TV ReviewOh Kylie. You were supposed to be the dazzling centrepiece of the Doctor WhoChristmas extravaganza, Voyage of the Damned, seducing everyone from tots to grannies with your winsome smile, high-kicking showgirlship and frisson of A-list celebrity. You looked great: cheeky black dress, plunging neckline, white frills, spiky lace-up boots - the perfect balance between ingénue and dominatrix, just enough to make post-prandially slumped dads perk up, but nothing to give Great Aunt Ruby the vapours.
And it was amusing - if curiously bathetic - to see you floor the accelerator of a fork-lift truck with your tiny foot and lurch forward at, ooh it must have been at least 5kph, in order to dispatch the baddie megalomaniac to the nearest fiery furnace. Yet somehow the magic failed to work, and - I'm sorry - it was hard to feel any sense of loss when you tumbled headfirst into that roiling pit of white-hot lava too. Laters, poppet.
Minogue was slumming it as Astrid, a jobbing waitress on board the ill-fated (how could it be otherwise?) Titanic. Not the original liner, you understand, but a souped-up spaceship version orbiting the Earth, full of affluent space-tourists hoping for a peek at our quaint Christmas rituals. "Human beings worship the great God Santa," droned the tour guide. "He has fearsome claws, and a wife called Mary." But the scenes of heedless, champagne-sodden decadence were soon brought to an abrupt and rather unpleasant end when a meteorite storm ripped through the ship's hull, setting it on a direct collision course with - oh please no - Buckingham Palace. Duck and cover, ma'am! And the corgies, don't forget the corgies!
Of course, David Tennant as the Doctor - skittering about in his tuxedo, all floppy hair and boyish quips and melting brown-eyed stares - saved the queen and the rest of the planet from doom, revving the broken, lumbering vessel up and over the roof of the palace at the last moment. "Thenk you," cawed the grateful monarch, standing outside in her rollers, a corgie under her arm, "Heppy Christmas!"
Writer Russell T Davies has already drawn the ire of conservative Christians by styling Doctor Who as a messianic figure, a kind of time-travelling Jesus wearing Converse runners and wielding a dinky blue sonic screwdriver, and he really rubbed their noses in it this time. In one scene, arms outstretched in cruciform fashion, the Doctor ascended through the ship's ruined decks, borne aloft by a pair of golden cyborg angels. (Both were members of a decidedly un-heavenly host, previously seen using their haloes as death-dealing Frisbees, one of which Kylie whacked away with a handy saucepan - one of the few times she looked as though she was getting anything out of this time-travel lark.) And you can bet a few eyebrows were raised by the Doctor's smarty-pants quip: "Christmas? It's a long story. I should know, I was there - I got the last room."
Kylie's distinct lack of va-va-voom aside, this was a seriously gripping show, albeit one that was freighted with lashings of rather obvious post-modern knowingness. And the rest of the characters - including the darling little cyborg-with-a-heart, Bannakaffalatta, with his spiky red conker-head - more than made up for any lapses in the pop-princess department, bringing off the whole rollicking, wonderfully preposterous tale with élan.
NO ONE COULD have got their knickers remotely in a twist over ITV's impeccably dull Christmas offering, The Old Curiosity Shop. Just what is it with this tedious Dickens-at-Christmas tradition? Where is it written that we must be served a prim portion of glimmering lamplight, smoky alleyways and mullioned windows at this time of year? Will Christmas be incomplete if we don't catch sight of a sad-eyed young scamp in a cloth cap being carted off to prison? Perhaps it's a bit like brussels sprouts with the turkey: few people actually like them, and they repeat on you terribly, but everyone expects to see them on the plate.
