TV REVIEW: BittersweetRTÉ1, Sunday, Marry MeRTÉ1, Monday Diary of a ModelTV3, Tuesday The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency,BBC1, Sunday
EVER FEEL like you've been dragged backwards through a bevy of Easter bunnies? Having survived the snakepit of Lá le Phádraigh, it was straight into the candy bath of Easter this week and, as crumpled egg-wrappings met the bin, greenish children met their beds and turkey carcasses shuddered in darkened kitchens, the national broadcaster attempted to lift our bloated spirits with the rousing if rather retro feature-length drama, Bittersweet, a chick-lit confection featuring the obligatory three thirtysomething female friends, precariously perched on various rungs of the love-sex ladder in their glossy stilettos.
There was Marie (Deirdre O'Kane), a recently returned divorcee, liberated from having been "buried alive with Leonard"; Gerry (Catherine Walker), an urbane PR guru with a shocking-pink cape-coat and a dewy-eyed toy-boy; and Carmel (Una Kavanagh), a perky yummy-mummy with a commercially inept but doggedly loving husband, Michael (Risteárd Cooper), who, despite his uxorious nature and woolly protestations, ends up giving it a lash with the bunny-boiling eastern European home help on the leather three-piece suite. A girls-dancing-round-the-handbags drama with all the kick of a diluted Bacardi, Bittersweet was, however, tightly shot, confidently acted and stylishly clad, and the comfortably bland script was as self-assured as a newly glued set of acrylic fingernails, brashly providing a cliché for each of its glitzy digits ("Is there no one I can trust?", "You'd want to take a good long look at yourself before it's too late!", "I'm not putting my shirt on a three-legged donkey!" - though actually I don't know if that last one counts as a cliche).
The problem with Bittersweet, the plot of which revolved around the three lovelies rescuing Michael's failing bar and turning it into a "bistro!!" (chock-a-block with growling, hedonistic, finger-food-munching, champagne-snaffling Tiger cubs partying the night away, while their Polish au pairs ran up their phone bills), was that its evocation of a solipsistic, shop-till-you-drop, party-till-you-poop society felt as dated as Mrs Thatcher's shoulder-pads. O'Kane's character, were she to step off the stuffy jet today, might be a little more hard-pressed to find a cash-happy mate to bungle her into a riverside penthouse, and Michael's mouldy local might need more these days than a zesty prawn on a cocktail stick to keep that scavenging old Celtic wolf from the door.
I'VE ALWAYS wanted to start a paragraph with the words "why oh why?", but one would need a really special something to come dancing out of the vapid powder-room of reality programming to merit such scented waffle. And guess what? As the last of the organic cocoa solids met the lips, the lovely Pamela Flood, late of Off the Rails, flurried onto the screen, curls akimbo, to introduce her leaden new sinecure, Marry Me. You gotta be joking, sweetheart.
Why oh why did RTÉ embark on this damp, under-funded fandango, this squib of nervous festivity that had all the pizazz of a dead parrot? And why, in all seriousness, encourage some poor inoffensive chap to impersonate James Bond, dress up in a tuxedo and hide in the cramped aft cabin of somebody else's motorboat, on a cold and choppy stretch of Irish waterway, on a nondescript drizzly afternoon, grey clouds scuttling, in order to surprise his camera-shy girlfriend with a very public marriage proposal? As the quaking and suspicious bride-to-be anxiously surveyed the last-minute lilies, the furry, heart-shaped scatter cushions and the warming pink champagne from her berth on the bumpy boat, one had to ask: how much could someone possibly want to be on television? Marry Me is a kind of candid Cupid, where one confident partner uses RTÉ's parsimoniously distributed resources to realise his or her dream proposal. In this first chilly outing, Flood worked with the aforementioned wannabe groom, Enda Lyons, to make his 007 dream come true, organising clandestine meetings in empty bars and facilitating close-ups of the young man waxing lyrical about his future spouse.
Unfortunately, things did not go as anticipated: while Flood, the fairy godmother fashionista, hung around the slipway in a tightly belted mac, the would-be groom missed his cue to burst out of the cupboard and there were various bungled and cringe-inducing attempts to alert him to the imminence of his mission before he got to drop to his knees on the shag-pile.
If a bunch of programme-makers are going to tamper with someone's personally riveting but publicly far from exhilarating reality, surely they could employ a little more panache? This clumsy voyeurism left one shaken but most definitely not stirred.
SURPRISINGLY - OR maybe not, depending on one's tolerance for public soap opera - TV3's Diary of a Model was a moving account of model Katy French's final weeks, prior to her untimely death just days after her 24th birthday. Diary of . . . has been a successful format for the channel, exploring three diverse stories each week and encouraging participants to speak candidly while an unobtrusive camera assembles details of their lives. The series seems to be sewing together an interesting patchwork of contemporary Irish experience.
This week's programme followed French, Nasrin Leahy (a young high-fashion model) and Northerner Jenny Marshall (a glamour model attempting to crack London).
"I'd like to be successful, not necessarily famous," said Nasrin, who, at 17, had the composure and assurance that are the bedfellows of beauty. "The world is my oyster," she trailed, and one knew that whatever delicacy the planet has to offer would grace this uniquely lovely child's plate.
Twenty-five-year-old Marshall, on the other hand, having dropped her young son to school, was racing through the gloomy outskirts of a wet Carrickfergus to have her manager snap her, "implied topless" in a cowboy hat and holster and, later, discreetly hidden behind a luscious lollipop, before the grim absurdity of the glamour world followed her to her neat kitchen, where she stuffed envelopes with her self-produced calendar in the hope of arousing the attention of the boob-blinded boys in Nuts magazine.
"Jaysus, who is that tart? It's me!" The real story, of course, was Katy French, the model and celebrity who largely made her living doing press shoots. Almost uniquely, it seems, French understood her medium and worked happily with the "snaps".
Courting the media to keep herself in the public eye, French was a pragmatist, heading, one felt, towards a career in TV. On the evidence of this programme, she would have been terrific: breezily confessional, funny, natural and self-effacing.
Dashing into RTÉ to begin her participation in the People in Need Telethon, she spoke, however, of the frantic pace of her life that would have sent her to bed for a week had she not been scheduled to go camping for charity. From aid work to charity balls to Sunday lunch with her beloved mother and family, French was a girl in a tremendous hurry to achieve her potential, and spoke longingly of some domestic nirvana at the end of the celebrity highway, the twin mirage of marriage and motherhood, an ambition she was never to achieve.
"Today's news, tomorrow's chip paper - I could be here one day and gone the next," she said. French's family made the difficult decision to allow the footage of their lovely and sparky daughter to be aired, and, given the context in which she had decided to live her life, they were surely right to do so. One can only imagine their devastation at her loss.
SADLY, ANTHONY Minghella, too, has left us to our labours. The writer and director's final piece of work, however, a light-filled adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith's The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, which he directed from a script by Richard Curtis, came to the screen this week. The feature-length drama, forerunner of a 13-part series to be shown later in the year, was a warmly engaging piece of work played out against the vast creamy yellow palette of Botswana, "the finest place on God's earth".
As the "traditionally built" Precious Ramotswe poured the bush tea into china cups at the start of her great sleuthing adventure, one disgruntled neighbour observed: "She is the size of an elephant - how could she go undercover?" We'll just have to wait and see. One to watch out for.