SNUGGLING in between Antiques Roadshow and a Morecambe and Wise repeat, Ballykissangel drifted gently back onto the airwaves with a whisper rather than a bang, already feeling like an old, familiar slipper. Father Peter Clifford and Assumpta Fitzgerald resumed their celibate tango in the opening episode, which revolved around the staging of a play in the local theatre, and introduced a new character in Stephen Brennan's louche, womanising musician. It's obviously intended that Brennan should provide some romantic competition for Father Clifford but the plotline is negligible in Ballykissangel and there are no belly laughs either.
There's nothing accidental about all this - the series was conceived and developed specifically for snoozy Sunday evenings, in the mould of All Creatures Great and Small - and it would be churlish to expect anything sharper. What's genuinely strange about the show, though, is its morose quality, particularly in the characterisation of the two leads. Both Stephen Tompkinson and Dervla Kirwan seem permanently glum most of the time, in a low level depressive kind of a way. Perhaps this is a more realistic depiction of life in a small Irish town than is normally given credit for.
Kieran Prendiville's script dips into the cliche's of the New Ireland - corrupt bishops, Euro scams and fading pop stars abound - without ever going for a satirical jugular but the series is most notable as a coming of age for BBC Northern Ireland's drama department, which has been enjoying, a much bigger slice of the national action lately, and now has a prime time network hit on its hands.
RTE's arts programme, Black Box, returned with a new presenter (Ann Marie Hourihane) and an altered format, allowing for ventures outside the studio and on location reports, which, this week dealt with new trends in Irish autobiography. Frank McCourt and Nuala O'Faolain both talked movingly about their painfully revealing memoirs, Angela's Ashes and Are You Somebody? One of the difficulties with last year's round table review format was that, unlike the BBC's Late Review, on which it was so clearly modelled, Black Box was the only English language arts programme on the national channel and had to cover too many bases as a result. The new structure allows for more flexibility and this was an excellent start - the distressing tendency of some arts programmes to go for unnecessarily wacky camera angles and silly locations was not in evidence here.
McCourt and O'Faolain didn't need any technical jiggery pokery to embellish the emotional power of their stories - the moment when O'Faolain described how a letter she received after the publication of her book was the first time she had read a "good word about her mother" was memorable television without the queasiness that seeing people cry in front of the camera sometimes causes.
Both authors have received the Late Late Show treatment already, and have been extensively covered in other programmes, but Black Box took the longer view, setting the two books in the context of a profound' shift in the way we think about memory, childhood and adolescence. Colm Toibin's analysis of the reasons for "a new sort of merciless tone" in Irish autobiographical writing was perceptive and provocative, with some well aimed sideswipes at the wistful, elegiac tone of earlier works.
A WISTFULLY elegiac quality pervaded 81, the first in the Short Cuts series of half hour dramas, commissioned by RTE and the Irish Film Board, but it worked rather well. Written and directed by Stephen Burke, this mock documentary, set in Belfast at the time of the hunger strikes, used the classic TV cliche of the mirror image on each side of the sectarian divide to paint a sympathetic portrait of two fictional families - one Catholic, one Protestant - in the days leading up to the death of Bobby Sands.
A quirky sense of humour and sense of pathos, combined with low key, naturalistic performances, made this one of the most watchable home grown dramas seen on television in a long time, although Burke seemed unsure where to take his twin track narrative towards the end.
RTE has been rightly criticised for its dismal drama record over the last 10, years (and, despite the protestations, 90 minutes of soap per week does not equal a drama policy), so Short Cuts should be wholeheartedly welcomed. It's important though, that the talents developed by the series should be encouraged to continue producing work for television, particularly in episodic drama.
It seemed a strange scheduling decision to put 81 up against another drama documentary, Jimmy McGovern's powerful and polemical Hillsborough, which received a welcome showing on RTE 1. When ITV showed Hillsborough last November, it was split in half by the News at Ten. Accordingly, half way through on Monday there was a highly distracting and disruptive trailer for the second part of the programme, despite the fact that RTE was showing it uninterrupted.
