TV Review: In a week when traditionally we polish our shamrocks, brush off our brollies and get in line, six deep, to observe the purpling of mighty American thighs as they high-kick down various O'Connell streets around our green and nominally pleasant island, there were a couple of interesting interpretations of Irishness from the national broadcaster.
In the four-part series Níos Gaelaí, presenter Bob Kelly presided over a gentle game of squeezing interestingly rounded pegs into staunchly green apertures. Four volunteers who have recently come to live in Ireland from places as diverse as China and Nigeria spent 10 weeks with an individual tutor doing a crash course in Irish; then, having mastered the "cúpla focal" (an overused phrase safely interpreted as "this is as good as my language skills get"), the participants were challenged to learn a uniquely Irish skill, such as (among others) hurling or Irish dancing. It appeared to be a successful identity experiment if you can measure success by the consistency of your colcannon or the flexibility of your fingering on a borrowed tin whistle. But to give the programme its due, the most vocal and interesting of the group, Taiwo, from Nigeria, spoke with great integrity of the value of accessing and understanding Irish culture and finding a place within it. Grimly at this time, Taiwo had to return to Nigeria before the end of filming due to "a family emergency".
For what it's worth, I think Bob Kelly should extend his experiment to cover "non-foreign nationals". With memories of being ill with anxiety in classroom after classroom because I didn't know a gúna from a gnu, because I watch my 10-year-old son battle with the same incomprehension, and because for an awfully long time I thought de Valera was a blind French diplomat and that Irish dancers had no elbows, I think Kelly should pluck people randomly from latte bars and hospital waiting rooms, from bookies' offices and ladies' gyms, and help us all to interpret our culture and understand our language.
'VERY FEW INTERESTING or intelligent men I knew weren't unfaithful to their wives," said the beautiful Hungarian-German-Jewish refugee Agnes Bernelle, in defence of her husband, Desmond Leslie. Excavating a fascinating subsection of Irish life - the bohemian, sometimes broke aristo - Flesh and Blood, which returned for a new series this week, began with a poignant testimony from their daughter, columnist Antonia Leslie. In conversation with film-maker Mick Peelo, she recalled an idyllic early childhood in Castle Leslie, Glaslough, in Co Monaghan, an idyll shattered and cauterised by a "lock-out" when her Byronesque and beloved father, using the opportunity of his wife and children being on holiday in Italy, moved his long-term lover and their children into the ancestral home and "evicted" his first family.
From the doorstep of Castle Leslie to a council house provided by Monaghan County Council, where she shrank from the sound of her father's car as it drove through the village (feeling, she said, only "terrible shame"), to watching her then-unknown half-sister, Samantha, pushing her erstwhile doll's pram past her door, and eventually sitting next to her in the village school and becoming her friend, to descriptions of running away to London to punk rock and split-second sex in grimy squats, Leslie's recollections were sharp and moving, and her vivid description of abandonment and its subsequent effect on her life intriguing.
Leslie was a hugely likeable, resignedly nervy, tenacious and self-effacing subject. Showing Peelo a small box containing her father's ashes, which she held throughout the interview, she said she had told her remorseful father on his deathbed that she had forgiven him from the moment he had hurt her and that she was proud to be his daughter.
"Who was the main man in your life?" Peelo asked, repeating the blatantly unnecessary question several times until Leslie, giving him the answer he required, said "my father". And true as this may have been, Leslie's story did not require such a painting-by- numbers interrogation. From her great opening line about remembering, as a tiny child, "lying in bed and contemplating the meaning of monogamy", she was a woman well in command of her own language.
IT'S OFFICIAL: WE now have more medical dramas than hospital beds, and more than enough moody, smouldering, truculent TV doctors to fill the lowly trolleys that litter the average casualty department. Given this epidemic, one wonders why the BBC chose to wear CBS's cast-offs and import 3lbs, a cortex of neurological nonsense that has already been axed mid-series in the US.
The title refers to the weight of the human brain, the intricate organ being the surgical playground of new docs on the block Stanley Tucci and Mark Feuerstein, who play Dr Yin and Dr Yang (yes, the characters do have names, but they're too tedious to recall). Tucci-Yin is a bald, moody, Armani-wearing smoothie with pockets full of machismo who is, predictably, the best damn surgeon in New York City and who views the brain as nothing more than a box of wires or as a kind of cerebral Scalextric. The sorcerer's apprentice, Feuerstein-Yang, on the other lobe, is a sensitive rookie who meditates in the X-ray box and takes the "whole person" into consideration when he's poking around inside their cranium. Feuerstein views the brain as a "receptor for the soul", as unexplored territory, or maybe that was as a beautiful wilderness or a low-fat bran muffin - and ooh, do those boys' mindsets clash.
Losing 3lbs probably wouldn't be a bad idea, on many level - it's House without Hugh Laurie, it's a bloodless ER, and of course it is entirely implausible. You know the kind of thing: the opening episode featured a brilliant young glossy-haired classical musician with a dead twin and a tumour, who would never have been allowed into the operating theatre with all that make-up on. Glittering baloney, yes, but airing at around midnight on a Sunday it makes for an untaxing bedtime story (although the David Gray soundtrack, while Drs Ying and Sling contemplated the NYC skyline blanketing itself in stars, was about as welcome as a ticking embolism).
THE THING ABOUT these well-shod American shows, though, is that no matter how formulaic or ludicrous, they have a pencil-skirted sharpness and well-manicured confidence that is often missing from those spawned closer to home. The second of the new US doggy-bag dramas to occupy our screen this week was Kidnapped, a glossy serialised thriller that skidded around the Upper East Side like a roller-skated waitress and was "way fun".
Certainly way more fun than this week's "ITV drama premiere", Fallen Angel, which occupied similar territory - child abduction - and which announced itself with full-page advertisements featuring a dagger-wielding foetus (goodness, that's appealing).
While Fallen Angel insisted on its audience (of more than six million people per episode, apparently) bartering three consecutive evenings in exchange for watching a pretty psychotic blonde (with a scalpel) kidnap and dismember small children, Kidnapped, like a frothy, chilled cocktail or a jaunt through Alphabet City, left a far more lingering impression. But even given its sophistication, languor and vertiginous camera tricks, Kidnapped, too, was bananas.
"We don't discuss Virgil with guests," says rich wife Ellie Cain to her precocious young daughter, who is trying to engage her bodyguard in a little pre-warm-milk-and-cracker chat. The Cain family, despite their intellectual prowess and glorious wealth, were not having a good day. Fifteen-year-old son Leopold (himself an avid reader of Buddhist Epistemology) had been kidnapped in a distressingly bloody car-jack, a teenage daughter was missing (presumed coked out of her dermatologically superior face) from her exclusive educational establishment, and, what's more, the family had received a severed ear through the post (lucky the Filipina maid opened the box). Oh poo. As Ellie Cain said to Knapp (Jeremy Sisto), the maverick, stubbled-but-sensitive ex-cop and hostage-finder: "You wake up in the morning worrying about the colour of a napkin and then this happens." Absolutely, Ellie, I can really empathise - I am plagued with worry about the colour of my napkins. The series continues with a high-tech Keystone Cop chase to the finish between Knapp, the FBI and shadowy figures from the enigmatic Mr Cain's past. Cool. But I do hope the skeletons in their cupboard match the curtains.
