Watch your language - unless, of course, you're in a 1980s drama

TV REVIEW:'I'M GOING TO make up the cripple's bed," said the former Irish international rugby player Trevor Brennan early on in Two for the Road(RTÉ1, Thursday). Think about that sentence next time you hear someone harrumphing that the world's "gone PC mad". When the rugby hard man dropped it, such was its power that it made me sit up and wonder, Did I really hear that?

The idea for this new series, directed by Alan Gilsenan, is that six well-known people accompany six people with disabilities on various adventures. In the first programme Brennan was buddied up with Co Louth man Eamonn Victory, an amputee since his 20s. The pair set sail around the Canaries on

Lord Nelson

, an old sailing boat now used to enable people with disabilities – including, on this trip, a double-amputee soldier back from Afghanistan and a blind woman – to experience sailing.

Brennan seemed to believe he had signed on for a luxury cruise, but scrubbing the deck and peeling spuds soon disabused him of that notion. It didn’t stop him complaining, though. Victory met his challenges quietly and with determination, whether it was climbing the vertiginously tall mast (no joke when you’ve one leg and a fear of heights) or doing the many tasks required of the crew. You got the sense that’s how he lives his life. Speaking of his disability, he said, “It just happened. I just get on with it. What else I can do?”

At the end Brennan said, “I have massive respect for people with disabilities; not that I didn’t have respect before” – which presumably is the intended outcome of the series.

MORE LANGUAGE and attitudes from the dark ages – ie 1982 – were on display in the gritty, smart and multilayered two-part crime drama The Field of Blood(BBC1, Monday). Paddy Meehan (Jayd Johnson) is a work-experience girl – or, in the words of her boss, "just the fat tart that makes the coffee" – in a newspaper office in Glasgow. She's overweight, Catholic and a wannabe journalist: all fodder for a stream of bad jokes and casual cruelty from her colleagues, mostly fat, middle-aged men with manky-looking beards tapping away on typewriters through a fug of cigarette smoke – and that's between lunch and dinner breaks down the pub.

A young boy is “murdurrrrred” – the Glasgow accent makes it sound deadly – and Paddy sees her chance to solve the crime and get a leg on the sticky career ladder. The only other woman in the office, the glamorous Heather, has chosen a different tactic, with her Farrah Fawcett hair and miniskirt. “Legs so long you’d need a pilot’s licence to get her knickers down,” opines the office letch to no one in particular.

Being a BBC period drama (and, yes, I know that’s going to make those of us who remember the 1980s feel ancient), the details are all there. Every interior is filled with swirly designs in brown, beige and orange, Paddy wears a duffel coat and desert boots and her Walkman (Google it, youngsters) blasts out Talking Heads and Elvis Costello.

Peter Capaldi plays a senior journalist slouched at one of the desks looking half sober and fully cynical; though he didn’t have much to do in the first episode, his presence is enough to make any drama watchable. That and Bronagh Gallagher’s performance as Paddy’s thin-lipped, devoutly religious mother, aghast that her daughter wants something as alien and uppity as a career.

THE BIG, NOISY prestige drama of the week was David Hare's Page Eight(BBC2, Sunday). Not only was it the dramatist's first telly screenplay in 20 years (he also directed it), but the cast was equally starry. Billed as a spy thriller, it featured Michael Gambon as Benedict Barron, the head of MI5, and Bill Nighy as his colleague Johnny Worricker. Both are over-60, old-school gentlemen spies recruited at Cambridge, the sort of chaps who might turn up in a le Carré novel. Barron dies early on, leaving Worricker with a secret file that reveals, on page eight, that the dastardly Yanks have a network of sites where they use torture to get information. What's more, the prime minister (Ralph Fiennes with a number-two haircut that would never work in Number 10) knows all about it, and hasn't used the information when it would have saved people (the London bombing is mentioned). He is in fact bypassing creaky old MI5 and has his own secret service. If that doesn't sound enormously thrilling, it's because it wasn't.

And that was part of the problem with Page Eight. There wasn't any real suspense in this overlong drama; although there were spies in it, it wasn't a spy thriller. Hare's wordplay was clever and pithy, but it rarely became realistic dialogue. For a glossy TV drama, too many scenes seemed stagy. It all rested on Nighy, usually a magnetically watchable actor, but his measured, low tones (he spoke every sentence, whether it was about a terrorist plot or his daughter's art, at the same languid pace and in the same posh rumble) made him seem oddly boring after a while. A couple of side plots were stitched in, and as soon as you saw gorgeous young Rachel Weisz as Worricker's neighbour, you just knew with a queasy feeling in the pit of your stomach that, before the end credits, the two would end up snogging.

HARD TO BEAT the feelgood factor dished up in Jig: The Great Irish Dance-Off(BBC2, Thursday), a superb feature-length documentary about the 2010 World Irish Dancing Championships, held in Glasgow. It didn't, happily, concentrate on the nylon wigs, the dresses that cost the same as second-hand cars, and the hideousness of full make-up on children.

The film-maker Sue Bourne followed a dozen of the 6,000 competitors, and every viewer will have had their favourite. There were the dour women in their 20s from Moscow who were passionate Irish dancers; the teenage boy whose parents moved from the US to the UK so he could get proper coaching, his father giving up his medical practice to support his son’s dream (“If he was into tennis you’d move to Florida, right?”); and, most heart-meltingly, 10-year-old John from Birmingham, a little Billy Elliot who has no Irish connections but loves “the rhythm and music and shoes”, as he explained softly, clutching his teddy. His schoolmates call him gay. “I mean, Michael Flatley’s not gay,” said his mother, clearly mystified by the whole thing, adding that when she went to her first feis, she thought she’d walked into a Shirley Temple convention. John won in his category, and I defy anyone not to get a bit teary when he lifted the massive trophy.

tvreview@irishtimes.com

Get stuck into...

Dominic West (right) makes the huge character leap from smoothy newsreader in The Hourto suburban serial killer Fred  West in a two-part drama, Appropriate Adult(UTV, Sunday).