TVReview: If you had been enjoying ITV's The Block - the big budget reality show involving identical flats that needed redecoration and personalities that deserved demolition - then you might have wondered what happened to it.
Having been launched into a prime time slot in a blaze of publicity, after a couple of weeks it was quietly shunted into late night and replaced by TV's Naughtiest Blunders 16. It's an unwritten rule that when you see TV's Naughtiest Blunders blundering into the schedule, it's because something else had to be put out of its misery. The Block, like an increasing number of ITV programmes before it, had become a fag butt burning a hole in the prime time schedules. So it was binned. Regardless of its cost. Regardless if you were watching it. Not to be mentioned again. The Block became the Trotsky of television makeover shows.
I mention this now because very late on Thursday night, RTÉ N2 broadcast a new supernatural drama - Chosen - which was co-produced by the station and ITV Wales. It's set in Dublin. Much of the cast is Irish. It looks like it cost a couple of quid. Although, perhaps not much more than a couple of quid. And yet, there it is slipping unnoticed into a midnight slot, where it can be found only by students and night watchmen. This ghost story, you reckoned, had to be a shocker.
And sure enough, it's terrible. A group of young people turn just off Dame Street and find themselves living in a crumbling manor, where they are greeted by ghosts and spooks and Scooby Doo chills. There are slamming doors and flickering lights and the wind howls tiresomely. It's as scary as a child running around with a sheet over his head.
Stilted and lazy, Chosen makes up for what it lacks in subtle characterisation with unwarranted nudity. To stretch things out until the credits everyone acts really slowly, as if waking up from a nap. You know that it is the cast, more than anyone, who will watch it from behind their fingers.
And when it ends, you are left with a couple of thoughts. You think maybe it's a good sign that RTÉ has reached a point at which it has enough output to write off such embarrassments. But mostly you wonder how on earth did this get made in the first place? Maybe it was commissioned the last day before the summer holidays. Perhaps there was a mix-up in the paperwork. Whatever, somebody in RTÉ will be having nightmares about this.
ELSEWHERE, SUNDAY NIGHT'S Shalom Ireland was an interesting but already out-dated film about the Jewish community in Ireland. Filmed mostly around 1999, as the Adelaide Road synagogue was being shut after 107 years, it relied gratefully on the stories of the late Joe Morrison, his wife Cleo, and Joe Briscoe.
Briscoe reminded us that his father, Robert, was the first Jewish mayor of Dublin; and before that he had been a republican gunrunner and then a fugitive during the civil war. At one point he was captured by the Free State forces, but was considered too obviously Jewish to ever be a republican.
It has been suggested that one of the 12 lost tribes of Israel ended up here and Joe Briscoe wondered if the naming of the Hill of Tara might in some way be related to the Torah. Most of the contemporary Jewish community has its roots in Lithuania, but they were a wandering nation arriving in a country of emigration and from a peak of 5,000 at the end of the war, the population declined. The film ended as the community contemplated a grim future. Yet, as the closing caption pointed out, the last census showed how immigration has boosted the number. However, we had no sense of that resurgence. And aside from a young couple pondering their toddler's future, there were no youthful voices. For all the reminiscence, it would have been useful to hear what it is like to grow up as an Irish Jew today. Shalom Ireland turned out to be less the obituary it had threatened to be, but this was not the place we would find out why.
In this week's Meet The Family, we followed a couple, Phillip and Jeanne Cassin, as they travelled to Guatemala to complete the adoption of a nine-month-old boy. They received a phone call to tell them that they were proud parents. "I'll send you a picture of your son," they were told. It was only then did Jeanne realise she didn't know his name. It was Edgar.
Guatemala is the fifth most popular country for adoptions, and 140 children have arrived in Ireland from there since 1991. This programme was from a western perspective, focusing largely on the process and not on why mothers feel that they must hand over their children in the first place. We saw a hotel filled with people who had come to pick up their new children. We were shown the awkward first meeting, when Edgar cried for his mama; not yet for his new mother but for the foster one he had just left. And there was the cost of it all: €13,000, excluding travel. Ultimately, this was a story becoming increasingly commonplace. With domestic adoptions now rare, it means a generation of Irish who will always have a few roots that stretch far across the planet.
The Grapes opened its doors for a new series of the comedy Early Doors.
"Previously on Early Doors," read the caption. Ken the barman munched on crisps. Tommy the codger supped his pint.
Ken: "Would you like a crisp, Tommy?"
Tommy: "No."
Roll opening credits.
Tommy, by the way, has a way of saying no that conveys on many levels that he just wants to be let sup his pint in peace.
Things hardly got more exciting this week, although Joan's mother's tortoise has passed away. As it happens, Joan (Lorraine Cheshire) looks somewhat like a tortoise might look without its shell. Craig Cash and Phil Mealey's script still moves at an unhurried pace, quite happy to sit over half a pint. It is comfortably predictable. The two old coppers who pass for a drink in the kitchen. Ken's mother dissecting everyone else's problems from her sofa.
Sliced into vignettes, in over a series now some of its characters have never even met.
It is tangy and often quite brilliant. The pub philosophy shines through the dense tobacco fog. This week's great debates included organic vegetables, Pele's erectile dysfunction and the identification of bodies. When they dig up a corpse, mused Joan as she hunched deeper into herself, the police identify them using their dental records. There was just one thing she couldn't understand. How do they know who their dentist is?
ARDAL O'HANLON CONSIDERED Irish-theme pubs in Jack Dee Live At The Apollo on Monday night. They are, he says, the only place in the solar system where you won't bump into a group of Irish people. But with the pots and pans on the wall and bicycles hanging from the ceiling, "you might as well go for a pint in a skip".
This series features a star guest each week playing to an audience smattered with celebrities. Every so often the camera goes to somebody you are meant to recognise. They do this on ITV's interminable love-ins An Audience With . . . I've never quite understood the presumption that because a minor character from EastEnders is laughing along then it makes a joke inherently funnier. That a sketch might be diverting, but because the host of "TV's Rudest Car Crashes" is loving it then it must be downright riotous.
Anyway, O'Hanlon's routine was a compilation of old and new material. With that well-practised look of bewilderment and barely restrained hysteria, he joked about such things as Irish mammies, marriage and Ryanair ("they're doing away with pilots now"). Throughout his act, the camera kept cutting to the audience. If it makes O'Hanlon feel far better about himself, the bloke who used to play Professor Giles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer couldn't get enough of it.
I might have been able to tell you the punchlines which ended both Early Doors and Live at the Apollo if VideoPlus hadn't intervened and cut off the end of each. It is one of technology's more insidious devices. It promised great things. Recognising that after millions of years of human evolution we still couldn't set the video timer, this short code promised salvation.
Instead, after millions of years of human evolution, we have developed the technology to destroy the world, to clone human beings, to travel through space. Yet we still can't figure out a way to link VideoPlus to a programme rather than a time slot.
