TV Review: Shane Hegarty reviews Any Time Now on RTÉ1, The Changing Face of Dublin RTÉ1, Thursday, Spooks BBC1, Monday and Haunted HouseTV3, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday
There was a nasty moment early on in Any Time Now when it looked as if all the fears about the new drama were about to become real. As the three, female, lead characters swigged on the whiskey after a funeral, one of them sighed, flounced and announced "Girls are great!". A minute later, the great girls where all tucked up in bed, giggling away at the pyjama party fluffiness of it all. If it had been followed by a montage of the girls on a shopping spree, it would have been strike three.
As it turned out Any Time Now wasn't that bad, with a polish and flashes of charm that allow it to be given the benefit of the doubt. And there are doubts. It is a television variation on every chick-lit book you've ever read. Those with pink covers and a cartoon illustration of a woman with a mobile phone in one hand and shopping bags in the other. Where the entire plot is contained on the dust jacket. It is about three Irish girls coping with men and jobs and credit cards and parents.
They are in their 30s, of course. If television has taught us nothing else, it's that being in your 30s equates to a couple of circles of hell. You can see every plot development about 20 minutes before they arrive. It is a script hewn out of stereotypes. It opened with Nora (Angeline Ball) bedding a man in her New York apartment - and we knew it was New York because a red neon light flashed outside her window, intermittently lighting up her room as neon lights do in absolutely every New York apartment. She had a Manhattan guidebook by her phone too, for those among you in a coma during the first clue.
Celtic tiger Dublin is the Celtic tiger Dublin of cliché. There is a trendy bar. There are references to dot com millions. More people work in the media than in any other sector of the economy. Otherwise they work in property.
The checklist of the thirty-something drama has had every box ticked. Love lives are in shambles. At least one of the characters is divorced. They question their career paths constantly. There is the now-obligatory scene in which a character re-discovers the pleasures of smoking dope, puffing on the lazy symbol of an idealistic youth they've left behind in the skid marks of their BMW.
The most surprising thing about it all is how brazenly unoriginal it strives to be. In many places there is an unmistakable sense of it being a knock-off Sex and the City, but never more than in the music, which is an identical perky salsa. Of course, it can imitate the style but not hope to emulate the sharpness and wit of the queen of chick-TV either.
There is the question, too, of whether it will be able to sustain even jogging pace all the way through six episodes. About three-quarters of the way through the first hour, it seemed to have already slipped into the second episode.
The characters vary in success. Nora has returned from The Big Stereotype for her father's funeral and is filled with Mittyesque tales of success. In the universe of Any Time Now she is the most attractive woman in the world. She sticks her nose out a window and the entire male population comes over all Pepe Le Peu. I'm sure that in the flesh Nora is highly attractive, but somehow my television is failing to pick up the pheromones.
More engaging is Susan Lynch's Stevie, a hippyish single mother attempting to get back on track both at work and in love (see, even watching it makes me write in the style of a chick-lit dust jacket). Lynch has a knack of turning so-so lines into decent ones with a wrinkle of her nose, an invaluable crutch for a script built on such predictability. And finally, Zara Turner plays Kate, whose high-powered property job is far removed from the life she planned (I'm at it again), and who ended the episode in a hot-tub with Stevie's ex-husband. He's a scruffy journo from the Evening Herald. Imagine how attractive she might have found a clean-cut journo from The Irish Times.
Of course, it's fluffy drama, not social science. That can be left up to Duncan Stewart - the David Bellamy of the urban jungle - who has followed up his excellent Winds of Change with The Changing Face of Dublin, an audit of the city's infrastructure and peek into its possible future. Once again, the series is technically superb and highly informative, but it does come layered in a Tomorrow's World optimism that cloys after a time.
This week, it looked at the public transport system, and the stages in which Dublin will gradually plan its development around that system. Yet, while it was enlightening and straightforward on some points, it used broad strokes on others. The pieces of the transport jigsaw fit smuggly.
