TV Review: 'Your vote can make a difference!" Hey-ho, it's telly-voting time again.
Derek Mooney's relentless bonhomie and implacable hairline are being put to the test over eight long nights as presenter of You're A Star Charity Special. And believe me, he's going to need every toothy grin in his armoury to get through this one.
You're A Star, despite dismally failing in its original intention to get Ireland back into Eurovision Song Contest contention, has proven itself to be a popular slice of telly dross. This charity version sees Irish celebrities (the term "celebrity" here, like a loose summer frock, covers a multitude) take to the stage and sing for their chosen charity. Having previously been tutored by Twink in how to put a song over, the celebs belted it out in the Helix before an invited audience, who cheered and clapped, some wearing colourful badges proclaiming their degree of intimacy to the "stars" - "Amanda Brunker's mother", "Geri Maye's boyfriend" . . . and that bloke who sharpened Alan Shortt's pencil in fourth class.
Having done their bit, generally with as much musicality as a nest of hornets, the celebs desperately attempted to get back to the green room, where Twink and her polka dot tights were having a lot more fun than we were. "Twink is back there with a big stick!" one of them announced excitedly.
Now, however, it was time for the judges to intervene. The usual suspects were on the bench: this time, a jaded Louis Walsh and a sinewy Linda Martin were joined by Brendan O'Connor, who played the baddie.
The judges tossed stock phrases at the relieved celebs, much like a mendacious zoo-keeper with a bucket of two-week-old fish heads: "You gave it socks"; "A brave choice"; "I thought you were terrific". At one stage, Brendan O'Connor berated politician Finian McGrath for his facial hair and "slacks", but even that small whiff of entertainment was soon deodorised by one of Mooney's perfumed platitudes.
During one of Mooney's vaguely panicky and seemingly disconnected prattles he asked what would one do with the endless millions recently won on the European lottery: if he'd stayed tuned to watch Tales from the Front Line: Keeping The Peace, he might have come up with a few ideas.
Five hundred Irish men and women are part of a 15,000-strong United Nations peacekeeping force in Liberia, on the west Africa coast, a country desperately in need of peace after 14 years of civil war. Keeping the Peace was the first of a four-part documentary series and was made up of conversations with Irish soldiers, part of a well-equipped army that has, since its inception in 1922, never fought a war.
The Irish, involved in peacekeeping since the 1960s, have (we are told) an innate ability to put people at their ease, and their neutrality often makes them more acceptable to the population, as in the case of Liberia, than the British or the Americans.
This was a well-crafted film, and despite a honeyed voiceover from Dervla Kirwan that fell somewhere between Deep Throat and a Fáilte Ireland advertisement, intelligently explored the paradox of troops who have been trained to fight and not to fight. The soldiers live in swelteringly hot, claustrophobic six-man tents camped in the grounds of the formerly luxurious Hotel Africa, which now, like the rest of the country, is crumbling wreckage on the golden shores of a heavily polluted sea.
The mundanity of their lives is set against the background of a potentially volatile political situation, with the coming election in October being fought by 40 presidential candidates and numerous parties.
There are warlords driving around in protected convoys and streets full of aggressively bored teenagers without work, money or education (80 per cent of the population are illiterate). One million Liberians had to flee their homes during the civil war and most of these are still in refugee camps; the rest scratch a living in a country without infrastructure or sufficient food. "Food, food, food," said one Liberian. "Without enough food there be can be no peace."
The soldiers spoke of their own children, part of the Playstation generation, immersed in technology, who would think you were insane if you offered them a stick and hoop to play with, and movingly compared them with Liberian children. "Give them a plastic bag," one soldier said, "and they will make a kite."
The thoughtfulness and humanity of the soldiers who were interviewed asked us to reassess traditional thinking about what an army is. However, seeing their enormous tanks roll through the jungle ("white lions", as the locals describe them) was a reminder of their right to fire without being fired upon. These lions, as the locals know, have teeth - and in theory UN permission to use them. Whether this firepower should or will ever be used was left unexplored in the programme, but as one experienced peacekeeper said, "If we had gone into Rwanda six weeks earlier, 400,000 lives could have been saved".
Obsessive-Compulisve Disorder (OCD) is a strange and terrifying beast and makes for compulsive television. Part one of two in The House of Obsessive Compulsives introduced us to three people with extreme forms of the disorder who have agreed to live together in the "OCD house" with the support of therapists, in an attempt to conquer their obsessions and return to "normal lives". The complex challenges faced by the sufferers, the fear and the joy experienced in the OCD house, make Big Brother look like a tea party in a tepee.
Sophie's descent into OCD began with a miscarriage, after which she gradually became more and more house-proud, the control she exercised over her domain making her feel that she was in control of her life. This feeling came at a heavy price: at the point that we were introduced to her, she had been unable to touch another human being for more than three years, including her husband and two young sons. She could not help or hug her children if they fell, she told us. She slept alone wearing gloves, wrapped everything she had to touch in kitchen towel, and no longer went out - and all because of a fear of glitter, innocuous glitter, the stuff that still sparkles in carpets in January after the home-made Christmas decorations have wilted.
Wendy was a compulsive washer, taking three hours to get ready for bed at night. Her husband had to wait outside the bathroom door, timing her teeth-washing and eventually taking her electric toothbrush from her when her gums began to bleed. She had been a compulsive washer since her teens and her slender hands, mapped with veins, looked almost transparent.
Gerard lived reclusively in Scotland. He was so terrified of confessing to crimes he hadn't committed that when he was required to make a train journey, he sat with his mouth full of water for the entire journey so that he couldn't speak to strangers. He has lived in fear of pens and paper - on which he might write a confession. He would search his house for evidence of imagined crimes and would chain himself to his bed, fearing what he might do during the night. Gerard used to be a teacher, we were told, and was subjected to severe bullying as a child.
The camaraderie and support available in the OCD house enabled all three of the participants to achieve extraordinary personal goals. Sophie sprinkled glitter in her hair, Wendy put her hands into the toilet bowl and Gerard succeeded in a long-held ambition, to sit in a cafe and write a postcard.
OCD, however, is persistent, and next week the resolve of the participants will be tested to the full when they return home to live with their families.
A dapper Derek Davis started telling Kinsale Tales this week, in the first of a six-part series about the lives of seven residents of this pretty and enterprising west Cork town. The "blow-ins", as Davis described them, included Des and Lisa, who had left the dizzying metropolis of Hong Kong to turn the beautiful Ballinacurra House into a private hotel.
Having gone three times over budget, the couple felt they now had the "synergy right"; all that was needed was the punters with the sponds to keep the couches company. We were also introduced to Andrew Carlos Clarke, a local auctioneer who flogs Kinsale with a charmingly indolent insouciance, and Jill Brennan, an American with a big laugh and brave colour sense, who has opened a "trinket shop in the town".
Maybe we will develop empathy for and interest in these people over the next six weeks; whether we or do or not, however, the genuinely warm Davis has certainly netted the most pleasant gig going on RTÉ this summer.
Derek's namesake in the Helix - the Siberia of the summer schedule - will just have to grin and bear it.