TV Review/Shane HegartyReviewed this week: Who Wants To Steal A Million? RTÉ1, SundayMillionaire: A Major Fraud ITV, Monday Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Network 2, Wednesday The Island RTÉ1, Tuesday The Social Insiders TV3, Thursday 24 Network 2, Tuesday
Somebody has made a lot of money from the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? fraud, and it isn't Charles Ingram. There were three programmes about it this week, two of which were shown by RTÉ. All clarified two things: the smartest of the three conspirators was not the one in the hot seat, and the good staff of Celador Productions are the brightest, most efficient, most perceptive people in all of televisiondom.
The three programmes - all made by Celador Productions - included the controversial Who Wants to Be a Millionaire episode as well as two documentaries about it. Perhaps mindful of accusations that it was indulging in a lucrative bout of self-congratulation, it made its ITV offering a co-production with Tonight With Trevor McDonald, a current affairs programme interested only in stories optioned by Hollywood. For Millionaire: A Major Fraud, Tonight was without Trevor McDonald, presented instead by Martin Bashir, the programme's star reporter, who tends to be released for these occasions.
He was there to give a running commentary on the infamous show in case it all got a bit too complicated. "Here it comes . . ." he would say. Cough! His was a moralising voice, tut-tutting so you didn't have to. Unlike normal quiz-show contestants, we learned, these nasty, nasty people were dictated by greed and the desire to walk away with as much money as possible.
ITV News had proved a handy sandwich board. Throughout Monday, the channel used its news bulletins to plug the show. The early bulletins included interviews with Celador staff about how they were sure there was cheating of some sort. By the evening, the reports had added cough-related footage. On Tuesday, the story had become an edited version of the programme shown the night before. It wasn't even the final item. Instead, it was followed by a heart-warmer about a man who rescued his dog from a burning building. And, finally, it turned to the news that S Club are breaking up. On ITV, news is what they turn to on a slow entertainment day.
The Millionaire scandal is so engaging because of its narrative perfection. Coughing Tecwen Whittock and Charles and Diana Ingram conceived of a plan and went all the way with it. If they had quit at £125,000 we would have probably never known about it, and even if we had the story would not have been so complete. The beginning and the middle would have been let down by the end. Instead, they won a million but had the good grace to get caught, so the world could be let in on the secret. Ingram's reaction when the call came to tell him that the cheque had been cancelled and the police brought in was a model of polite, flaccid resignation. "All right," he said. "Well, thanks for letting me know."
In Millionaire: A Major Fraud, the fine people at Celador told us how, as their suspicions grew, they debated whether to stop the show before Ingram could walk away with the jackpot. They didn't, and he did. There will forever be an hour of Major Charles Ingram's life when he got away with it. And for the rest of their lives, the people of Celador will be delighted that he did.
In The Island, Ireland looks so unequivocally beautiful that you feel guilty for walking on the grass in your garden. It is a half-hour postcard: aerial shots of the landscape accompanied by a breast-beating score from Brian Byrne, played by the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. This week it skimmed the coast and rivers. The crannógs that dot the lakes. The ruins of Dunluce Castle, perched on the edge of Co Antrim. The tattered edges of Clew Bay. There was little animal life, save a few sheep panicked by the helicopter and the kids performing for the camera as they jumped from the pier at Salthill.
Otherwise it was just landscape, glorious beneath clear skies. Show this to some emigrant on a Boston bar stool and it'll drive him deep into the maudlin torpor of Celtic twilight from which he might never recover. Which is where Rob Vance and Will Harris's script became lost. Of course, you could never get away with a programme of music and nice pictures with no words at seven in the evening, but it would make a tempting digestif.
Here, we had Cathal O'Shannon's narration, which for a while was the equivalent of a postcard's blurb. Anecdotes to match the scenery. Tales of Grainne Mhaol as we flew over Clew Bay. How the Black Death stowed away on a ship that pulled into Waterford city one day in 1349.
Gradually, though, it segued into prose that swelled with the waves. "Water is inviting, tempting, playful . . . . We seek its company, we walk beside it, our thoughts reflecting its myriad moods . . . . We meditate upon its mystery and glistening beauty." It all got a bit wet.
With The Social Insiders, TV3's final documentary in the Matters Of Fact strand, we were promised a peek inside the world of Dublin's VIP parties but, when we stepped forward, found ourselves ushered into the toilet. The Social Insiders was a documentary of unrelenting vacuity. For its first half, there wasn't a party to be spotted, only a barrage of people describing the minutiae of the Dublin social scene. Talking head after talking head, without pause for a full stop or the restraint offered by punctuation. It had an hour to fill, and this was the documentary gabbling to fill time, flicking through its research notes to see what it might have missed.
When it finally left the couch and went out, it saw things only from behind a clipboard. It followed the PR people and bar owners, the ones who tick the names on the list. The names on the list were inside somewhere, doing whatever names on a list do. The camera waited outside, in the cold, with neither the wherewithal to blag its way in nor the sense to know when it was time to turn round and go home.
We have reached halfway in 24. To recap: there is still a nuclear bomb hidden somewhere in Los Angeles. The Counter Terrorist Unit's building was blown up. The boss, George, has only days to live after being exposed to radiation. The fragile, Waspish young girl who was due to marry a Middle Eastern man is actually a brutal Islamic fundamentalist who kills without mercy. The head terrorist, Syed Ali, is being played by Anthony Quinn's son. Once you clock the resemblance, you'll have bouzouki music going round in your head all night.
Everybody is double-crossing everybody else. President Palmer's ex-wife, Sherry, knows so much about the coup being plotted against him because, doh, she's its leader. President Palmer hasn't picked up on this yet, as he's too busy having a senior member of his administration tortured for information. He's found a guy who'll take a defibrillator to a person's head, no questions asked. Every time he charges those paddles, you can feel an electric charge shoot through your teeth. Kim Bauer, meanwhile, has rescued an abused child, run from someone else's abusive husband, run from the police, lost the child, rescued her again, lost her again, stolen a car, found a body in the trunk, been arrested for murder, escaped from a burning wreck and been caught in an animal trap while being hunted by a cougar. Every time the action switches to her, you think, what now?
Her dad, Jack Bauer, played by Kiefer Sutherland, has meanwhile been going about his business with the sureness of a man who just can't sleep soundly unless he's being shot at every five minutes. As established when he came to work with a head in his suitcase, he doesn't care much for the rules of international law.
In this week's episode, he extracted information from Ali by having masked gunmen shoot his young son, live by satellite link, with the threat that the rest of his bound-and-gagged family would be next. It turned out to have been staged. The key witness is a good-looking chick, and the awkward silences between her and Jack, coupled with his sudden reluctance to kill everyone, suggests he's going soft on her. Still, it was an episode that left your fingernails sunk deep into the sofa, bringing a new twist every two minutes - a sound policy, as it stops you worrying that the plot makes no sense whatsoever.
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