TV REVIEW: RawRTÉ 1, Sunday; Your Bad SelfRTÉ 2, Monday; Katherine Lynch's Single LadiesRTÉ 2, Tuesday; The PersuasionistsBBC 2, Wednesday; Stone Cold SoberRTÉ 2, Tuesday
IF YOU CAN’T stand the cold, get out of the kitchen. Aisling O’Sullivan swept into the new series of
Raw
last Sunday, playing Fiona Kelly, a businesswoman recently returned from London and determined to make the failed restaurant a success again. She’s the perfect TV businesswoman, a veritable Ice Queen of steely resolve. “I’d shake your hands,” she says when greeting her new staff, “but . . .” The disdain in her tail-off frosts the air. This is a woman for whom sang-froid may well translate literally. Her recipe for success includes “good, simple food”, with none of the “pretentious, expensive” rubbish that saw
Raw
get diced and sliced last time out. What can possibly go wrong?
Well, for starters, and possibly mains and afters too, she's recruited the restaurant's old head chef to hire all the staff that were on board when Rawwent into the blender. Neither is she disposed to change the restaurant's name. These are strange decisions for a hard-headed businesswoman, although maybe Fiona wasn't aware when signing the lease that she was taking on a TV programme too, with its name set in stone and its cast of loveable losers more or less intact.
To be fair, there was plenty to distract her: extortion, police raids, a pub brawl, multiple broken hearts and a recruitment process akin to The Magnificent Seven. And then there's the Big Questions. Will Jeff get to thaw the Ice Queen's heart? Will the cat's cradle of plot resolve itself into tasty linguini or stale pot noodle? The production values are strong, with O'Sullivan cutting a commanding figure in the lead role, and she gets strong support from the likes of Keith McErlean and Charlene McKenna. The clipped, minimalist style is neatly judged to mirror not only the new owner's personality, but also the economic deep-freeze she is operating in, a scenario that may give some real-life restaurateurs the impression they're watching reality TV.
For a contemporary drama, however, Raw is overly dependent on stock characters, and its big problem is the gaping plot-hole that sees the former staff returning. For now, Raw is open for business and fresh as spring lamb, although the suspicion is that mutton broth will dominate the menu.
YOUR BAD SELFis a sketch show determined to avoid stereotypes at all cost. Menstruation, hirsute women, euthanasia and bestiality might not be taboo subjects, but it's not every day they get an airing on Irish TV. With a strong cast of actors in place, headed by Michael McElhatton and Peter McDonald, the omens were good.
Unfortunately, the writers seem more intent on provocation than gags. McElhatton provides a good turn as a nervous Garda on the death-knock, while the sketch that ends up with aspiring actor Domhnall Gleeson riding a horse in a way neither God nor John Wayne intended is both subversive and funny. By the same token, McDonald’s turn as a cleavage-ogling TV presenter would have been turned down by Roy “Chubby” Brown on the basis that the joke was rather blurred by all the cobwebs draped across it, while the mother who has no concept of what is sexually appropriate for her young daughter is presumably intended as satire on Irish fashion mores, but comes across as simply crass.
Compare that with the clever piece in which a woman asked to shave "down there" by her partner hits the mark by skewering the ongoing infantilism of sexuality, and also provides a punchline that works as a double-whammy. Such moments were far and few between, however, with the emphasis very much on shocking the audience into an appreciation that modern Ireland is ripe for satire. If good comedy is the business of holding up a mirror to allow us laugh at ourselves, Your Bad Selfneeds to spend more time on polishing the mirror and less on exaggerating the troglodytes it sees there.
More to the point, if it’s satirising contemporary Ireland Your Bad Self is engaged in, where are the politicians, bankers and sundry other authority figures who’ve left the country so badly in need of a good laugh? Pushing the envelope is one thing. Pushing it around a dead letter office is another matter entirely.
