TVReview: The crudely drawn national stereotype is the stock-in-trade of the desperate comedy scriptwriter.
Like a pair of "comedy breasts", it's an easy way to elicit a guffaw from an audience. While Supernova, the new sitcom starring Rob Brydon (of Marion and Geoff fame) doesn't feature any outsize plastic mammaries in the first episode, you feel it's only a matter of time.
Set in the Australian outback, Supernova features a couple of sun-kissed young beach bums, a hard-talking, hard-drinking matriarch and a sweat-stained, bush-knife-wielding swagman. The improbable twist in the plot is that these archetypal Aussie characters are all brilliant astronomers at the Royal Australian Observatory, "one of the most advanced scientific facilities in the world".
Brydon plays Dr Paul Hamilton, a tweedy British lecturer who, bored with his dead-end college job and his girlfriend's pretentious Aztec jewellery, accepts an invitation to join the team. By the end of the first episode, he manages to kill the pet office snake, Pussy ("she came to us as a mouse exterminator, but stayed as a friend") and, while crouching under a desk, accidentally eavesdrops on an intimate long-distance conversation between the sexy Dr Rachel Mann (played by Kat Stewart) and her paranoid astronaut boyfriend, Chad.
"I had my eyes closed the entire time I was between your legs," Paul burbles apologetically when Rachel discovers him emerging at thigh-level. With his mournful eyes and long, perplexed face, Brydon slips easily into the character of hapless Pommie drongo, cast adrift in a world of mind-blowing science and stomach-churning innuendo. But a little haplessness goes a long way, and his dorky persona soon starts to grate - not least when he swaps his "stage-academic" tweed jacket for a T-shirt emblazoned with the classic Australian legend, "I got f***ed and spewed my guts up". Nice.
Perhaps anticipating accusations of stereotyping, Brydon has rather primly remarked that Supernova "plays on conceived images" of Australians. But with its proliferation of kangaroo-skin bedspreads, nudge-wink lewdness and relentless didgeridoo music, Supernova doesn't so much play with those images as repeatedly batter you over the head with them.
TRANSSEXUALS HAVE LONG suffered from the "comic" stereotypes imposed on them by the popular press. But despite its tabloid-inspired title, My Mums Used To Be Men resists any temptation to treat 12-year-old Louise Jarvis and her male-to-female transsexual parents as a domestic freak show. In this sensitively filmed documentary, we learn that Louise's mum Sarah was originally her biological father, Brian, while Sarah's partner Kate (Louise's "other mum") was a male trucker called Lee. Louise's birth mother plays no part in her life.
Louise is a child who appears lit up from the inside. Emotionally articulate beyond her years, she's an endearing little freckle-face who's determined to show the world that her family is as normal as any other.
But her sense of loneliness and isolation is inescapable; bullied and ostracised by her schoolmates, we most often see her pacing the fields and riverbanks near her home, a tiny figure in a vast landscape.
"I'm the only person who's like me," she muses, without a trace of self-pity.
In her overwhelming need to tell her story, to affirm its validity, Louise is very much a 21st-century child, reared in a culture that celebrates the confessional narrative, the catharsis of the public declaration.
It's as if, in telling that story, she's trying to weave a coherent sense of self out of all the confusing and contradictory strands of her young life.
But sometimes the openness Louise and her mums willingly offer us feels too intimate. Did we need to see Sarah taking Louise to buy her first bra? Did we have to eavesdrop on poignantly innocent conversations between Louise and her first boyfriend Jamie (also the child of a male-to-female transsexual)?
Yet there's no doubt that taking time to explore the reasons behind Sarah's overwhelming need to become a man, and speaking out about the reality of her own life, help Louise reach a new understanding of her family, and her place in it.
A defining moment comes when Louise and her mums are asked to give a talk at the local youth club.
Although "extremely, extremely terrified", Louise rises to the challenge with passion and grace. "This might be a story she has to repeat and repeat, just like me and Sarah do," says battle-weary Kate. Torn between a fierce love for her parents, and an irresistible desire to assimilate and conform, Louise eventually finds a tentative equilibrium in the idea that "we're just a different type of normal". "I think I'm going to be okay," she says with slightly uncertain bravery.
THE CHILDREN WHO feature in Return to Our Lady's, a documentary catching up on the patients featured in an earlier programme about Our Lady's Hospital, Ireland's largest children's hospital, require courage of a different kind.
For many of these children, it's about the day-to-day reality of long, slow endurance. Little Matthew McGrath is a long-term intensive care unit patient, who relies on a ventilator to breathe after meningitis left him paralysed from the neck down. The first thing you notice about Matthew is his dark, fathomless eyes shining in the half-light of his hospital room. He can communicate using only three sounds, one of which is the blowing of tiny raspberries to signify No.
Ian Reilly is another child whose present home is Our Lady's. The 13-year-old has cystic fibrosis, and is constantly fighting for breath; he has reached the point where only a lung transplant can help his condition.
"It's not a life," he says bleakly. The visits of his parents are the single focus of his attenuated hospital life. Paddy and Caroline frequently make the long journey from their home in Mullingar to the hospital in Crumlin. "Thank God for Mammy and Daddy," is Ian's heartfelt comment.
His favourite food is curry chips, says Caroline. After a recent life-threatening episode, the first thing he did when he came round was ask for a portion.
In a documentary that deals with issues of fear, pain, hope and death, it's the little details like this that add an almost unbearable poignancy, connecting the vastness of mortality to the trivially mundane.
Return to Our Lady's also aims to offer a "first-hand view into how the Irish healthcare system works, in a key hospital where some of the best healthcare in the world is provided in outdated and crowded wards".
But the educative dimension of the documentary cannot compete with the raw emotion of its human subjects: the father who is stoically fighting back tears; the tense, tired face of a mother; the gentle tenderness of a nurse lifting a seriously-ill child into her arms. Return to Our Lady's resists the lure of the happy ending, the comforting fiction that all will eventually be well. Episode one in this six-part series concludes with Dr Aengus O'Marcaigh breaking the news to the young David Connolly's parents that his leukaemia has worsened. It forces us to participate - however fleetingly - in the reality of their fear.
A CACOPHONY OF squealing, dissonant electric guitar feedback - with a few police sirens thrown in for good measure - is the ear-splitting introduction to MacIntyre's Toughest Towns. Proposing Belfast as a prime candidate for "toughest town" in the UK, leather-clad Donal MacIntyre provides a whistle-stop tour of the squalid back-alleys of the city, scene of many punishment beatings, knee-cappings and worse.
But despite the silly theatrics of the programme's opening sequence, this is not merely an uninformed safari-style gawk at the dark heart of Belfast. Seeking to understand the motivations behind some of "the most brutal and calculated violence in Britain", MacIntyre attempts an analysis of the problematic notion of the paramilitaries as "defenders of the people".
David Ervine of the Progressive Unionist Party, which has links to the UVF, describes how Mondays are "terrible days" for the paramilitaries as they deal with queues of people wanting troublemakers dealt with.
But here again, it's the personal narratives that carry the most visceral force. Displaying his scarred and mangled legs, "Jimmy" recounts one of the punishment beatings he received at the hands of masked men: "I could hear my bones cracking while they laughed like animals."
Jimmy's stark words resonate in the mind for a long time after the intricacies of MacIntyre's political analysis recede.
Hilary Fannin is on leave