Truly, you couldn't fault the production. The new adaptation boasted the requisite all-star line-up, with the magisterial Sir David Jacobi as Grandfather, whose white-haired gravitas concealed a serious gambling habit, and Irish actor Sophie Vavasseur as the hard-done-by young Nell, replete with inscrutable gaze and rampant Pre-Raphaelite mane. It says much for Vavasseur's competence that she managed to make the virtuous Nell anything more than an insufferable little prig. (As Oscar Wilde once noted, "One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.") Toby Jones did sterling service as Daniel Quilp, the evil and mendacious loan-shark determined to get his dues from Grandfather, who - along with Nell - had done a runner. With grandfathers like this, who needs enemies? Of course, you knew straight away that Quilp was a bad, bad man. Since ITV and the BBC now seem to treat period drama as a kind of high-functioning soap opera, subtleties are abandoned in favour of bleedin'-obvious characterisation. Still, it worked here: Quilp's thuggish sneer and squashed top-hat marked him out as the villain of the piece long before he started threatening his wife ("if yew do that again, I'll bite yer") and - this was the clincher - before he began chewing up hard-boiled eggs with their shells still on. Only really evil men do that. Meanwhile, Geoff Breton as the foppish but fundamentally decent Mr Dick Swiveller (an authentic Dickens character despite his oddly porn-inflected name) brought all the petulant airs and graces of a Victorian Russell Brand to the role.
So why did The Old Curiosity Shop feel like a bit of an effort? Probably because Dickens always comes with a side helping of stodgy piety, a kind of sanctimonious, prissy moralising that makes you long for the uncomplicated fun of Doctor Who. At least ITV resisted the temptation to style it as "Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe". You feel it's only a matter of time.
BUT ANY DICKENS-induced tedium was nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to the enervating, spirit-sapping ennui called up by Ireland's Top Earners.
For a full 90 minutes - and by God you felt every single one go slowly by - a relentlessly perky Craig Doyle led a countdown of the 50 businessmen (and women, though there were far fewer of those) who have made the greatest gains in the last financial year. If ever there was a programme that could make you lose the will to live, it was this.
It's in part down to the fact that super-rich people are often pretty dull, too busy stacking up the cash to express interesting opinions. So what we got was a parade of virtually indistinguishable grey middle-aged men, interspersed with vapid, cheesy interjections from Doyle, such as "nothing like a successful entrepreneur to make you feel rubbish about your life!" or "the O'Flaherty brothers have added €103 million to their overall wealth - well done boys!" Oh, this was a naff programme. So naff it hurt. But it wasn't the top earners themselves that gave the offence, boring bunch though they seemed. No, it was the cringing, pants-wetting tone of awe adopted by Doyle, as though it were the height of human endeavour to own a lovely yacht and a residence in Monaco. Seán Quinn, who bought Bupa, eventually came in top, with €1.5 billion in financial gains this year. But by then you really didn't care.
After watching this mindless celebration of gross excess, you felt like running off to a spiritual retreat in the Outer Hebrides where you would be repeatedly lashed with burning birch twigs and forced to bathe naked in freezing mountain streams until you regained some kind of inner sentience. Actually, can Craig Doyle get the birch twig treatment too?
NOW, SAY WHAT you like about culchie-comedy Killinaskully, at least you know what you're getting. Alright, you may not like what you're getting, but it will be as familiar and reassuring as a pair of old socks. The Christmas offering, entitled The Last Round, was no exception, featuring the Killinaskullians - those bewildered refugees from some time in the mid-20th century, with the haircuts to match - grappling with the prospect of Jacksie's bar shutting its doors for a final time.
Time for some misty-eyed reminiscences about "madcap" craic from way back, like the science experiment to find out how rain works. ("How does it get up there?")
As a rule, it pays to be suspicious of any comedy that aspires to be "madcap", or indeed that invokes "mayhem and madness" as a unique selling point, as Killinaskully does. It's a case of protesting too much. All that frantic alliteration conceals the reverse: plodding, predictable and laboured fun that - in this particular case - found its nadir in the quip, "Whatever happened to The Smithereens?" Answer: "They broke up." There's really nowhere you can go from here but up.
Hilary Fannin is on leave