Boy in the pop bubble

TV REVIEW: Worried About the BoyBBC2, Sunday; Rising After RedundancyRTÉ1, Sunday; In Memory of Joey DunlopBBC1, Saturday; Wormwood ScrubsUTV, Monday; Junior ApprenticeBBC1, Wednesday

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO explain just how famous Boy George was in the 1980s, though

Worried About the Boy

went a long way to capturing the hysteria.

With more make-up than a Max Factor counter and a raft of catchy disco tunes, George O'Dowd was a rare thing: a one-off at the apex of pop culture who prompted fathers everywhere to glance up over their newspapers while Top of the Popswas on and wonder, Is that a woman or a man? And turn off that bloody nonsense.

As things were pretty grey here at the time and a bit of colour might have helped, we could have come over all Jack Charlton and claimed him under the grandfather rule – or more accurately the mammy and daddy rule – but I don’t remember us really embracing him as our own. Too shocking, too controversial and too much of a puzzle, with his widely quoted quip that he’d rather have a nice cup of tea than sex. In this feature-length drama covering the four years from his first sniff of fame, in 1982, to his heroin-induced meltdown, the astonishingly good Douglas Booth played George as a likeable but vulnerable and easily hurt young man. He wanted to be famous – for anything – and his outrageous look was part of that dream.

It all looked authentic under Julian Jarrold's atmospheric direction, but too many characters (and there weretoo many) were underwritten, particularly key ones such as Jon Moss, the Culture Club drummer, who was George's lover. The best scenes weren't the anarchic ones in Blitz, the hypercool club of the day, they were the quiet and even tender exchanges between him and his dad, Jerry (Francis Magee), an understandably bewildered Irishman who could see past the layers of kohl and into the eyes of his boy. When George had everything, including a heroin addiction, he woke up in his plush flat to see his father burning his clothes. "They're freaks: they all like to gawk at the junkie who's taken over my son's body," said Jerry. "I received my Grammy in this," pouted George. "Ahh, get a hold of yourself, it's only a dress," replied his dad.

WHILE THE BBC is tapping into 1980s nostalgia through a haze of blue mascara and Poison perfume, we're actually back in the eighties. Rising After Redundancyis a new series that aims to help six people who have been made redundant. John Fitzgerald is an executive job coach, a newfangled invention that didn't exist back when there was no need to pay someone to tell you that the only way was out – hopefully, with a Donnelly visa in your back pocket.

This series gives an idea of what a job coach does – or at least what John Fitzgerald does; the opening programme introduced the six unemployed people (three who worked in marketing and communications and no construction workers – a peculiar balance). Fitzgerald, who was a salesman before he changed career, told them he’d be helping them “to make the right decision going forward”. No flies on Fitzgerald: he delivered all this while standing in front of a giant poster for his own new-agey-titled company.

The first session was held over two torturous days (torture to watch at least). It involved a great deal of soul searching and personal revelations, leaving this viewer with a queasy feeling of being a voyeur in a private therapy session. “It’s all too touchy-feely for me,” said Noel, a man with more urgent things on his mind than sharing his feelings. As a self-employed man whose business had failed, his outgoings were now seven times his income. “With respect . . .” began the coach. “God, I hate any sentence that begins with that,” replied Noel.

The 40-minute programme felt long, with Tina Kellegher’s monotoned voiceover repeating key details several times, as if we were too dense to remember them from minute to minute. The whole thing seemed more suited to self-help-friendly daytime TV and definitely not prime-time Sunday.

MOTORBIKE ROAD RACER Joey Dunlop's funeral, in 2000, was the biggest Northern Ireland had ever seen, and that's some claim. The documentary marking 10 years since his death, in a race in Estonia, should have been fascinating, but In Memory of Joey Dunlophad all the atmosphere and style of a corporate video circa 1988. Dunlop was the most successful road racer ever, clocking up five world championships, but his public profile was kept in check during his life, probably by his reticence to give interviews. And what propels someone to race at 290km/h on an ordinary road, where potholes are the least of the hazards? Delving into that psychology would have broadened out the story.

The programme makers travelled to Japan, bringing Joey’s widow, Linda, to visit an engineer at Honda with whom he worked for 20 years. This trip provided the one standout moment in the otherwise dour and joyless programme. In a stunning modern atrium with greats beasts of bikes on show, a Japanese woman wearing white cotton gloves carefully opened a cardboard box and, as if she were handling a Ming vase, took out one of Dunlop’s old helmets. Linda quipped about having any amount of these at home, and “you’d want to see the way we handle them”.

The material was there, all his friends were interviewed and the sport provided excitement and hours of potential footage, but the BBC Northern Ireland programme makers once again made something you couldn’t imagine cutting it on the main BBC channel. A missed opportunity to make a good bit of telly.

THE RETIREMENT OF two of our prison governors, John Lonergan and Kathleen McMahon, turned the spotlight on Mountjoy – though it’s hard for most of us to get a handle on what really goes on inside. That’s why the UK prison service’s decision to let cameras into London’s Wormwood Scrubs, one of the largest jails in Europe, was so brave and so insightful. The vast Victorian jail was built in the same bleak style as Mountjoy, though its 1,280 prisoners at least have the dignity of toilets in their cells.

It was the noise you noticed first in this utterly compelling documentary; there was never a moment’s silence, what with keys rattling, footsteps on metal walkways and prisoners shouting and moving around. That and the sickly light from the 24/7 fluorescent tubes that gave the prisoners and their wardens the same putty-faced pallor. Some prisoners considered the Scrubs to be home – or the only stable one they’d ever had.

Neil McCarthy was doing a four and a half year stretch for burglary. The longest he’d been out of prison in the previous 20 years was 11 months. Filmed over several months, the two-part documentary showed in the clearest, most unambiguous way that prisons are all about containment – trying to keep drugs out, managing the ever-present threat of violence and dealing with the vicissitudes of the mental health of the inmates, particularly around Christmas, when no number of services in the Scrub’s splendid church brought any sense of cheer.

And it all started over again as the prison’s revolving door cranked into action.

Sugaring the pill: Nice guy Alan handles the tough teen execs with kid gloves

What’s happened to Suralan? Not only is he being referred to by a different version of his name – he’s Lord Sugar to the fantastically mouthy teenage contestants on Junior Apprentice – but he’s also, well, nice. No more growling and finger pointing, and when it comes to the bit at the end when he spits out “you’re fired”, he says it gently, like a kindly grandad. In the first programme, where 16-year-old Dubliner Jordan de Courcey got the heave-ho, Lord Sugar did a bit of counselling.

“I’m going to have to say it’s a difficult thing to be the first person to go. Twenty-eight thousand young people applied for this. Whilst they were sitting on their armchairs scoffing crisps and drinking cola, you made it here. And don’t ever forget that.” It’d bring a tear to your eye. Not that Jordan was in any way teary; these young entrepreneurs are made of stern stuff, not a bit like the blubbering adult contestants.

This week bookish Hibah Ansary got the gentle push. When she left the room he remarked to his sidekicks – the not-Margaret-but-she’ll-do Karren Brady and the irreplaceable Nick Hewer – that he hoped the young teen wouldn’t think it was because of her academic bent. She wasn’t bothered.

If he doesn’t shake off this new caring mode by the time the next series of the grown-up Apprentice comes around, it’ll be a dull do.

tvreview@irishtimes.com