The Irish Navel Gazing Championships (Sunday, RTE 1/ Sky Sports 2)
The Book of Kerryman Jokes - The Movie (Sky Movies, Tuesday)
Why are the Irish so self-obsessed? Why do we love talking about ourselves so much? Anybody with an interest in these issues (seemingly everybody in the flippin' country) would have tuned into the 12th Irish Navel Gazing Championships on Sunday hoping for the annual bellyful of national introspection, self-absorption, indigenous psyche-analysing and identity-crisis hypothesising at which the nation excels.
The former Bishop of Galway Eamon Casey, once referred to these championships as "a kind of intellectual It's A Knockout, only with more obstacles". Bishop Casey, who came up against a few obstacles in his own life, most notably the obstacle of the Church's opposition to bishops having babies, certainly hit the nail on the head.
Due to a nagging hamstring injury, Fintan O'Toole (of this parish - St Dympna's, Fairview) was unfit to take part this year, leaving the way clear for Prof Declan Kiberd, Eoghan Harris, Senator David Norris and surprise qualifier Fungi-the-Dolphin to slog it out for the blue riband of analytical self-fascination.
As has been pointed out here before, Fungi-the-Dolphin is the most popular person in the country. However, his lack of articulation cost him points early on and he never really recovered. As the ever-witty humour expert Prof Des McHale said on the Sky Sports commentary, "he looks like a fish out of water". When Prof McHale was corrected by Andy Gray on the point that Fungi wasn't technically a fish, the prof got quite defensive and stressed that he had said that he only looked like a fish.
It was an ugly moment, and one could literally smell the tension in the studio. For Andy, it was a big change from the usual Monday night fare of Derby County versus Southampton. Certainly this viewer is fed up of people who call dolphins fish being corrected and told that they're actually mammals. Bor-ing!
Fungi, rather like a riderless horse at the Grand National, was an object of some fascination but, unlike said horse, was never seriously at the races, leaving the way clear for Declan Kiberd to eventually romp home as a splendid winner.
His triumphant speech, lasting almost three hours, thanked everybody from Plato to Daniel O'Donnell. Honourable mentions were also made of the Young Irelanders, Zig and Zag, Pat Taffe and Arkle, Brush Sheils and Gen Richard Mulcahy. I thought it was the most memorable thing I've seen on TV since the Dubliners special on the Late Late Show. There are plans to make it available both on DVD and a triple video-boxed set, so my advice is to book it in Xtravision now.
Some books are difficult to turn into films; some are darn well impossible. The Book of Kerryman Jokes fits into the latter category. Despite a magnificent screenplay by laughter expert Prof Des McHale (him again!), the film didn't quite "gel".
Even a mesmerising performance by Gabriel Byrne as the hapless Kerryman who is the butt of literally everybody's jokes couldn't lift it out of the mediocre bracket. If films were record companies instead of films (which they're not - they're record companies - but stay with me), then this offering was more Dolphin Discs than Tamla Motown.
However, the acting was first-rate. Because it was an Irish film, it was nice to see the line-up of local faces so familiar from many other home-grown movies, e.g. John Hurt, Sean Bean and Minnie Driver.
Why do we so often have to import British or US actors to play Irish roles (with obligatory dodgy accents), when native talent like this exists? After all, Peter O'Toole didn't have to go changing his accent to play Lawrence of Arabia.*
Flawed though it is, at least someone had a go at turning The Book of Kerryman Jokes into a film. On that point, they're to be more congratulated than scorned. (Although, of course, that does not mean that they cannot be scorned at least a little bit.)
* This point is not relevant to the opinion expressed in the previous sentence.
Arthur Mathews is co-writer of Father Ted