Doing it for themselves: Edna O'Brien and the brides of Franc

TV REVIEW:'LITERARY SCENES CAN be very over-rated," said Edna O'Brien in Life, Stories (RTÉ1, Tuesday), a beautifully made, carefully considered profile of her life. For this arts documentary – at last, an arts documentary on RTÉ! – directed by Charlie McCarthy, concentrated not on her work but on O'Brien, teasing out through a series of interviews her development as a writer and her enviably colourful life in London, where she lived as a literary outsider who still managed to know everybody.

Her work did feature – although the film didn’t even hint at how prolific she has been – and there were clips from the screen adaptations of her stories, but it was all about O’Brien. Its strength was that it got behind the well-known image she presents of a fey, flame-haired Irishwoman with a curiously thick brogue, the Maureen O’Hara of the literary world, to delve into her memories to explore the themes that absorb her: from family bonds to exile, from the creative impulse to love and loss. And she has been around so long that you forget how much of a literary celebrity she was. At the height of her fame she did the rounds of the chatshows; a clip of her flirtatious ways with Michael Parkinson was one of many vastly entertaining moments in the documentary.

There was a curious absence of dates, though, so it became frustratingly difficult to pinpoint just when she had those extraordinary-sounding parties at her London home, where everyone from Princess Margaret to RD Laing hung out, or when she made Marlon Brando sleep in the kitchen when he thought he’d come in for more than a nightcap. And there was much about her parents, the 1960s, the 1970s and maybe the 1980s; less so about subsequent decades. Maybe that’s the point McCarthy was making about O’Brien: the details don’t matter as much as the colour and poetry of the story. There was no voiceover, if there was music I didn’t notice it – two big pluses in my book – and there was no roll-call of literary types giving their verdicts.

McCarthy kept it intimate. The only other interviewees were O’Brien’s two sons. The biggest date wasn’t even alluded to: she will be 82 this year, which is impossible to believe when looking at her or her busy life as a working writer. But as McCarthy’s warm film showed with every archive clip and reminiscence, she has been fabulous for a long time.

EVEN WEDDING PROGRAMMESprovide boom-and-bust analogies. Back when Peter Kelly – or Franc, as he probably wishes he had never called himself – first appeared on the telly, prompting mutterings of "It's far from wedding planners we were reared", it was Harry Potter-themed nuptials, ice sculptures, gold-rimmed crystal and every blingy extra you'd be hard pressed to think up. But, as we saw in his new series, Franc's DIY Brides (RTÉ1, Sunday), now it's table settings made from bits of wallpaper and doilies, icing your own cake and stuffing flowers in mismatched tea cups bought at car-boot sales.

Even Franc isn’t as exuberant as he once was. The first episode featured Emma Daniel and Michael Foley, two enthusiastic, loved-up teachers from Co Meath with a budget of €15,000. (Not exactly sackcloth and ashes, then.) They wanted a vintage-themed wedding. It wasn’t really DIY – once you book a hotel you’re more than halfway to a traditional Irish wedding – but there were cute decorative touches, dreamed up by Emma but made sense of by Franc and ready to be copied by other brides, which is the point of these programmes.

In Franc’s DIY Brides, Emma bought her two bridesmaid’s dresses online, for a staggering €250 each, and they were so shoddily made that she spent a fortune trying to have them put right.

THE DRESSEScame from China – no surprise there – whose vast sewing factories are the world that Tony Caldeira, a Liverpool businessman, fully understands. He makes cushions, with a factory in Kirkby, one of Britain's unemployment black spots, and a factory in eastern China – "It's like Lancashire was in the industrial revolution: the home of textiles" – that he bought eight years ago when manufacturing in China was dirt cheap. Then he paid his workers the equivalent of 20 pence an hour; now wage inflation means he has to pay £1 an hour, and as there are more jobs than workers in China he's finding recruitment difficult. The final straw was when one of his workers demanded a 50 per cent pay rise in order not to walk. It wouldn't happen in Kirkby.

His grand experiment, shown over two weeks in The Town Taking on China, (BBC2, Tuesday) was to see if it’s possible to bring the work back to Britain, through boosting output at home by training a new batch of machinists to be as efficient as the Chinese.

Life in the factory in Coronation Street, where a pair of knickers hasn’t been made in decades and where the staff sit about, drinking tea and gossiping, are the stuff of dreams for workers in Kirkby. Caldeira’s machinists must each sew 1,000 cushion covers a week on the minimum wage of about £6 an hour. Mind you, at least they don’t sleep at the factory, like their Chinese counterparts, who migrate thousands of kilometres for their jobs.

It’s demanding, exhausting work, and staffing at the British factory is the affable Caldeira’s biggest problem. The old-timers complain about the wages but get on with it – not so his new recruits, who were less willing to knuckle down. Of the 17 he employed from the job centre, four had left after four weeks because they couldn’t be bothered or found easier work elsewhere, and absenteeism was starting to kick in among some of the others. It was a fascinating insight into small business and how global economics trickles down and has an impact on the ground.

"WITH PLENTY OFfood and no sign of mange, this family seems to be living the good life." No, not a quote from a new Channel 4 cookery-lifestyle-mortifying- illness hybrid – though it's probably only a matter of time – but one from the best nature programme on TV this week. And it's not the ambitious Planet Earth Live (BBC1, Sunday), ruined by its presenter Richard Hammond doing his cheeky-chappie thing, but a nightly series that got up close to the new inhabitants colonising cities and suburbs: Foxes Live: Wild in the City (Channel 4, Saturday-Wednesday).

Get stuck into . . .The latest instalment of the groundbreaking Up series, which has been charting the lives of Tony and 13 others since they were seven. They're now 56. (56 Up, UTV, Monday).