TV REVIEW/Shane Hegarty: That creaking you heard from the corner of your living room on Wednesday night was the sound of something heavyweight landing in the TV3 schedules.
Living The Revolution, TV3, Wednesday
Questions and Answers, RTE1, Monday
Britain's Favourite Hoaxer, Channel 4, Monday
Tipping The Velvet, BBC2, Wednesday
A hardback landing on a pile of magazines. Actually, the new documentary strand, Matters of Fact, added to a bit of a pile up on the station this week, as Monday night had already seen the arrival of the extremely promising US cop show, The Shield. A good week for the station, even if two pebbles don't make an avalanche.
Given this sudden belch of quality on the TV3 screens, Living The Revolution, the first Matters of Fact film, was more subtle than might have been expected. A behind-the-scenes story of Martin Ferris's campaign for election in Kerry North, it profited enormously from Sé Merry Doyle's deft editing, and by the camera loitering in the background.
There were points made about the tenuous, repeated argument that has Sinn Féin trying to lengthen the hyphen between itself and the IRA, but they were made slyly. Catching the yells of "Up the IRA!" as Ferris won his seat. Ferris himself doing a double take on the way out of a nightclub on the eve of the election, so that he could wait for the bit during The Fields of Athenry where the crowd inserts the chant "IRA!"
It gave glimpses of the machinations of the Sinn Féin campaign, if not the intricacies. Strategy meetings and moments behind the hustings. Ferris and his Sinn Féin handler practising the awkward questions before facing the media. It also captured the comedy of the trail, where seats are won via speedy doorstep bargaining or standing on a chair outside Mass and debating your policies with a gale.
The camera turned to Adams instinctively, just as the public came to shake his hand, not Ferris's, during a Kerry walkabout. There was a slightly unreal scene of himself and Ferris shouldering each other as they walked down a street, the president of Sinn Féin boisterously shoving a convicted IRA gun-runner into railings. Two adolescents working off their hormones on their way to school.
Adams is a devilish verbal duellist with an answer for every question, even if it's often the same answer for different questions. He directed his colleagues before the official launch of the campaign to speak in general ideologies, not in specifics. His repertoire is practised and forceful. He peppers his debate with diversions. He will say: "With respect . . .," where most people would revert to an "erm". He slaps the wrist of hecklers with the routine "I didn't interrupt you when you were talking, so please don't interrupt me". His retort to insistent interviewers is: "I've answered your question," even if it has been an answer to a whole other question.
He proved flappable only when encountering the glorious inanity of the questions of one particular reporter, who had one question - would he ever meet Queen Elizabeth? - and it had gone into a feedback loop in her head, the words coming out in an uncertain order as he asked her to repeat the question.
"And what would you say to the queen if you met her?"
Adams looked genuinely surprised. He rocked back a little as if he walked into a fart.
"I don't know. I'd have to consult the Queen Department of Sinn Féin first."
Gay Mitchell received a sharp lesson in Adams's oratorical arm-twisting on Monday's Questions and Answers. The panel here seems to grow every week, inching ever closer towards a nervous audience. Most of this week's coach load of guests seemed to recognise the rules of the game when it comes to dealing with Adams. That it is about making your point, and occasionally probing for his soft spot, but not charging at him head down.
Mitchell went with the latter tactic; heckling, jeering, his voice leaping ever higher in pitch until it resembled, not a coherent argument, but the cry of a distressed bird. Adams gave him the repertoire of Adamsisms ("With respect . . .") until he knew he had won the point. Then he let Mitchell carry on, but only after flashing a look suggesting that, if he can shoulder charge a man who spent a decade in a maximum security jail for gun-running, this shouldn't be too much of a challenge.
In Britain's Favourite Hoaxer we learned that Karl Power's nickname is Fat Neck. His mates and his mate's kids call him by that name. "Daddy, Fat Neck's on the phone!" They could have honed in on his nose instead. It is miniature roadkill on his face. And he stands and walks and sits like he's half expecting to have it broken again at any minute. He has, though, an endearing, dumb grin and the look of a fellow who doesn't so much go looking for trouble but bumbles into it like a clumsy infant in a pottery shop. He has a machete scar dug into his left leg to prove that trouble most definitely finds him.
You probably know Karl: he's the prankster who inserted himself into the Manchester United team picture in the quarter-final of the European Champions League last year. He went out to bat for England at Headingley, dressed in the full whites of the cricket team; appeared on the Silverstone podium and did a "Riverdance" moments after the end of this year's British Grand Prix. The crowds were expecting Schumacher's chin, they got Power's neck.
He ran onto the pitch at an English rugby match, but nobody noticed. He also played a couple of rallies of tennis on Wimbledon Centre Court, ready to run at the first sight of security, but relaxing when the adrenaline rush mingled with the applause of an entertained policeman standing behind at a respectful distance.
Karl became a grandad at only 32. A man has to do something in his retirement. It's made him famous, but not rich. It was making Tommy Dunn neither of these. Tommy is the brains behind the Neck, a 40-year-old with an imprecise employment record, an unhappy girlfriend and a persistent parole officer. It was his son, Tommy Junior, who played Centre Court with Karl. And the three of them took the stage at Silverstone.
He planned for five great stunts that would make them wealthy. He was a good mate; always there with a stolen press pass when it was needed most; ever ready to soothe Karl's nerves with a barrage of curses. He had the head full of dreams that drove the whole thing along.
"If this comes off, we'll make a bloody million each!" Tommy announced, as they searched for a gap through security at the race track. It did. But they didn't.
They shouldn't give up just yet.
Before Tipping The Velvet, the continuity announcers gave us a little primer on what was to follow. " . . . Victorian sexuality . . . vibrant adaptation . . . erotic journey . . . With some nudity and scenes of a sexual nature, who can resist . . " He should really have given an anticipatory rub of the hands just to cap it off.
Andrew Davies' adaptation of Sarah Water's novel has been occupying the column inches of the newspapers for a couple of weeks. You use the phrase "explicit lesbian scenes" and it's like waving a salmon at a pack of bears. "What the butler wished he'd seen," is the line the BBC uses on the trailers, after a little light nudity. It makes the whole thing tiresome long before it's even begun.
Predictably, Tipping The Velvet is nowhere near as explicit as the headlines might have hoped. Rachael Stirling plays Nancy, a coy, Victorian naïf following her object of obsession - male-impersonator Kitty Butler (Keeley Hawes) - to the London music halls and a sexual awakening. In doing so she leaves behind a small coastal town of small minds and large oyster metaphors. The shells are delicately prised open to reveal their fleshy metaphors. After her deflowering, they later wash up on shore, as empty as her innocence. How every woman in the town isn't lesbian is a mystery.
Davies' script is languid and knowing, and laden with sly winks. It's accompanying narration, from Nancy, grates at the inner ear. Her voice is that of a pubescent boy's, forever quivering on the brink of manhood, and it sort of tips the thing into a shallow silliness it really could have done without.
It is all so Victorian. The cast performs not so much as Victorians would but as modern television impersonators of Victorians. Formal in emotion, formal in language; until the moment when the buttons burst open under the weight of the repression.
And yet, as straightforward romantic drama, it is quite engaging at times, even if the manipulation leaves an aftertaste a little worse than oysters. It left the sex until the end; building slowly towards it, keeping the audience expectant, thumbs hovering over the video remote control. If that remains its chief trick, it will be quite wearying.
Oysters are not the only metaphor.