TV Review'I won't go down in history, but I will go down on your sister." Hey, don't shoot the messenger - I am merely transcribing, for the benefit of those who may have missed it, a section of the opening monologue of TV3's throbbing new buy-in, Californication, a soft-porn, less-wit-more-tit Sex and the City imitation, which discarded itself onto the screen this week like a hastily shed G-string, writes Hilary Fannin.
"It would be nice if I could fellate myself while farting The White Album," says central character Hank, a parsimonious screenwriter and east coast intellectual (you can tell by the permanent five o'clock shadow) who is roughing it in LA with a severe dose of writer's block and a disillusioned girlfriend who has left him for someone else.
Hank is played by X-Files star David Duchovny, and certainly the first two episodes seemed entirely predicated on women, aged from 16 to 46, the length and breadth of Hollywood Boulevard and beyond, shedding their Givenchy frocks (none of them seem to wear any underwear - must be the climate) and flailing around against the plasterboard in anticipation of Duchovny favouring them with his smoky nonchalance and whatever it is that's lurking underneath his stuffed 501s (if that's still the fashionable dishabille of gruffly sardonic hacks in LA these days).
Mind you, Californication is a strangely tight and self-conscious beast for a programme whose costume budget probably comes in at less than its Xeroxing bills (most of the actresses don't dress). Despite its frothy talk of bleached anuses (sorry) and vaginal regeneration (if you don't know, you don't want to) and its obsession with pubic grooming, it seems intent on making the point that it is far cleverer than the society that it seeks to illuminate.
"Why is the city of angels bent on destroying its female population?" asks Hank from beneath yet another sporting and surgically modified blonde, who presumably camera-tested with a dozen lookalikes, queuing up with their ortho-dentistry and implants to keep the Hollywood dream alive. The only women who get to act with their clothes on in this series are Hank's beatific ex, Karen (Natascha McElhone), an idealised beauty who is letting her Brazilian grow out, and their teenage daughter, Becca (Madeleine Martin), wise, lovely and a convenient metaphor for the ultimate purity of her parents' broken love.
A lot of the script, however, is busily clever (one lover who insults his writing is told she's a cadaverous lay with lousy taste in movies), and as adult comedy goes it's quite, well . . . funny, although 40 minutes of self-serving macro-misogyny disguised as lovable rogue-ism can be a little hard to swallow. If you know what I mean.
WHICH BRINGS US to the other buy-in of the week (brought to us courtesy of RTÉ), Damages, a new legal drama much like any other legal drama, but one which labours under the distinction of having Glenn Close head the cast. Opening against the backdrop of an operatically grand New York City bathed in a pinky dawn, and featuring some straightforward dialogue of the "if she's got a pulse she's got a price" variety, the series appeared to promise some good old-fashioned narrative telly, the kind we used to have before Lost came along and suddenly everyone had to operate from some subliminal zone where the sun don't shine. But the hope of an engaging story evaporated as quickly as an NYC sunrise and, by mid-episode, I was prodding myself into consciousness with stray cocktail sausage sticks.
Close plays high-stakes litigation queen Patty Hewes, "America's most revered attorney". Described by her staff as a "hard-dick bitch", the actor gets to reprise aspects of the bunny-boiling persona which served her so well in Fatal Attraction. Hewes is impulsive, driven, domineering, a woman who will stop at nothing to get what she wants - in this case, Ted Danson's ass in the slammer. Danson (who is about as scary as the aforementioned bunny when it was still happily twiddling its flopsies) plays the, um, horrid baddie, crooked stock-market billionaire businessman Arthur Frobisher, a man who will stop at nothing to get what he wants (hang on . . .).
Well, the plot of episode one unravelled much like that poor little bunny's innards: bloody, sticky and entirely unpalatable. After a long hour, a dog and a man were knifed to death (one under a kitchen table, the other in a bathtub), Close had sashayed through a wardrobe of cashmere wraps and Ellen (Rose Byrne), Hewes's able assistant, was dumbstruck with terror, sitting frozen in a police interrogation cell in her underwear and a blood-spattered mac. Tut! There you go - blood and lingerie and a hard-nosed bitch with a Teflon conscience: what more could you ask for on an autumnal Saturday night? Barring, that is, a slice of vaguely comprehensible, mildly entertaining TV.
RIGHT, I CAN'T avoid it any longer. The English Class is a new six-part comedy from RTÉ, written and directed by Declan Jones, the basic premise of which is that a lonely, ineffectual young male teacher in an acrylic zip-up tries, in his idiosyncratic ("crayzee stuff") way, to impart the language to a group of immigrants from Belarus, China, Poland, Nigeria and Spain in a Dublin evening class. Attempting to emulate the success of the fly-on-the-wall mockumentary style of the achingly brilliant The Office, the show opened with a shaky hand-held camera following Myles Brennan (William Morgan), the aforementioned acrylic-clad lad, as he prepared to go into battle with his charges, a bunch of largely beautiful young men and women earnestly, if cautiously, awaiting his arrival behind their Formica desks.
The English Class is pretty awful - Brennan is a deeply irritating, unfunny and unsympathetic character, a passive-aggressive child-man who indulges in mild frottage and alphabet singing as he sulkily withholds conventional educational methods from his students (or "family", as he calls them). Brennan, the "stand-up" in this collapsing show, is a plodding, self-aggrandising Frank Spencer with all the charisma of a mouthwash, leaving his vehicle without a trick leg to stand on.
But that's not the only problem: descending into slovenly bathos, the script excavates shaky territory (which, I suspect, is an attempt at black humour) crassly and insensitively, having one Polish immigrant weeping with loneliness for his infant daughter while Brennan twists his ineffectual fingers and makes silly faces at the camera, then requiring a beautiful young actress to describe a life of cartoon violence while Brennan tut-tuts around the blackboard and salivates over a mini-skirted Spaniard.
This is not brave writing, this is not pushing the envelope of inclusiveness, this is not a clever parody of our national incompetence when it comes to appreciating diversity; this is simply a dreadfully misguided attempt at topical humour. Worse still that this is the shabby hat the national broadcaster chooses to throw into a virginal and potentially fertile ring.
'IRELAND'S CORIOLANUS, AN heroic figure who should never have been asked to apologise for his actions" was how one vehement contributor described Roy Keane, her hero, in Eamon Little's partially animated documentary film, Red Mist, an examination of the most famous tantrum in modern Irish history, the fiasco of pitted, dry old Saipan and Keane's departure from Ireland's World Cup squad in 2002. In a gentle, vaguely amusing hour, which integrated archive footage with soundbites from pundits Marian Finucane, Tommie Gorman and, of course, Eamon Dunphy, the fluidly humorous drawings depicting a father and son caught in the maelstrom of that particular un-civil war served as a reminder of just how childishly outraged we as a nation became.
The story is well-known and Little's film merely sought to tell it like it was. The facts speak for themselves, don't they? Keane (the talent) was sent home by McCarthy (the churlish functionary) - right? There was an animated scene in Little's film of that fateful evening in the Hyatt Regency ballroom after McCarthy, having been given a copy of the Tom Humphries interview with Keano in The Irish Times, and having got his joggy ends in a twist, goaded Keane into spewing up a couple of artistic expletives which left yon functionary sitting atop a high horse of determined indignation from which there was to be no dismounting.
Talk about rubbing our noses in it. Did we really have to be put through this again on the same day as our latest World Cup fiasco (albeit with a different-shaped ball)? Setanta's scheduling was truly for masochists only.