TV Review Hilary FanninHaving problems with your inner wolf? Try a spoonful of twinkly, curly-headed and thoroughly house-trained James Nesbitt, a piquant Irish import regularly enjoyed by a salivating British television industry. Nesbitt's humorous self-effacement - as in Cold Feet and a slew of advertising campaigns - has possibly been marginally more palatable than his five-o'clock-shadow role as policeman Tommy Murphy (Murphy's Law), where he tends to leap around sulkily in a distressed leather jacket.
Nesbitt, one feels, is an actor who has been trying for some time now to shake off his sugar coating, and this week he was given the opportunity to marry his ying and yang, so to speak, in Jekyll, a 21st-century remake of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic tale.
This modern-day interpretation is strangely dichotomous, falling somewhere between comedy and drama, success and failure, farce and psychological thriller. Nesbitt, without a doubt, is better at being gentle Jekyll (or Dr Tom Jackman, as his character is called), a pleasantly troubled bloke with a big house, a frosty wife and well-pressed twins. His Hyde, the irritating alter ego that insists on possessing Jackman's body, altering his hairline and generally committing untrammelled mayhem in borrowed skin, is less convincing. It should be simple enough: if Jackman is the cooled glass of sauvignon as the sun goes down, his inner Hyde is the furry-tongued devil that's cracking open the crate and lining up the narcotics ("if Jackman gets a hard-on, I'm it," as Hyde sweetly opined). You get the picture.
The problem with Jekyll is that, instead of trusting the plausibility of Stevenson's tale (with its intrinsically fascinating notion of one man possessing dual personalities) and indeed trusting Nesbitt's maturity as an actor, the production insists on a range of dramatic devices to pump up the plot, reducing Hyde to a supernatural sci-fi being, evaporating and reappearing with an alarmingly high warp factor and equally disturbing pneumatic libido.
Throw into this heady pyrotechnic mix Jackman's glossy-lipped assistant (a ra-ra-skirted psychiatric nurse), a couple of jolly and helpful lesbian private eyes and a vanload of mysterious men with European accents, and a potentially interesting adaptation starts to look like its storyline is being dictated by the contents of the BBC dressing-up box.
For a TV actor whose popularity has earned him a substantial fanbase, one which would happily have him reprise his sunny ironic roles ad infinitum, Nesbitt is certainly not lazy. But one suspects that he has yet to break free of his gilded televisual cage; the many faces of Jekyll are just not tough enough to stare down a cosy audience who like their likeable actors likeable.
THERE ARE LIKEABLE actors, and then there is Sally Field, a performer whose endlessly gritty determination and propensity for dissolving into torrents of tears every time the dog barks or the Academy throws her an Oscar ("You like me, you really like me - whhaaa!") sets my teeth on edge. I accept that I am in the minority with this opinion, and the fact that I spent a long, dark night sitting through a week's worth of the emotionally undulating Field and the mind-numbingly kooky Calista Flockhart in the big new American import, Brothers and Sisters, is probably not going to earn me a whole heap of sympathy.
Here's a flavour of the show, courtesy of the press release: "Incredibly intertwined, somewhat damaged adult siblings embrace one another unconditionally while striving to reflect the perceived perfection of their role model parents." Right, and there was me thinking that I was watching a new age Dallas.
Brothers and Sisters is set in a big house in California with a swimming pool and a lot of walk-in closets to store the skeletons and the glassware. There's a family business, fruit imports (okay, it's not oil, but this is a cleaner, greener world), and, after the death of the floppy-haired patriarch in episode one, the fruit pulps into a series of power struggles between the five siblings, who, along with their various addictions, neuroses and sexual predilections, vie for the attention of the resolute matriarch, the weepy and libertarian Field.
