Hello readers. I have been away for a while, reading books, smelling flowers and listening to the laughter of children and the wisdom of the elderly. It was awful.
I’m now back at The Irish Times, chained to my many screens and subsisting entirely on Haribo Supermix, undergraduate postmodernism, and begrudgery. I’ve never been happier, to be honest.
Here are a few television things I missed while away.
Noel Edmonds
Like King Arthur, Noel Edmonds returns to bring hope to the dispirited British people in times of trouble. “Whither Edmonds,” they cry, and he returns from Valhalla or Crinkley Bottom or, more accurately, New Zealand, where he now has a farm, like Jeremy Clarkson (feudalism is coming back), and wishes it to be filmed as Noel Edmonds’ Kiwi Adventure. Mr Blobby, his lover and consort, is not involved with this project.
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Resembling a small neat Yorkie dog who is riding the headless body of a compact man, Edmonds practically invented television back in the 1980s. Sadly, in the months I have been away the show has both launched and come to end. This was, Edmonds now tells his YouTube followers, the plan all along. Do not listen to the lies of ITV, which has implied it has been cancelled. He just wanted to bring joy to the people.
The slow, wheezy death of prestige drama
The word on the street is that the golden era of television that launched many years ago with The Sopranos is over and that the streamers now want nothing but episodic procedurals churned out cheaply by robots or child labourers.
That said, on Netflix I see something called Trainwreck: Poop Cruise, which surely means that there’s life in prestige telly yet. Okay, I’ve just learned that Trainwreck: Poop Cruise is actually a documentary about a cruise on which the ship’s toilets were broken and not an antiheroic Shakespearean exploration of the American city.
So, yes, I think prestige drama might finally be dead. I thought it was dead in 2023, but there was another series of Severance to go, so I think it was just sleeping.
Cancellations
While I’ve been away the Mr Man and food fabulist Gregg Wallace was fired from MasterChef after multiple allegations of inappropriate language or behaviour. He denied some of it and blamed the rest on autism rather than unfettered privilege and institutional enabling (which feel more likely).
He’s to be replaced by the excellent London-based Dublin chef Anna Haugh, so it has been a good result for the Irish.
Another Game of Squids
Squid Game returned with another very lucrative critique of capitalism in which regular folks play murderous children’s games for the entertainment of a nefarious elite.
It’s not as grounded in Korean realism as the first season, and it does seem to imply that the future is a hopeless, brutal slog with no other isms to choose from.
On the plus side, I think we haven’t been depicting the billionaire class cartoonishly enough, so I like how they’re depicted as the weird mask-wearing, champagne-quaffing psychopaths they are.
Tubridy returning €150,000 to RTÉ as promised
We open on a grubby prefab surrounded by rubbish and dying Marxists. Enter a Fred Astaire-style Ryan Tubridy, dressed in top hat and tails, and carrying a diamond-topped cane.
Tubridy [gesturing offstage]: You there, old man, what place is this?
[Enter Kevin Bakhurst, RTÉ director general, carrying a bindle and wearing fingerless gloves, baggy trousers with a patch on the arse, and shoes with the toes sticking out. He is speaking into a rusty tin connected to a string (RTÉ Player).
Bakhurst: Why, this is RTÉ, sir.
Tubridy: Can it be? What has befallen it?
Bakhurst: Oh, kind sir, there was once a golden child who lived here and caused the sun to shine. [He throws his hand to his head in anguish.] But he is gone from us and all is woe.
Tubridy [biting his fist in agony, for he is that golden child]: Oh, the humanity.
Bakhurst: I feel so cold.
Tubridy: Perhaps you can buy yourself some soup, to warm yourself, with this €150,000 of walking-around money I happen to have on me. I have no idea what soup costs.
Bakhurst [coughing consumptively]: Oh, thank you, fine sir. Perhaps we will survive to see the spring.
Tubridy: Now I must return to London, which is paradise. [He jetpacks off.]
(Folks who’ve promised to return money to state-supported institutions haven’t always done so, so kudos, in fairness.)
The news in hunks
As The Irish Times’ hunk correspondent and hunkologist, I was heartened to see that the field of hunk studies is still flourishing.
Several hunk-based programmes continue to exist on which these gentle and magnificent creatures are, once more, studied, tagged (on social media) and encouraged to breed in customised habitats.
There are loads of these shows: Perfect Match, Love Is Blind, The Ultimatum, Too Hot to Handle, Temptation Island, Hunks! Hunks! Hunks! (I made that one up) and, of course, the ur-text of the genre: Love Island.
Coming soon, we have Are You My First?, which involves a hotness (the collective noun) of virginal hunks exploring their sexy options upon a sultry desert island.
Anyway, call the phwoar brigade, because here come even more hunks!
True crime
Nowadays when you call emergency services you probably won’t even get through to the phwoar brigade. You’ll get a choice between an ambulance and a true-crime-documentary maker. Most go for the latter (if only to avoid A&E).
The speed at which people churn out true-crime documentaries is astounding. There were two documentaries and innumerable podcasts about Erin Patterson, the Australian “mushroom murderer”, even before her trial was over. (Full disclosure: I love mushrooms, so if you told me they were poisoned I’d probably still eat them if there was a nice sauce.)
Anyway, there isn’t a murder so tragic or a family trauma so grisly it can’t be repurposed as entertainment, and apparently we’re all fine with that.
South Park claiming Donald Trump has a tiny penis
That’s what passes for discourse these days. It’s basically our version of William F Buckley versus Gore Vidal. You see, we’re at the phase of fascist revival that requires desperate acts of blunt defiance.
Subtle, clever, politically informed satire of the sort peddled by Armando Iannucci or The Daily Show, that’s for another age. Tom Lehrer literally died to avoid having to deal with Donald Trump (as far as I can tell).
No, pals, subtlety is over. When you really want to annoy an oddly hued autocrat with candyfloss hair and chicken lips, do 20 minutes of jokes about how he has a micropenis and literally has sex with Satan.
That’s what Matt Stone and Trey Parker did, in defiance of their Paramount paymasters, and now right-wing crybabies don’t like South Park any more and the Trump administration has declared it to be “fourth rate”. It’s a good old-fashioned Socratic dialogue.
The last few days of free speech were always destined to be like this, I suppose.
[ South Park isn’t letting go of Donald Trump’s hambone any time soonOpens in new window ]
30 Rock is on RTÉ Player
This has nothing to do with the theme of this column, really, and is just a public-service announcement. Recently I spent ages looking for Tina Fey’s hilarious classic on Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+ only to discover, like Dorothy, that it was at home on the farm all along. So fire up the rusty cans and string and prepare for absurdist laughs.
