TV REVIEW: Shane Hegarty reviews Cogar: Do Mhargadh Déanta which was on TG4 on Sunday, Channel 4's Tainted Love shown last Monday, Extreme Ironing on the same channel and Tomorrow La Scala! which was on BBC2 on Tuesday
Cogar: Do Mhargadh Déanta, a documentary about the now-dead tradition of arranging marriages, was so lush with charm that it induced a pining for those days. A nostalgia for a time when lifelong bonds were bargained over by families around a kitchen table, through negotiations about dry cattle, hillside grazing rights, seaweed rights, sand and gravel; and then settled through a trip to the local solicitor followed by the pub. No blind dates, dinner parties, bad date-movies or personal ads. Just the shaking of hands and a warning not to screw it up. "If you don't get on, don't come running back," one father told his freshly contracted daughter. "This door won't be open for you."
It was a practice born out of a sense of necessity and survival, an eye towards an heir and the requirement for an extra pair of hands around the farm. "People didn't really expect happiness," as one lady, Maire, explained. "It was more a matter of being content." Marriage was about co-operation and hard work. If you talked of love, you were simply losing the run of yourself."
"People didn't talk about love a long time ago," said another woman, Noirin. "Love was a disease. It was something to get over." Gneas was another thing altogether. This documentary focused on Kerry, so it was on those honeymoon trips to Tralee that new negotiations would begin.
"We managed it alright. We made deals and bargains," said Maire, who blushed like a teenager. "I wanted to wait a few days, maybe a month. But by dad, I was told it would have to happen sooner or later." After a few days in the Grand Hotel, it was back to the homestead, where a woman could look forward to a lifetime with her new husband. And his old parents. And his brothers and sisters. And maybe an aunt or an uncle. Trudging up a sloping field in a squall would have been an attractive escape.
Do Mhargadh Déanta was inveterately nostalgic because the interviewees were, quite naturally, people for whom the experience hadn't been too painful.
"Not all were successful," we were informed meekly, and with little by way of experience to flesh that out. Still, in another generation people won't believe this took place deep into the 20th century. The practise is already gone; the living proof will be too. This documentary will at least act as a fine oral history.
Love really was a disease in Tainted Love. If there is an annual quota of genital swabbing allowed shown on television in a single year, then this documentary must have doubled it. Just pull down your trousers and say "aaah".
Eeuugh! Film-maker Kira Phillips spent 12 weeks in a London clinic that specialises in treating the increasing number of sexually transmitted diseases. In that time, 2,000 people walked gingerly through its waiting room, but only nine agreed to appear on camera. You may be surprised by that figure. How did they persuade nine people to have their antibiotic-assisted sex life torpedoed on national television?
If you discount your dinner, two things came up during this biopsy of the clinic's population. Firstly, that some people take such a casual approach to sex that you wonder when they have time to do anything else.
One teenage girl was a wide-eyed brew of hormones. "When did you last have sex with your boyfriend?"
"About, this morning"
"When did you last have sex with someone else."
"A week ago. I cheated, but he doesn't know about it."
She hadn't, we learned, really felt loved since aged seven, when her father walked out of the family. Her search for a replacement, it became clear, will be a dominant theme in her life.
The doctor confirmed that she had gonorrhoea and that she should inform the other parties. "That means I'll have to tell two guys." She did some quick maths. "Three guys."
The second thing that came through is that men are wishful thinkers. We would rather hum away, la-la-la, than face an uncomfortable truth. Two of those featured had contracted the disease despite being in supposedly monogamous relationships, and needed the indelicate prodding of the interviewer Phillips to consider that maybe, just maybe, their other halves had contracted the disease because they had introduced yet another half into things.
"She was on holiday in Egypt recently. I don't know. Maybe she got it from the water," suggested Ben, who had contracted chlamydia from his girlfriend Amy. It turned out that she had brought him home a present that was more imaginative than a miniature stuffed Sphynx. "I slept with someone else," Amy confided to two million viewers. "I suppose I should tell him." What Ben doesn't know, it turned out, did indeed hurt him.
Tomorrow La Scala! kow-towed to television's insistence that no prison drama reaches its closing credits without including a male rape scene. This fitfully engaging, but ultimately lightweight production about prisoners putting on an opera, lasted 32 minutes before it was interrupted by the sounds of buttons popping and a close-up look of an anguished face pressed against tiles. It took place in a gym hall rather than the showers, for the change of scenery.
It's a pity that Tomorrow La Scala! had to resort to such cliché, because it had ambitions to be smarter. Jessica Stephenson played the director of a local opera company dragging her luvvies into a maximum-security prison. It reached for themes of beauty introduced into ugly lives, the redemptive power of music and middle-class presumptions about prisoners. It fell short continuously. It lacked craftsmanship and subtlety. It was a strong idea without the skill to see it through. It was a smattering of nice images without a decent script to link them. Characters remained unexplored. The central joke - that the blood-drenched Sweeney Todd would be performed by a bunch of convicted murderers - never really took off. It looked too much like a first draft on which a red pen should have worked its magic.
Extreme Ironing will have been of some interest to evolutionary theorists. This is what happens to a civilisation when its palate becomes jaded, when mankind has too much time on its hands. When even the thrill of danger for the sake of it becomes passé.
Welcome to the thrilling world of "white goods sports". Don't trip on the cord. The participants go by the monikers of Steam, Starch and Basket. They climb rock pinnacles, giant water towers and, sometimes, each other. They bring with them an ironing board, an iron and a shirt. They even iron underwater, as if acting out some lazy, old Irish joke.
Extreme Ironing may have begun life as a prank, although it was not made clear. The participants are humourless individuals, their facial gestures ironed flat. They're either being spectacularly deadpan or spectacularly serious. Thankfully, some Germans arrived to wash away any doubt. The inaugural World Championships were being held in Munich, because while Extreme Ironing was invented in Leicester, it was embraced by those stereotypically messy, capricious, easygoing Germans. From there, it spread to the Austrians. They are the giants of the sport. They wield a Rowenta and ironing board with such insouciance that you would hardly notice they were doing it while simultaneously riding a surfboard down a river.
There has been a split in the world of Extreme Ironing. A fringe group has broken away in an attempt to kick-start its own sport of Extreme Vacuuming. "There is only so far you can go with an ironing board and an iron," explained one renegade as if this was an excuse in itself. The group consisted of three men who possessed none of the dash of the ironing set. For men who do get out much, they looked like they don't get out much. Behind their words, you suspected, lurked their true sentiments.
"What we really do need is commitment," explained a man called Duffers. Subtitles: What we really do need are girlfriends.
Anyway, back to the Munich course, where the plucky Brits were making up for their lack of grace through speed, guts and a willingness to adopt a Teutonic sobriety that embarrassed even the hosts. They carried off the trophy. Strangely I found this victory for the underdogs somewhat uninspiring. Perhaps the ennui is taking hold of me. Next week I plan to watch television only while hanging upside down from the top of the newly-erected Spike.
tvreview@irish-times.ie