Along with the embarrassing screening of the uncut version of the comedy Dead Solid Perfect on Wednesday afternoon, it looks suspiciously as if nobody in Montrose is watching the programmes they're putting out. Mind you, there doesn't seem to be much point in censoring RTE's afternoon output when young viewers can tune into MTV Select, where the VJ this week advised his preteen callers from Co Kildare to get down and boogie to their requested video, Mark Morrison's Horny, the words of which don't bear repeating in a family newspaper.
"ALWAYS be selective with whom you're erective" could be a line from a more sophisticated Mark Morrison song but it was actually a piece of advice in The Dating Game, the first programme in the Hollywood Lovers series, following hard on the heels of Pets, Wives, etc. "Peace of mind is more important than piece of ass," was another maxim, with fear seeming to play a large part in West Coast mating rituals. The apparently safer option of anonymous sex on the Internet carried its own dangers, though: "You could be dating your brother," mused one observer of the cybersex scene (dating in modern American English seems to be a polite synonym for an older Anglo Saxon word).
There's always a place in the schedules for cheap, trashy programmes about weird Americans but the visit to a plastic surgeon was too much for this squeamish viewer, as fat was extracted from the inner thigh of a "patient" for the purposes of genital enhancement" (you don't want, to know). "Oh, I could never have anything done to my suburbs" squealed one otherwise surgery friendly interviewee, and you could only agree.
TWO TV stars who never really managed to make it big in the movies returned to their small screen roots, with mixed results.
Don Johnson rolled down his sleeves, put on some socks and went easy on the pastels for his new role as Nash Bridges. Nash is a San Francisco cop with two ex wives, a 1970s sports car and an over inflated estimation of his own charm. Johnson's low rent, lounge lizard image worked in the quintessentially 1980s setting of Miami Vice, but 10 years on he looks downright sleazy.
The new show pilfers elements from many of its forerunners, particularly The Streets of San Francisco, which gives it a curiously unconvincing retro feel which just comes across as dated - a bit like Johnson himself. Perhaps a visit to the plastic surgeon for a good, old fashioned face tightening is called for.
NO ageing problems as yet for Michael J Fox, the Mickey Rooney of our times who, at 35 years of age, still looks too young to drive. Fox fits his new role like a glove in Spin City, the latest in a seemingly unending line of sitcoms crossing the Atlantic at the moment. As a deputy mayor (read flak catcher) of New York City, he's a political fixer for his avuncular boss, working 16 hours a day to spot potential PR pratfalls before they happen. His Peter Pan looks prevented Fox from ever being taken seriously as a Hollywood contender but he's perfect for punchline heavy television comedy and Spin City looks as if it could be the best example of the type to hit these shores since Frasier.
Given that race is the most important issue in New York politics, the show has its cake and eats it by having, Fox offer a job to a troublesome gay activist who also happens to be black, killing two birds with one stone by getting both minorities on board at the same time, and avoiding accusations of tokenism by making clear it was a token appointment in the first place. The increasingly dumb Friends could never play it so smart (or so cynical).
THE most obvious difference between Chicago's Cook County Hospital and its fictional counterpart in The Real er was racial. Of all the patients processed, through Cook County's emergency room in the course of the documentary, only one was white. By nine o'clock on a Friday night, the unit had more than 10 gunshot victims, all of them black and many under 15 years old. The prognosis for the inner city ghettos served by Cook County was grim - murder is the most likely cause of death for young black men and the victims are getting younger all the time. "In the past five years, the age of our patients has decreased by five years, said the hospital's trauma unit director John Barrett, whose rural Irish accent seemed incongruous among the concrete desolation and human carnage.
The Real er wasn't as tastefully lit as the fake one, and the staff were a lot less goodlooking, but it was far more terrifying.