TV Review: For Inside 252, seven ordinary women were plucked from obscurity to take part in . . . Excuse me? Celebrities? Oh, great! Where? Here? Oh.
At the beginning of each night's programme, we were introduced to the women. Eileen Reid was described a showbusiness legend, but I guess that's fine, because it would be unfair to simply call her "the Twink substitute". Emma O'Driscoll is considered a "pop star"; Sorcha Furlong is a "soap star". The word has long lost its luminosity; but to call these people stars is like picking a pebble from a beach and declaring it to be a planet.
By the way, the TV presenter, Bláthnaid Ní Chofaigh, was described only as "Gaeilgeoir", confirming that to be such an exotic species it's now worth sticking it in a zoo.
Anyway, Inside 252 was the latest effort by RTÉ at back-engineering the successful British reality television formats of Big Brother and I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!, but once again lacked the personalities, the budget and the expertise to pull it off. They lived in a house and had to run a daily radio station. It was predictably derivative, even down to mimicking the Geordie deadpan of the Big Brother narrator. Except that it used a guy who read his lines like he was doing the shipping forecast. "This is the schedule for Wednesday's Charity 252: The Morning Show with Fiona, 1013 millibars and falling." It was tepid, with the housemates offering little in the way of interesting, protracted storylines. By featuring only women, it robbed us of the weak thrill usually delivered by real - or even manufactured - sexual tension.
But it was all for charity! So why did it feel as if the constant referencing of the sponsors bordered on the obscene? Each of the seven had a personal sponsor, represented by the grinning corporate-types lined up with cheques in hand and applause in their ears. It was a diversion from the fact that they had each bought themselves a full week of advertising, only wrapped nicely in chumminess and charity.
Inside 252 will have had a lot of viewers, as much because RTÉ mobilised its resources for a big push across TV and radio. When you make a big splash in a small pond there are always a few who will turn their heads. Each night, it also hyped itself up, whooped loudly to drown out the low groan of banality. It had a studio audience and guests and presenter Gerry Ryan chuckling dutifully at the most mediocre of footage. Ryan presented this in customary fashion. It is a great mystery how a man who has been such a gift to radio can be such a curse to television. But it is a mystery most of us long ago grew bored with contemplating.
The original of the species, Big Brother, always runs a weekly episode during which psychologists dissect the every move of the housemates, giving the whole thing a delightful trash-anthropological spin. Best of all its shrinks is Peter Collett, who is unwaveringly earnest about their body language and how it betrays their real feelings. "What Jade is really saying . . ." he would comment, before letting us in on the secret. Of course, if we could read his body language, we would be able to tell what Collett is really saying.
He has now brought these skills to the enjoyable Body Talk, which this week looked at how the body language of politicians reveals much about them. He calls them "tells", which is the term used by poker players to figure out if someone is bluffing.
He dissected George W. Bush's exaggerated power walk ("it makes him look tough") and there was footage of Bush and Clinton trying to out-walk each other, like a couple of cowboys spotting that there's only one horse between them. He also identified how Bush bites his inner lip when he's anxious. Collett calls this "emotional leakage". When the President was told the news about 9/11, it turns out, he leaked like a rusty colander.
Perhaps if Collett was to observe me as I watch Inside 252 he might provide a few insights into my disposition. Lolling tongue. Rolling eyes. Any thoughts? Oh well, never mind.
TV3 must have derived a certain satisfaction from how Bad Girls ran against Inside 252 three times this week. Here, a lot of women are cooped up in jail together, but with the advantage that they are fictional and at the whim of scriptwriters with a flair for the ridiculous. It is made by the same people who make Footballers' Wives, and however outrageous their scripts, this week they did something quite simple. They took a character from that and stuck her in Bad Girls.
Tanya Turner (Zoe Lucker) arrived to find that former soap stalwarts already populate the jail. There's Stephanie Beecham, once of The Colbys, and there's Alma from Coronation Street, who was killed off in that soap some time ago and, judging by appearances, has come to Bad Girls to decompose.
In Tanya's presence, the plot was its usual high intensity barrage of knowing melodrama. Someone lost a toe, someone else lost her life to dodgy rhubarb wine and Tanya lost her false nails. There are no prizes for guessing who screamed the loudest.
Whoopi is a new sitcom starring Whoopi Goldberg. She does not play Whoopi, but Mavis: a failed singer who now runs a failing hotel. If you love comedy that's screamed at you with such force that it's like standing in the teeth of a jet engine, you won't be able to get enough of this.
It is heavy on the racial jousting. Her brother acts like a white man and his girlfriend is white but acts like a black woman. "What's wrong with a real sister?" yells Whoopi, and the whole audience explodes like a pressurised canister of laughter.
The audience does this regularly, as if they are watching something else that we can't see.
Mavis employs an Iranian handyman who is there both to play up to stereotype and to mock American slavishness to them. The promise of this scenario quickly succumbs to the jokes. "This TV is more dead than Saddam's first defence minister!" Here's another one: "I haven't felt this oppressed since the Ayatollah blew up my beach house." That's enough, now.
Every so often, somebody gets the idea that it's worth revisiting the Delorean debacle and this week it was through Car Crash: The Delorean Story. Perhaps it's because people still can't quite believe they fell for it; each documentary being the equivalent of another slap to the forehead in disbelief. Still, it always makes for an interesting story, although you wouldn't want to have been part of the plot.
At one point, the Delorean plant in West Belfast employed 2,400 people. Delorean got a grant for each person he employed, so he kept shovelling them in. One day, a man asked for directions to a particularly dangerous machine. "Ask the supervisor," he was told. "I am the supervisor," he replied.
The car itself looked great, but ran like a nightmare. It went from 0-60mph in 10 seconds, which was acceleration that rated somewhere between a Robin Reliant and a clown on a tricycle.
"Dogs. They really were dogs," said one ex-employee.
"Ruff," chipped in another, gamely. Oh, sorry: "Rough." John Delorean had movie star looks, a hypnotist's skill at getting money from the government and a wife who wiped each chair before she sat on it. A former chief engineer disagreed with her withering assessment of Belfast. "I think we could have had a bullet through the water tower," he recalled. "But that might have been fun as much as anything else." Yes, perhaps a child's birthday party or something.
There was no interview with Delorean, so the programme had to rely on one he gave in 1996. There was, though, rather excellent footage of him getting busted for the cocaine deal that he hoped would earn him some quick cash. He doesn't say anything, but his face goes from 60-0 in half a second.
The early 1980s, by the way, are looking worse as every year passes. The straggled hair and beards wispy in the breeze. The duffel coats. The way everyone seems to be just standing around. The weather forecast for 1981 was that it would be generally overcast, with outbreaks of heavy cloud. It reminds us that there was so little money in those days that no-one could afford primary colours.
tvreview@irish-times.ie