The "buts" were rebutted summarily. The details of the service and how it affects the individual passenger were not tackled. There was no need for Stewart to parrot Iarnrod Éireann's slogan of "we're not there yet, but we're getting there". Try telling that to a passenger standing on a packed Arrow, which sits stalled behind a DART train introduced to supposedly improve the service. Or to a passenger waiting on a platform, under a sign that for 20 minutes says the next train is only one minute away. Or who stands in a long, slow queue for tickets while the train pulls away. I'm getting petty now, but public transport does that to a person.
Back to drama, and Spooks, a series with a similar lack of originality as Any Time Now, but with far more personality. It will provide a half-decent substitute for those who have missed out on the excellent CIA drama 24, which continues to race along at a plot twist a minute. If you so much as reach for the teapot you can lose track altogether.
Spooks doesn't just settle for seeking inspiration from 24 but instead hunts down its ideas, sticks them under its jumper and steals them for itself. It is filled with identical split-screen phone calls, subliminal moments when the film speeds up, poorly-lit offices staffed by fashion-model spies. Despite this, it has an undeniable spark that makes it worth revisiting. Set in MI5, it has the typical irony mixed with a soap feel that often veer it towards being This Life with invisible ink and laser watches. Yet, just as this week it had lulled you into thinking you had it all figured out, it took an impressively vicious turn.
The cartoon baddie was a right-wing racist intent on inciting a race war in Britain and unable to open his mouth with a polemic leaping out. The goodies, Matthew MacFayden as the charming Bond-in-chinos and Lisa Faulkner as the rookie spy, went undercover to turn his abused wife against him. It all went along in a fairly standard way, including their outing and a subsequent baddie-tells-all-before-planning-complicated-murder scene. Faulkner is not quite a household name, but she is a rising actor and would have been expected to have been saved from a terrible deed at the last minute.
INSTEAD, as you were waiting for her rescue, she had her face and hand not only hovered over a deep fat fryer but plunged straight in. As you were trying to work out how they'd deal with her disfigurement for the rest of the series, the baddie's henchman solved the problem by shooting her dead. And the retribution for her death? A spot of MI5 sponsored assassination. It sort of left you wondering if you'd accidentally sat on the remote control half way through, but it wasn't half enjoyable. Froth it might be, but froth laced with a strong dose of arsenic.
There were spooks of another kind on TV3 this week. On its website, the station says: "With an innovative approach to programming, news and current affairs, TV3 continues to challenge established broadcast practice". I should wait until you've finished choking on your rasher before I continue.
If by "innovative programming", they mean badly edited, confusing, pointless programming, then Haunted House is the Picasso of TV. This was a show in which 27 people, chosen from 10,000 applicants, spent three days in a house in which they were faced with their deepest fears. It was all spiders and snakes, of course. Not mothers arriving in to tell their children they don't love them. Or Louis Walsh shouting "Next!". The continuity announcer warned that the show contained scenes of a "disturbing nature". If your idea of ultimate horror is being attacked by the cast of a student theatre production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, then you will have been hiding behind the sofa.
Otherwise, the most horrific thing will have been the enormous cost and resources put into it. The credits list goes on for almost as long as the action. There are an awful lot of actors involved, and a job lot of Hallowe'en masks. For most of those contestants - to whom the rules seemed to make as little sense as they did to the viewer - the most horrific moment will have come in realising how dumb they looked screaming their heads off, and weeping uncontrollably at the antics of Doctor Frank-N-Furter and pals.
The voiceover comes in a badly imitated American accent, which scrapes along the bass notes in an imitation of one to be found on the trailer of a particularly bad B movie. Early on in the first episode, it told us that "ultimately, the viewer decides" the fate of the contestants.
If you took that as a tacit acknowledgement that you should switch over to something else, you did the right thing.
tvreview@irish-times.ie