TROGLODYTES AND stereotypes are the order of the day in Katherine Lynch's Single Ladies, which returns to provide another outing for "traveller celebrity" Bernie Walsh, the Leitrim loudmouth Liz Hurley, and their urban alter ego, Sheila Chic. That all three characters are variations on a theme is disappointing, the trio being brassy, vulgar, self-deluded harridans with more mileage on the clock than Bernie's Hiace van.
It's easy to sneer at the Single Ladies, Lynch and her co-writer and director Warren Meyler being of the opinion that saying something loud enough, often enough and crudely enough will eventually batter the audience into submission. Her characters, too, are one-dimensional, being grossly exaggerated variations of a generation that is completely self-absorbed and blinkered but nonetheless blinded by the glare of celebrity.
That said, there’s no faulting Lynch’s work ethic. Trading in the comedy of embarrassment, she pursues the great and good in the hope of mortifying them in a kind of guerrilla-style street comedy; failing that, she is ever willing to disgrace herself in the process. The “nudey calendar” proposed by Liz Hurley for her GAA team-mates was rather stale, but Lynch worried at the joke like a terrier, shaking loose a couple of gags at the expense of elderly women posing naked.
Similarly, when Sheila Chic decided that the footballer Ronaldo was worth “a lash”, she attempted to penetrate the security cordon thrown up around last summer’s friendly match between “the Mighty Real Madrid and Shamrock Whatever”. Hauled away screaming that she is carrying Ronaldo’s baby, Sheila returns again and again, her raucous perseverance enough to raise a wry smile.
Every bit as provocatively crude as Your Bad Self, Lynch offers one difference: if you don't like one joke, there'll be another along in five seconds' time. It's a pity she limits herself to skewering caricatures, though. For all that her characters contain a kernel of truth, her huff and puff is wasted on straw women. It would be nice to see her and Meyler turn their beady eye on more solid targets.
OVER TO THE BBC, then, to see how comedy is effortlessly executed. Or perhaps not. The Persuasionistsis set in an advertising firm, HHHH, and purports to trade in surreal comedy with a side-order in – oh yes! – skewering stereotypes. The first episode introduced a blustering manager, a put-upon copywriter, a neurotic blonde and a wacky Eastern European, the latter carrying a novelty giant pencil. The story revolved around writing a slogan for Cockney Jim's Cockney Cheese, with Cockney Jim's Cockney traits writ large. Heard the word "Cockney" once too often yet?
Tired, bland, formulaic and dull, The Persuasionistssomehow fails to see the irony in a cast of stock characters going about the business of lampooning stereotypes. New Irish TV comedy may well be floundering in similar territory, but at least the likes of Your Bad Selfand Katherine Lynch's Single Ladiescan get people foaming at the mouth on Liveline. You wouldn't ring 999 if you heard The Persuasionistshad caught fire.
Giving up the oul' gargle: Drinking buddies get a taste of sobriety - will it all end in beers?
In a week of stock characters, Stone Cold Soberprovided a classic case of "a stereotype that is an actual truth", as one of its protagonists mournfully observed: the Irish male and his love of the gargle. Set in Tullow, Co Carlow, this documentary series follows six friends in their mid-20s as they attempt to give up the demon drink.
On the face of it a one-note joke, the programme, given a light-hearted narration by Colin Murphy, quickly revealed hidden depths, few of which were to be found at the bottom of a bottle. With testimonies coming thick and fast as to the paucity of social life in Tullow, the six lads cheerfully reveal their alcoholic intake – 15 or 16 bottles of cider wasn’t strange on any given night, and they were at it Thursday to Sunday.
Displaying the expected numbskulled bravado when together in the pub, the lads were a different proposition when speaking privately to camera. Concerned for their health and wealth, and keenly aware they were being sucked into a vortex with most of their lives still to live, each was smart, sussed and hugely sympathetic. Officially on the dry since the end of the first episode, the gang are off to Ibiza next week to see how they fare sober. It’s potentially car-crash TV, but it’s timely and relevant too, and they’re good lads – authentically, spikily and loveably Irish. You only hope it works out.
