On the Summer Show (Sunday, RTÉ1) Nuala Carey and Derek Mooney speak to us with the jaunty, calming tones of paediatric nurses. It’s been a tough, rain-filled and Dáil committee-filled summer. At RTÉ they know our nerves are shot and that this is about all we can handle – footage of lovely Irish scenery facilitated by smiling television caregivers. It’s a comforting, well-produced hour-long screensaver for the mind and I mean this in the best possible way.
In a way it’s at the very core of public service broadcasting, the kind of no-nonsense seasonal stalwart that RTÉ emits regularly with little fuss. It’s summer. It’s a show. So that’s the name. Dispatch a camera crew and whoever they can subdue with tranquilliser darts in the canteen to a pleasant part of the country. Write it into the schedule. In fact, I’m not entirely convinced shows like the Summer Show are actively commissioned so much as they are autonomic phenomena like breathing, blood circulation or voting Fianna Fáil. I imagine that like migratory birds, Carey, Mooney and their camera crew just suddenly feel an irresistible seasonal urge to travel west and document what they see.
It’s possible this is a new way RTÉ have hit on to raise money, getting their presenters to double job as farm labourers
They are fazed by nothing. There are clouds behind them as they broadcast from Galway, but Nuala is in a bright pink Barbie-esque blazer and Derek wears a pink T-shirt beneath his bomber jacket. If there’s a difference between them, it’s that Derek sometimes looks at Nuala when she’s talking with a strangely detached look on his face. Possibly on the day of shooting she was represented by a tennis ball on a stick and was only added afterwards in post-production (or vice versa). But they are both very warm and smiley. Nuala has the sort of smile that goes not just to her eyes but the roots of her hair and to her toes. She makes the smiling emoji look like a scowling dullard.
Here are some things that do not happen on the Summer Show: At no point does Derek fall to his knees and scream: “What are we doing starting a ‘summer’ show on the eve of August, which is technically autumn? This is cultural imperialism! I demand another Dáil committee hearing!” If he did do that, they didn’t include it in the footage.
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And not once, in a segment on her childhood holidays in North Clare, does jockey Nina Carberry say “Now, between you and me, the Burren is bit of a hole. I mean, it’s just rocks, isn’t it?”
And when Derek wanders a field with a local historian who waxes nostalgic about a big concert Pope John Paul II once headlined, no one mentions the big repressive theocracy Pope John Paul II also once headlined.
That’s because such things would be a downer and moral dissonance is not why we’re here. We’re here to watch diverting colourful antics involving nice bubbly people because life is hard and we’ve suffered enough. So here’s wildlife photographer Theo Jebb accompanying a shark scientist on a boat trip to scrape mucus from the backs of basking sharks in order to document the state of basking sharks. And here’s Nuala in a fascinator wandering the Galway races with fashion scientist Bairbre Power to document the state of women who wear unfeasibly large hats (it feels similar to the basking shark section somehow, but there’s no slime-scraping stick).
There are occasional high jinks. While documenting the costumery of the horse-folk, it is suggested to Nuala that a good way to prepare for wearing high heels all day is to soak one’s feet in ice water. Nuala, a television maverick who hasn’t yet absorbed Barbie (not Bairbre)’s critique of patriarchy, decides to do just that. “Oh, Bairbre that’s very cold,” says Nuala, injecting a rare note of controversy to proceedings that belies the network’s supposed obsession with balance.
“I can’t feel my feet, Bairbre,” she adds with a little more panic in her voice. They cut away.
I’m in the foetal position screaming an explanation of how rollercoasters work to Lochan when my wife comes in and turns the Summer Show back on for me
There’s also some stuff that speaks to possible cost cutting in RTÉ. Chef Paul Flynn is sent to a goat farm, where he is forced to labour for a day, milking goats, trimming goat hooves and making his employers some goats’ cheese-themed dinner. Look, it’s possible this is a new way RTÉ have hit on to raise money, getting their presenters to double job as farm labourers.
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And excellent soothingly-voiced wildlife cinematographer Colin Stafford Johnson is sent out to Omey Island with nothing but a 360-degree camera on a stick (seriously). That’s clearly a money-saving swizz. Omey, he tells us, is an island that is accessible only at low tide, was once the site of a great depopulating tragedy (the Famine), features a 12th-century church that was found buried under the ground and is known as the “last outpost for paganism in Ireland”.
Oh no! “Get off that island right now Colin!” I cry. “I’ve seen this film.”
Colin doesn’t hear me. Instead, he talks compellingly about the history and natural history of the place. Eventually, he says: “I’ve a feeling the tide is coming in and I’ll be wading home if I’m not careful.”
We cut to Nuala who is, in this episode, literally and metaphorically at the races. “I do hope Colin got home before the tide came in,” she says, in a manner that makes me feel absolutely sure Colin is still out there wandering the island alone. The whereabouts of Colin Stafford Johnson are, at the point of writing, still unresolved.
There is another island on which camera crews are frequently abandoned to their fates and that is of course Britain’s Love Island (Monday, Virgin Media Two), which is, in actuality, a Majorcan lust peninsula to which we have been glued now for many years. The Island is currently overseen by terrifying slow-motion telly-person Maya Jama and it really does feel like it’s on its very last, albeit hunky, legs. Most of Monday’s finale involves tedious flashbacks to moments before and the hunks dressed in skin-chaffing evening wear reading declarations of love to one another and reminiscing fondly about ancient June 2023, when they were still young and footloose with their futures ahead of them.
I can keep it together through most of it but I finally go over the edge when a male hunk named Lochan says to Whitney, his true love, the light of his life: “The fact our rollercoaster journey has only gone one way the whole time, upwards, confirms for me that this can work on the outside.” I’m in the foetal position screaming an explanation of how rollercoasters work to Lochan when my wife comes in and turns the Summer Show back on for me. I really wish it would stop raining.
