Fresh ideas going stale

TV REVIEW:
Fresh from the SeaRTÉ1, Monday Rising after RedundancyRTÉ1, Sunday The IT CrowdChannel 4, Friday Saturday Night with MiriamRTÉ1, Saturday Lennon NakedBBC4, Wednesday

THERE WAS ONLY about five minutes to go in the first episode of a new series of

Fresh from the Sea

, and a giant turbot had just been slapped on to a pan, when a lengthy promo for Nationwide cut in – and that was that. Not having the first clue how these things work, I like to think it was some bloke out in Montrose who was so catatonically bored by the show he dozed off Homer Simpson-style, his head hitting a giant “Do not touch” button on the desk. No harm done. On the evidence of the first programme this was a travelogue-cum-food-programme idea that worked brilliantly last year – it really did seem fresh – but now there’s a sense it’s been done and they’re scrabbling around to fill a half hour. And if that’s what the first episode felt like, it doesn’t augur well for the rest of the series.

The opening minutes saw presenter Clodagh McKenna setting off in a small plane for Inis Mór. Plenty of shots of the hangar, the aircraft taking off, then landing, yawn, even an off-screen interview with the pilot for heaven's sake. The pointless padding went on from there. Last year there was nothing in terms of homegrown fish programmes to compare this with, but now we've had the excellent cookery series Martin's Mad about Fish, also on RTÉ1. In that programme the Kinsale restaurateur Martin Shanahan did much the same thing as McKenna is doing, except he cooked really simple dishes that most people could master and he had an easy rapport with everyone he talked to, from kids testing his fish fingers to the hard-working trawler men. And his enthusiasm felt genuine.

Despite the natural surroundings – the west of Ireland looked spectacular – Fresh from the Seafelt as stagey as a corporate video, with awkward cookery demonstrations and stilted interviews with fishy folk. I'd like to imagine that the scene that tipped the mythical guy in Montrose over the edge and prompted the promo button mistake was when McKenna said to one of her interviewees: "Describe the process of farming turbot."

Reaching the end of its run this week was Rising from Redundancy, and let's hope another series is not in the pipeline. Over a six-month period six unemployed people put themselves under "executive career coach" John Fitzgerald in the hope that he would show them a way out of unemployment. It was like being trapped in the self-help aisle of a bookshop and about as deep and meaningful.

That’s how it started all those weeks ago, and that’s how it ended. Obviously there can’t have been a viewer who didn’t root for the six hopefuls, wishing that it would all come right in the end and that, in Fitzgeraldspeak, they could “maintain the momentum to create an income stream”. (The series was full of that sort of jargon.) By this week’s final episode one of the six had gone. No mention of where and why. And of the five that remained two had fledgling ideas for businesses, one was working for less than the dole, though gaining experience, one was in college and one was seeking work. They seemed to varying degrees happy with their progress and the insights they gained on the “journey”, which is the main thing for them, but it’s difficult to see this as an insightful and entertaining prime-time programme rather than an uncomfortable eavesdrop on a series of private therapy sessions with people who were clearly feeling vulnerable.

Fitzgerald’s “coaching”, with his progressively more annoying “what’s your passion?” mantra, is fine as far as it goes, but the language of self-help really needs to be supported by practical help, particularly for those trying to set up businesses, and there was little sign of that here.

By about programme three, one of the participants had an ambitious idea for an adventure centre, but by the final programme the doom-laden voiceover informed us – and it really was repetitive and funereal – that he had hit a major problem. The adventure centre would need planning permission. Had the right professional been drafted in for advice he would have known that in programme three instead of continuing with the follow-your-dreams malarkey. It was symptomatic of what was wrong with this series.

A worthwhile recommission was The IT Crowd. It's hilarious. Graham Linehan's sitcom about life in the IT department of a faceless corporation is back for a fourth series and it has lost none of the clever humour that won it the Best Sitcom award at last year's Baftas.

It's business as usual down in the eccentrically decorated basement of Reyholm Industries. Moss (Richard Ayoade) is planning a role-playing game of Dungeons and Dragons (does it get geekier?); Roy (Chris O'Dowd) is recovering from a broken romance – a romance being so deeply unlikely in geekworld that it's fertile ground for jokes – and Jen (Katherine Parkinson) is trying out for a new position as entertainment officer in the company, although it soon emerges that it involves bringing her obnoxious boss's sleazy associates out on the town in London. Three endearingly odd but curiously recognisable characters in a remote location surrounded by over-the-top stereotypes and in situations that are just a couple of degrees west of recognisable reality: it worked for Linehan and his co-writer Arthur Mathews in Father Ted, and it's still working for him here.

And, finally, Miriam O'Callaghan is back for a sixth – can it really be that long? – series of Saturday Night with Miriam. She's an empathetic, engaged interviewer, she looks fabulous and the set works, but the show has got the same problem we've seen over and over on Ryan Tubridy, Brendan O'Connor and Craig Doyle's chat shows: the guest list is culled from the same very small and by now seriously dog-eared address book.

This week’s first show of the season was one to dip in and out off. Dip in to see who was on – the Benhaffafs, parents of the previously conjoined twins; the journalist Paul Williams and the Limerick crime victim Steve Collins; and comedian Brendan O’Carroll – and dip out again when you realised you’ve heard their stories so many times you could recite them as a party piece. Indeed, Williams and Collins were guests on Miriam’s show last summer.

The final guests were new, though: three glamorous young women who appear to be chat-show material because they are the wife or girlfriend of high-profile GAA players. The Irish version of the blingtastic footie Wags, our very own Gaags. There was much talk about how rubbish their partners are at housework and how nice their mammies are.

“At the risk of defining you by the men you married . . .” said O’Callaghan in the introduction – a bit disingenuous given that’s the only reason they were plonked on her matching sofas.

The women said their bit, and were funny and even a little controversial – Seán Óg Ó hAilpín’s partner was outspoken on player payment – but that’s it. With luck they haven’t been added to that dog-eared address book. Enough said.

Wigging out Christopher Eccleston gets under John Lennon’s hair

Earlier this month Julie Walters won a Bafta for her portrayal of Mo Mowlam in the powerful Channel 4 drama Mo. She didn't actually look like the late politician, really – though her make-up was excellent – but somehow (well, duh, acting!) she became her.

Christopher Eccleston had perhaps a bigger challenge playing John Lennon in Lennon Naked, the BBC's ambitious feature-length biopic of the Beatle covering his personal life between 1967, when his manager and father figure Brian Epstein died, and 1971, when he and Yoko Ono left Britain for New York.

This wasn’t the lovable, artistic hippy, quipping at press conferences and making peace protests. The Lennon portrayed here was a cruel narcissist who, together with Yoko Ono, isolated himself with brutal disregard from friends, family (including his son Julian) and his former band mates.

The most pivotal relationship in his life, according to this drama, wasn’t with his aunt Mimi (as shown last year in Nowhere Boy – dramatists love picking apart the Lennon psyche, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear). It was with his father, who abandoned him when he was six and only came back into his life when The Beatles were at the height of their fame. Black-and-white footage established a sense of the time, particularly The Beatles’ huge fame, and gave glimpses of the real John Lennon – a further challenge for Eccleston trying to pull off a credible impersonation.

Ultimately, though, for all the superior production values and the quality soundtrack, the problem with Lennon Nakedwas that Eccleston looked too distractingly like Dr Who in a succession of astonishingly bad wigs, from the mop top of the early 1960s to the long-haired Lennon of the early 1970s. More seriously, he's 20 years too old to play the part – and no wig could change that.