have committed professional suicide. Whatever the reason, it's time to get out your Bury Biddy Byrne T-shirt or bumper sticker. The character (and actress) deserves it. Has the world (okay, Ireland) forgotten how stoically she endured those terrible perms? Or her stellar performance for nearly two decades? The desire to see Biddy buried is not macabre, nor is it cruel or unusual. At best, soap is cut-priced, populist Greek tragedy where life is cheap. And, Gawd forgive us, we always like to know who faces the axe. Yet last year, RTE tried teasing the audience by keeping Biddy's death a secret. When other soap characters, for instance, declare their unbridled happiness, that's a sure sign the scriptwriters are sharpening their knives. Unlike Biddy. She was full of fuss and bother right up to the end.
Loose talk costs lives. Remember Pam Ewing's exit from Dallas? She phoned Bobby on her car phone to tell him she could, after years of trying, bear him a child. Then, she made the fatal mistake of telling Bobby how happy she was. Bad move. Seconds later, her car plunged into an oil tanker and burst into flames. It's not rocket science. It's drama. Soap characters, therefore, should always be extra careful, especially when it's close to the end of a season. Last Sunday, Glenroe's Stephen Brennan (Robert Carrickford) refused to tempt fate by stocking foreign artworks. They make some very strange things out in those foreign countries, like voodoo dolls and the like, he said. What if one of them was to look a bit like him? Where would he be then? People would be sticking pins in them every time their tae was weak or they didn't get enough currants in their buns. Smart man.
Miley, meanwhile, is haunted at every turn. He only needs to turn on the TV to see the ironically named Fidelma (Eunice McMenamin), with whom he renounced his marriage vows of fidelity, in a car insurance advertisement, trading off her sultry Glenroe persona with the seductive line, "You'll be glad you called!" And then, of course, his yet-to-be-buried wife is still Queen of Soap Powder Advertisements, floating around that supermarket like the great undead (and looking remarkably unscathed after her accident, I might add). In the ad, Biddy departs and the love-struck cashier leers after her, ignoring a sexy blonde who's next in line. Instead of ignoring the blonde, though, I keep expecting the cashier, like Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense, to whisper in her ear conspiratorially, I see dead people.
BUT Miley Byrne isn't the only one to have suffered. Ally McBeal (Calista Flockhart) also lost her ex-love, Billy, last season. But she's doing rather well, which really isn't surprising. The entire neurotic cast - barring Jane Krakowski's sassy, coquettish Elaine - is eminently forgettable. Ally McBeal is a mish-mash of drama, comedy and sub-Twin Peaks quirkiness. The characters are supposed to resemble live-action Loony Toons. The producers have even used computerised animation on occasion. In fact, as Ally gets thinner and thinner, her lips get bigger and bigger: if she's not careful, she'll end up looking like Donald Duck. Still, the show fills the ad breaks like a big, hollow puff pastry, inspired by ideas from the Internet (the dancing baby), Dennis Potter (the office show-tunes and showdowns) and The Full Monty's dolequeue scene (spontaneously jiving to music in crowded public places).
In Monday's episode, Richard (Greg Germann) takes on a new client, Cindy, a transsexual with her very own dumb stick. This is a classic Ally McBeal gender-role-with-a-twist storyline. (But this envelope has already been pushed, licked, signed, sealed and delivered . . . to Coronation Street, no less, which has its very own token transsexual, Hayley.) On Ally McBeal, Cindy becomes romantically involved with the series' square-jawed newcomer Mark (James LeGros), who likes a girl with a past. Mine, Cindy says, is kind of distinguished. Richard is up in arms and asks how Cindy will sustain such a relationship. Cindy says she will claim to be a Catholic and tell Mark she doesn't believe in premarital sex. I'm confused, Richard replies. What other kind of sex is there?
IN Boy Meets Girl attempts are made to take Ally McBeal's transsexual story further in an extraordinary and bold new television experiment. Four men and four women aim to transform themselves into members of the opposite sex. Each week, two candidates will be eliminated. That word is obviously designed to make post-Big Brother viewers salivate if the cross-dressing doesn't. Everyone likes a good elimination these days (see Anne Robinson's gameshow, The Weakest Link). The final two candidates must spend one week in the outside world in their new Victor/Victoria personae. The narrator informs us: "One of the hardest things for a woman to do is be seen without her makeup." I'm no woman, but what ever happened to giving birth or breaking the glass ceiling?
Steve plays darts in his local pub. "I'd like to pull all the lads definitely," he says pre-drag. "I'd like to get a load of free drinks. I want to know what it would be like to have massive . . ." Steve will make one classy broad. He soon evolves into a buxom barmaid called Sandra, with long yellow tresses. Equally unsettling, the women (as men) wear baseball caps and become sulky, sex-mad, teenage Harry Enfield types. Helen, a tough nut herself, turns into Bob. She grabs the sock in her crotch and chews cigarettes. "I feel like I've lost the warmth and openness I felt as a woman," she says. "You don't know what's going on behind these eyes now." Neither did the judges, unfortunately. Her performance lacked the necessary dramatic potential. So, they gave her the, er, chop.