TV REVIEW: This week A Good Thief, My Worst Week, Fir na hÉireann and Sampler get the once over from The Irish Times' television critic.
A Good Thief ITV, Monday; My Worst Week BBC1 Tuesday; Fir na hÉireann TG4, Wednesday; Sampler N2, Wednesday
How many scriptwriters privately act out the words on their pages, indulge themselves in a little hamminess in the comfort of their own office? After all, they write the words, they must often speak them aloud to ensure others will be happy to do so too. And when the words have come from one's head, there must be an enormous temptation to suggest that they come from one's mouth too.
This week the writer of Bad Girls and Fat Friends found that all her indulgences came true. A Good Thief was written by Kay Mellor. She wrote it for its star. Its star was Kay Mellor. That's an equation to slot in alongside the old one which says that she who represents herself has a fool for a client.
Mellor played Rita, a witness to a murder who goes on the run and turns to shoplifting to survive, aided by her daughter and elderly neighbour Lizzie (the always endearing Liz Smith). The drama itself was pleasant enough for the first hour. There were comedy chases involving frazzled women and violent thugs, and there was laughter between the trio so hysterical that you knew it would cement their sisterhood and carry them safely to the denouement. But those returning, after the news, for the second half did so to discover that the ingenuity had run dry, and in its place was Kay Mellor feeding her appetite by chomping up the set. Only Rita mattered. If the script so much as twitched in the direction of another character, Mellor would give the reins a firm wrench. Her co-stars became redundant, save for the odd one-liner by Lizzie to remind us that she was still there, even if we were not quite sure why.
Logic was swiftly decommissioned. It went from Band of Gold to Sex and the City in the space of minutes. The glamour of shoplifting would suggest that even Winona Ryder may be a little down-market for the life. Rita robbed only one store, but did it over and over. She did this by wearing a different wig each time, fooling the same shop assistants. Mellor's face, though - and I say this with the utmost delicacy - is not one that would melt in a crowd. It was a Scooby Doo script that belied Mellor's pedigree as a writer.
It ended with the villains apprehended, Rita free of any shoplifting allegations and the three women heading home to safety with the laughter drowning out the soundtrack. Everything had been wrapped up with a granny knot, but with just enough time to get a nice, deliberate, gorgeous close-up of Kay Mellor before the credits rolled. All that was missing was a rose thrown on the set and a pre-recording of Mellor shouting "bravo!" at herself.
When Chris Evans rang in sick to work in June last year, it wiped £100 million off the company's value. Ask yourself what would happen if you called in sick for a week.
My Worst Week is a tabloid series in which celebrity scandals are re-lived by journalists, friends and ex-wives, but not - despite the assurance of the title - by the actual celebrities themselves. Instead, there are blurry reconstructions in which the celebrities are, surreally, replaced with overweight versions of themselves. It is presented dryly by Iain Lee, a presenter who looks like he's been squeezed through a pasta maker. It is television you enjoy despite yourself.
Evans's sickie came at a time when he had become increasingly stroppy with his bosses at Virgin Radio, to whom Evans had sold the station in the first place. For a few years, his career had been zipping along at light speed, but the engines had begun to smoke.
Whatever caused his sickness was never fully explained, although he insisted that he had a doctor's note. The prescription, though, may have had something to do with the disease. Evans decamped to the Nags Head, where he was treated by the best barmen money can buy. According to the massed ranks of the press gathered outside, in one day he downed six pints of cider, six pints of lager, four Guinness, three whiskeys, two vodkas and a Bloody Mary. And a partridge in a pear tree.
This was the beginning of a week-long binge, embarked on by the 36-year-old Evans and his 18-year-old, pop-star wife, Billie Piper. He had wooed her by the traditional route: sending a brand new Ferrari filled with flowers round her house. The man from the Sun was not impressed. "It's a bit clichéd," he sniffed, as if we've all sent a Ferrari filled with roses to a girl at one time or another.
Virgin called his bluff and sacked him after a week, and his career now seems to consist solely of being tabloid long-lens fodder. Billie's career evaporated too, her teeny-bop attraction dropping like a fag butt into the slops of a pint. "What must her parents have thought?" asked the woman from the Sunday Mirror. It's a fair bet that they desperately tried not to think about it at all.
If Evans was gallivanting with a woman half his age, his ex-wife acted like a woman with the sourness of one twice hers.
Evans has a mansion with 15 bedrooms. "He doesn't even have that many friends," she sniffed. If his career is over, how will he be remembered? "As a ginger-headed twat." Send her a Ferrari, and she'll run you over with it.
With Fir na hÉireann, Cliona Ni Bhuachalla follows her enjoyable Mna na hEireann series with one which knits straightforward interview with an audit of the state of the Irish male. It is a diverting programme, although you have to accept that it has limits to its wisdom. It is only half an hour, and it doesn't hang about.
So when the film-maker Bob Quinn, who was this week's guest, was asked why he believed Irishmen were undergoing a personality crisis, his reply came as bullet points. Men are "disrespected by women", he said. "There are also a large number of homosexual men," he mused, and one was desperate to know quite what he meant. He blamed the "Gombeen Tiger" and declared: "I don't believe in the New Man". He may or may not have had worthy points hidden behind the generalisations, but there was no time to investigate.
The subtitle person, though, betrayed his or herself as not being a lover of the silver screen. There was a question about Neil "Jordon". In his reply, Quinn was translated as referring to his favourite director Luis "Bonwell".
Of course, I'm being picky only because I'm too ignorant to understand all that is being said. Instead, I read the subtitles and then complain when I reckon we haven't been given the full translation. It must make me the lowest class of viewer.
Quinn had an anecdote relevant to the likes of me. He talked of Connemara's pilot TV station project of a decade ago, and how a colleague described it. It should not, he said, be a TV station for the masses but one for the Gaeltachai. "And the non-speaking areas can eavesdrop if they want."
Watching the underground magazine programme Sampler is like eavesdropping on the conversations in UCD bar. It is filled with people who are often far more serious about their art than anybody else, and who veer into unwitting parodies of themselves.
At least this magazine programme attempts to give us a glimpse into the cogs of the counter-culture or underground or however you want to tag it. It's shot on digital and done on the cheap, which is just the kind of television that TG4 has built its success on, but which RTÉ still hasn't quite got a handle on.
For every three Gitanes-smoking spoofers with a paintbrush there is somebody else featured who is doing something really interesting. The animator Rory Bresnihan, for all his painful quirkiness (he wore a bike helmet during his interview) makes wonderful claymation fables. The painter Rasher showed that good art doesn't need to be laden with pretension. For the sake of balance, another painter Cypher - who specialises, it seems, in artistic porn - carried enough for both of them. "I used to masturbate to Carravagio," he announced to a nation that could have done without that image in the minutes before it went to bed.
Anyway, you won't get a chance to make up your own minds, because Sampler has been axed after only two of its five programmes, thanks to what RTE weakly describes as "unforeseen internal procedural difficulties", but what seems like a solid case of the station tripping over its own red tape. You can hardly stick the kettle on in RTE for fear of causing an industrial dispute, and you can't make an in-house programme without assigning an in-house producer/director to the job.
Somewhere along the way, with the programme walking a blurred line between being an in-house and independent production, this issue seems to have led to a row, and an interesting programme has been yanked from the air. The thing has been made. The money has been spent. What damage can be done by showing the final three episodes? RTE claims it is the Rolls Royce of Irish broadcasting, but can only be that when it stops using coal to power its engine.