Actually, if you close your eyes when Kitty (Flockhart), a right-wing TV pundit, is contemplating her ever-so-tiny navel, and block out the folksy-cutesy soundtrack that tends to follow Flockhart from series to series to accompany every "inner moment" close-up, the series is not half bad. And, given the political climate in the US, it is entertaining to watch prodigal daughter Kitty, a crisply defiant neocon, coming home from New York to a family of smouldering Democrats. Unlike President Bush, one senses that this one will run and run.
'IN REAL LIFE no one ever grows up, no one ever really changes." And so, dear reader, with all the literary merit of a plastic bag being suckled by a muddy puddle, began the husky narration of The Time of Your Life, the last of this week's new serialised dramas, a leaky and dull tale of suburban woe that was about as alluring as the drizzle on my window-pane and not half as good for the geraniums. Here's the low (low) down: it is Kate's 37th birthday, and her mother is making her a cake. Kate sleeps upstairs, Kate wakes - ahhhhhh, holy molasses! Kate has been asleep for 18 years, in a coma since a mysterious accident in her teens. Nevertheless, with nary a pressure sore nor an adult sanitation pad in sight, up she hops out of the scratcher (after being on her back for 5,000 days or so) and attempts to take up where her life left off, in the pre-digital age of stone-washed denim, shoulder-pads, fervent teenage crushes and Wham! albums.
But life's not like that. Kate may feel like an 18-year-old, but friends have aged; instead of trekking around India in their flip-flops, they are nurturing their sclerosis and smoothing out their wrinkled foreheads. What's more, they know grown-up things that Kate doesn't know (there is no avoiding income tax, cellulite and the rusting of lust); they also know that someone else died mysteriously on the night Kate slipped into her long sleep.
Da-da-da-da.
Watch if you must. Kate's thirtysomething mates are much more interesting than Kate (played by Genevieve O'Reilly, who has to do a lot of adolescent acting in petrol-blue footless tights and dungarees) and one of them, a careerist girlfriend, is having an affair with her younger boss, who has a backside like a freshly popped lozenge. But really, at your age you should find something more useful to do with your time.
NO MATTER HOW dodgy some of this week's dramas may have been, they came as a welcome relief from some of the more desperate moments of reality on our screens. The ghostly pallor of Kate McCann, mother of missing toddler Madeleine, in a sensitive interview by Anne Cassin on Crime Call, was deeply saddening as, still clutching her beautiful little girl's discarded soft toy, she appealed to the Irish public for vigilance and thanked them for their prayers. And BBC's news footage of the discovery of abandoned Iraqi orphans dying of malnutrition in their own excrement was almost unbearable to witness, a screaming testament to the utter futility and gross inequity of that war.
WHICH BRINGS US to oil, that dangerous miracle of nature, which was at the heart of George Lee's excellent and thorough Future Shock: End of the Oil Age. Lee's reasoned and vigorous report examined the consequences for our economy when oil, a finite resource, is no longer available to us, certainly at prices we can afford. Ireland is one of the "biggest guzzlers" in the European Union, Lee told us, with seven-and-a-half litres of oil per man, woman and child per day being consumed on this island. With everything from our frothy lattes to our sprawling suburbs being dependent on oil, Lee's projected scenario of huge price hikes, followed by interest rate rises, inflation, debt and unemployment, was predictably depressing and, if one was in a worse mood, probably devastating, given that oil is a one-off gift from the planet and, a bit like the SSIA gravy train, not likely to come around again in a hurry.
But then (and excuse my naivety) Lee's report became almost cheery. An examination of alternative energy sources, including wind and wave power, led to a discussion about how our wind-blown little island might manage to be a little more self-sufficient and maybe quit importing 5,000 tonnes of chickens a year from Thailand and a rake of spuds from Mexico. Lee should not leave it there; we have just been bludgeoned by an election and I don't remember the phrase "peak oil" being bandied around on my doorstep. It felt like Future Shock had hit a valuable wellspring, and, with our green/green Coalition, a couple of more reports on our future energy needs would seriously enhance a debate about who we are and where we are going.