TV Review/Shane Hegarty: You're A Star finished up last week, with the final result robbing us of the chance to hear A Better Plan at the Eurovision.
The song wot Bryan McFadden wrote seemed to have lived up to all the basic criteria from its opening couplet. Surely a song that rhymes "October" with "Herzegovina" should receive an automatic bye into the competition? Unfortunately, Simon Casey did somewhat lessen the song's geopolitical weight by repeatedly pronouncing the region as "Herzigova". So, we came within a few text messages of sending to the Eurovision a song mistaking a tragic, war-torn country for a Czech supermodel most famous for sporting breasts that once stopped traffic. Thanks to the controversy over the winning song, A Better Plan is our stand-by option, so we may yet discover how the voters of Bosnia and Herzegovina feel about this.
In the end, we voted for Mickey Joe Harte, a Donegal man with a cheeky appeal that lets him away with anything. In this case it let him get away with how, when invited to sing his favourite song ever, he had the chutzpah to choose one he had written himself. It also allowed him get away with singing the Eurovision entry, We've Got Tonight, a song most notable for the fact that it took two people to write it.
Now the people of Europe will sit in judgement of our judgement. 1.3 million Irish voters can't be wrong. And if they are and we finish in the bottom five again, it will throw up fundamental questions about us as a people, while RTÉ will suddenly have a lot of television hours to fill in 2004.
The contestants on You're A Star were at the first stop on a long journey that starts with Eurovision and trundles on to Reborn in the USA. This is proof that the people who make television programmes must now need to climb into the barrel in which they found reality TV to get at whatever ideas are left there. Here, 10 people who used to be sort-of-famous are given a second chance at sort-of-fame. They are put on a bus and driven around the States, performing at each stop while the good viewers back in Britain and Ireland vote on who should stay and who should be left at the roadside. It is presented by Davina McCall, a woman now so ubiquitous that she comperes your dreams.
It is worth noting that each of the ex-celebrities chews gum with a studied nonchalance, perhaps needing the saliva to keep the dignity down. They are the mouse and television is the cat. They are being toyed with, pawed, teased. They pretend that they are enjoying it and it's a bit of a laugh, but when the turn comes for them to perform they have a nervy eagerness that gives them away. They are fame-a-holics, convincing themselves that they can have one last sip of stardom and walk away without going crazy. "I think people will be pleasantly surprised," said Eighties pop sensation Sonia before giving a rendition of The Greatest Love Of All, throughout which it sounded as if someone was stamping on her foot. She was put up for eviction, and has apparently reacted badly to the news. Later in the week she got off the bus and didn't get back on again, which was a pleasant surprise.
Eighties pop duo Dollar are here too, and also up for eviction. This is the second week in a row in which Dollar have given cause to be mentioned in this column. I haven't looked at Revelations recently, but surely this is one of the signs of the Apocalypse. In broadcasting Reborn in the USA, TV3 brought this week's count of programmes aired simultaneously with ITV to over 10 prime-time hours. It is, however, beginning to claw some of the time back through its Matters of Fact series, which continued this week, albeit with a six-year-old film. Sex in a Cold Climate is a documentary about the Magdalene Laundries that was made in 1997 and first broadcast on Channel 4. It was made one year after the last Magdalene house was closed and at a time when we were only beginning to take our fingers out of our ears and pay attention to this story. It is the documentary that inspired Peter Mullan to make his film, The Magdalene Sisters.
Still, following on from last week's original documentary, Before The Hungarians, a stuttering start is a start nonetheless. Besides, the pain of Sex in a Cold Climate has not dated. Six years of hearing these stories being added to by so many others has not diminished its impact. Seeing the four women featured was to receive a cold shock, the realisation of how the first time one heard these stories they were immediately seared onto the brain.
With a title such as Mandela: The Living Legend, the BBC's two-part documentary was hardly going to eviscerate the man's character. "I wanted to be regarded as an ordinary human being, with virtues and vices," he said when talking of how he was elevated to demigod status while in Robben Island. The film made an effort to do that. It reminded us how he stood by Winnie Mandela as her reputation was disintegrating. It followed his daughter Zenani as she accompanied him on a fund-raising trip to Indonesia, chasing him around the globe in the hope of gaining back some of the time lost when he was in prison, the daughter of a man known to the world, but not to his children. An AIDS campaigner criticised his record on handling the pandemic while President.
Yet vices were thin on the ground. This was a superb film, the latter history of apartheid through the prism of Mandela's life. He spent 25 years in an 8ft x 7ft cell, sleeping on the floor. Organising resistance against warders, who would burn letters from the prisoners' families to demoralise them, and would give Mandela newspapers headlining Winnie's latest infidelities.
All the while, his name was seeping into the world, becoming a rallying cry. It is hard to recall the full impact of his walk to freedom. This man who had been heard only in name and seen through an old black and white picture he no longer resembled.
More remarkable is that he could live up to every expectation put on him by a world that had drafted his personality in his absence. Each subsequent step burns bright through history. Casting his vote in that first open election. The white army generals and the police force lining up beside him on inauguration day. The catharsis of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The master stroke that was his greeting the South African rugby team before the 1995 World Cup Final.
He is looking forward to the day he "retires from retirement", but you were left with the impression that he never will. He travels the world, cajoling world leaders for money for his charities, refusing to leave without a cheque. "If you don't get it from them then, you will never get it." Everywhere he goes he is treated like the demigod he insists he isn't, a man whose tale is consistently told through hagiography, but one of the few among us who is allowed get away with it.
The only thing that you couldn't predict with any certainty in Fair City Accident & Emergency Special was the exact moment a doctor would shout "clear!", a bare-chested actor would give a salmon-leap on their trolley, and the machine that had been going "ping" would suddenly go "beeeep".
Everything else about it was fatally predictable. Almost every cliché of the medical drama genre was here. The waiting room scraps. The romantic friction between doctor and nurse. The casualty bed confessions. The way the camera swung into action every time the doors burst open and the paramedics pushed through another trolley on which lay an actor waiting to grab their big moment. "Me leg! You can't take me leg!" And . . . cut! A storyline was improvised in which a few Fair City regulars were dragged into hospital for the night, to be greeted by a few roughly-assembled characters. There was pretence that it was saying something about the state of the health service, but it was really only an exercise in bandwagon-jumping. For all the application, the idea was fundamentally lazy. Fair City has shown itself to be confident enough in what it is, without having to dress itself as something else. It will not, however, be the last time we visit this hospital. A set has been built. The cast should be very nervous indeed.