A tale with a sting

TV REVIEW: The Consumer ShowRTÉ1, Monday; Bouquet of Barbed WireUTV, Monday; U Be DeadUTV, Sunday; Boozed Up Irish AbroadTV3, Monday; Do the Right ThingRTÉ2, Tuesday; Mad MenBBC4, Wednesday

BET THAT marketing bloke from Innocent smoothies was sorry he agreed to come on The Consumer Show. What could go wrong, he must have thought: we never get bad press, and our dinky little cartons are lunchbox shorthand for 'mum cares'. And then he met Keelin Shanley. His interview came at the end of an item about how clueless most of us are about the danger of very sugary soft drinks – the photos of black, rotting baby teeth should have come with a look-away-now-if-you're-squeamish warning.

“There’s a quarter of a child’s recommended daily allowance of sugar in each little carton,” she reminded the man from Innocent before repeatedly asking if he would be happy to have that fact printed in large letters on the box and how much of the stuff he would recommend a child to drink anyway. It was the sort of grilling a politician preps for, but the marketing man (and I didn’t note his name, being too mesmerised by how unable he was to marshal a half-decent rebuttal) clearly didn’t think he was walking into that kind of show.

A bit of informed straight talk is what you need to counteract marketing flimflam, which is why Shanley, the Prime Timepresenter, was an inspired choice for RTÉ's new series. Her co-presenter is Eddie Hobbs, and the consumer-rights specialist Tina Leonard chips in, all adding up to a strong team in what was the start of a promising series. And the content worked – a group of teenagers testing mobile phones provided a good balance for an involved (and slightly boring) financial piece about householder insurance. The studio audience was a dead loss, however. Its members were reluctant to talk, and when they did talk they were awkward – though maybe they were still reeling from Hobbs's peculiar and remarkably unfunny stand-up routine about Ryanair at the start of the programme.

BY ALL REPORTS the first time Andrea Newman’s Bouquet of Barbed Wire hit the TV screens there were headlines and hand-wringing about all the sex (not to mention the whiff of incest), and you could almost hear parents muttering about “unsuitable viewing” as they shunted teenagers to bed early for fear they’d be corrupted by the shenanigans – or get notions about running away and living in a bedsit with their English teacher. That was in the 1970s. The new version, a three-parter, began on Monday without even a whiff of protest, so read into that what you will.

It’s a great old yarn, and the new production is slick and compelling. Peter Manson (Trevor Eve) is a super-successful architect with an obsessive love for his teenage daughter (Imogen Poots), an understanding wife (Hermione Norris) – okay, not so understanding about the obsessive-love bit – and a murky secret from his past. Enter the brooding and nasty Gavin (Tom Riley), his daughter’s teacher, who we know from all his dark, meaningful stares is intent on wrecking Manson’s perfect life.

There’s still lots of sex, with everyone. It gets to the point that when a gorgeous new architect, young enough to be his daughter, joins Manson’s firm, you know it’s only a matter of time before the drawing board is used for something other than blueprints.

The suspense kicks in early in episode one as hints of Gavin’s true motives begin to emerge. Tuning in next week is a must.

WHILE YOU'D want to be blind not to cop that flinty-eyed Gavin in Bouquetis up to no good, the central characters in the drama of the week, U Be Dead, had absolutely no way of knowing who had it in for them and why. Tightly based on a true story (the real victims helped the writer with the script), it told the story of a terrifying case of stalking from 2002. The victims were a suave psychiatrist named Jan Falkowski and his fiancee, Debra Pemberton, who were harassed via their mobile phones with such persistence and menace – "u be dead"; "a hitman has been paid to kill you" – by Maria Marchese, the girlfriend of one of his patients, that it eventually broke up their relationship.

It took police a long time to track Marchese down because she mostly used public phone boxes (who knew you could text from a public phone?) and had no direct relationship with her victims, making her more difficult to catch. The police in Dorset who caught Marchese after an elaborate sting didn’t press charges on the phone-stalking, leaving Marchese to continue to persecute the doctor. She escalated her campaign by first planting forensic evidence and then accusing Falkowski of rape – an accusation that went to a very public trial – providing tense scenes in the drama because it looked like he would be found guilty.

In the end it was Marchese who ended up in prison. The plot was so outlandish it had to be true. The strength in this drama, which was as gripping as any thriller, was that the characters were so unlikable – a brave move in a genre where victims are more often than not presented as being next to saintly, no matter what they were really like. David Morrissey played Falkowski as arrogant and unfeeling, having an affair with a younger woman in the middle of all the trauma; Tara FitzGerald as his fiancee was brittle and cold; and Monica Dolan gave a fantastically chilling performance as the demented Marchese.

TV3 LAUNCHED ITS autumn season with a promise of new faces; disappointing, then, to see quite so many spotty young bottoms in one of the first of this season's new programmes – though, really, what would you expect from Boozed Up Irish Abroad? It's a grubby business. Groups of young people are brought by the station to various grim-looking, low-rent resorts in Greece and Spain, and the cameras follow them as they drink themselves into oblivion. They drop their trousers 'cos it's hilarious, shout a lot and generally act it up for the cameras, which lap up every inane moment – or the 10 minutes I managed to stay tuned. When their heads clear and the sunburn has faded, I wonder how many of these young men and women think that the free holiday might have been a very expensive life lesson.

A FAR MORE interesting programme involving mostly young people and travel was Do the Right Thing.It's your typical task-driven game show with a twist: the prize is a chance for people to spend a year volunteering abroad for various charities, and the judges are experienced overseas NGO workers who know what it takes. It's presented by Lucy Kennedy and Baz Ashmawy, who were pretty superfluous, but maybe their role gets bigger as the series goes on – or maybe they are there to make what could easily have been an RTÉ1 programme look more like an RTÉ2 one. In the first episode the 50 would-be volunteers were whittled down to 16 – after a strenuous weekend doing hands-on work at Barretstown camp for sick children – and for once you'd have to say that this is a show where the contestants are hoping to give more to the show than they'll get out of it.

[ tvreview@irishtimes.com ]

Ad, bad and dangerous: The return of the Don

After weeks of googling Mad Menspoilers – they're up to episode seven in the US – the wait for the real thing finally ended this week when series four started on this side of the Atlantic on BBC4. The new agency is up and running; the pneumatic Joan is back; Roger's take on the let-it-all-hang-out 1960s is to be even more crude and openly sexist; and Peggy's career is on the up – she has an art director to boss around. Last series was all about the women; this one looks to be back to Don (John Hamm). It kicked off with a reporter from Advertising Ageasking "Who is Don Draper?" – a stressed-looking Don has been sent out to do some PR for the new agency, something he's clearly uncomfortable with. He doesn't answer, of course, but the Don who emerged in the next 45 minutes (no ad breaks: bliss) was harder, crueller and even more psychologically damaged than the mystery man we met in series one. How the writers reveal the real Don without making us all hate him by the end of this series will be interesting to watch.