Glenroe - RTE1, Sunday
Random Passage - RTE1, Monday
Action - TV3, Thursday
The Secret Rulers of the World - Channel 4, Sunday
Cutting Edge: Brian's Story - Channel 4, Tuesday
So there you have it. No planes dropped from the sky. A group of crazy terrorists didn't burst in on the wedding and spray the place with gunfire. Miley didn't wake up, find Biddy in the shower and realise that it was all a dream. Instead he simply packed away the kids and the picnic into the car and headed home with a "Holy God".
Enough has already been written about the decision to axe Glenroe, but as a purely televisual event it initially seemed hugely disappointing, muted, anti-climactic. Having thought about it, however, it was probably apt. Plotlines were left swinging in the wind like broken rope and even the great Dick/Mary will they/won't they was left ambiguously. But that's what happens. If a soap does its best to represent in any way the banality of life, and the way in which things are seldom wrapped up neatly in time for next week's episode, then it makes sense to walk out on things as they are still in progress. We had a right to worry after last year's attempt to launch Biddy into space ahead of Dennis Tito, but luckily we simply slipped out quietly while the village went about its business. It was a nice way of re-affirming the old sense of Glenroe as a place that could conceivably be real, rather than a film set where actors were going about their lines only pausing to check on the height of the sword hovering over their heads.
There will be inevitable nostalgia for Glenroe, but you could never have guessed that it would arrive only 24 hours later. Random Passage is quite possibly the worst thing RTE will show this year, a relentlessly awful costume drama that trades on the fact that, because there are several extras in old costumes, it has got a love affair and because the action takes place in two countries, then it must be a sweeping epic. There have been editions of Mart and Market more sweeping and epic.
It cost £12 million to make Random Passage and its tale of poor Oirish folk forced to leave for Newfoundland - £12 million! I am presuming that a large part of that was the fine built up on not returning to Xtravision their copies of Far and Away, Ryan's Daughter and the complete series of The Irish RM. Even in the long, inglorious history of co-productions this is a corker. Every fifth-generation Irish emigrant's half-baked idea of Ireland is thrown into a big blender, and squeezed out the other end as a fine blancmange that the producers hope will be gobbled up by viewers in the international territories.
You'll see evictions! You'll see potatoes! There's a workhouse! Large families! Boat journeys! British baddies - boo! Feisty colleens - hooray! Terrible, realistic poverty! Terrible, realistic poverty that luckily leaves everybody with nice teeth!
It's mostly Canadian cash, which explains the historical hiccup that has the west of Ireland over-run by half of Toronto. Even the otherwise reliable Colm Meaney doesn't seem the slightest bit embarrassed by the whole thing, but then again, anybody who has spent half his career playing opposite actors dressed in monster suits, as he did in Star Trek, can probably duet with even the sturdiest bit of mahogany without blinking. It's a cold and stormy place, Newfoundland. It's a wonder the cast don't start chopping each other up for firewood.
THE fact that RTE can blow loose change on such nonsense only highlights the fact that TV3 has no home-grown drama whatsoever. In fact, it has so little of any substance that when the Champions League comes around every couple of weeks, the coverage roars like a flood through the dusty riverbed that is the TV3 evening schedule. Fortunately, it hasn't washed away Action, in which the magnificent Jay Mohr stars as Hollywood producer Peter Dragon trying to put together one last movie before he gets dumped upon from on high. This week saw him struggle with a food-addicted actress, drug-addicted actor and sacking-addicted boss. There are few great films about Hollywood, and fewer TV series, but this is the Larry Sanders Show of the movie industry - vicious, smart, expertly written and achingly funny. Each character is nastier than the next, Dragon himself delivered with such an unrepentant amorality that after a while you can only admire his consistency.
"Are you crying?" he asks his assistant after a particularly brutal bit of belittling. "A little." "Fantastic."
It's typical of TV3's luck that when it does find a decent programme, the US network that made it cancels it after only 13 episodes. This is a repeat of that single series, and it deserves it. This week was episode six, but don't let it put you off watching the final seven. You could dip your toe into this shark-pond at any point and still be bitten.
David Icke turned up this week in John Ronson's The Secret Rulers of the World propounding his theory that the Earth is run by a shadowy elite of, wait for it, 12foot, shape-shifting, blood-drinking lizards. There's a big market for this kind of thing, and Icke has become a superstar on the conspiracy theory circuit since realising that he is not, as first thought, the son of God. Don't worry about it David, we have all made the same mistake.
I'll come back to Ronson's series another time, but this particular episode again showed the journalist's uncanny ability to elicit empathy for people usually held up as walking freak shows. His list of lizard shape-shifters consisted of predictable subjects: George Bush Jnr, Boris Yeltsin, Al Gore, the Queen of England, the Queen Mother, the Rothschild family of England. But Bob Hope? Boxcar Willy? Kris Kristofferson!? I will never be able to watch Convoy in the same way again. The theme tune for his lectures was No Matter What by Boyzone. You can make up your own mind on that one.
I remember that when Icke first transubstantiated himself from snooker commentator to saviour of the universe, the Sun newspaper ran the banner, "The Sun: Always Chocful of Nuts" along the top of the pages devoted to the story. It's a much easier sort of madness to deal with when you have someone so straightforwardly, so calmly stepping into territory that starts people whirring their fingers round their temples and whistling knowingly. The sort that was dealt to Brian Davis was one that defies any such pigeon-holing.
DAVIS was a successful journalist and magazine editor during the 1960s before mental illness and alcoholism took such a hold that they eventually consumed him completely. Cutting Edge: Brian's Story, a fly-on-the-wall film following him for six months, was a further example of how the subtleties and the inclusiveness of the digital camera gives us an ability to get into the cracks of life that a three-person camera crew trying hard to keep a big furry boom out of shot can't.
Davis was a ludicrously optimistic man, living on the street, but always making plans to get back on his feet. It was agonisingly predictable.
He decided he would resurrect his career by flying to Paris and interviewing Roman Polanski. A friend gave him £150 for the plane ticket and asked him to be sensible with it. "I'm very careful," he assured her. By morning it was all gone, and he was sleeping on a park bench.
When he received £700 in benefits owed to him, he pledged: "I'm going to be careful. I'm not going to blow it. I'll get a hotel room, take-away food, a few beers, go to bed early." Three days later it was gone too, £200 of it lost because he couldn't remember what hotel he had stayed in.
Scene after scene illustrated an individual, and a mind, dismantled by manic depression. Screaming obscenities down the phone at receptionists who won't put him through to editors. Destroying a cousin's house when, within 48 hours of moving in, the floor has disappeared under junk and the record player is stuck, blaring at 45 r.p.m. Fires broke out twice, not surprising given that he resorts to cooking with the grill tray on the gas stove because the pots are mouldy, and then eats the dinner off a magazine because all the plates are broken. The desperation finally gets to the film-makers who try to calm him down as he tears up the floor looking for his chips. "We'll buy you chips, Brian," they promise, begging him to stop.
In his writing, when he did get around to it, there was a wisdom and a clarity betrayed by the ramshackle, raving author, and the poems read were stark, rhythmical and never self-pitying. He couldn't live in his writing, though, and eventually couldn't live with reality either. After a spell in a hospital he checked himself out and into a hotel, where he climbed on to a roof and was found two days later, dead in a courtyard below. The coroner left an "open verdict". All that optimism that only he could feel was destroyed with a distressing inevitability you could see coming. Television rarely comes so compelling, so harrowing, so sad.
tvreview@irish-times.ie
