A week of guns and roses

TV Review: Thirty lovely girls in 30 lovely frocks, 60 tinselled eyelids sporting alarmingly fecund lashes, barefoot jigs, Arabic pop songs, Maori dancing with luminous balls, and truly lousy poetry - good God, what does it take to keep that pale moon from rising?

Ray D'Arcy hosted the attenuated event: sweet, funny and self-effacing, he is just the kind of good-natured, comforting bloke you bawl all over when your boyfriend has left you or a festival apparatchik has refused you permission to do your party piece (only 14 of the 30 lovelies, all swaddled in great big silver torcs from the sponsor, were allowed to perform on stage this year).

Forgive my hysteria, but even purgatory, that chilly old weeping'n'wailing waiting room, can't be a patch on the enduring agony of six long hours of The Rose of Tralee.

D'Arcy's is a well-crafted persona, but one that seemed to come a little unstuck on night two of the gala after news reports of his run-in with "a highprofile American representative" (who, for all we know, could have been Ronald McDonald) when his interview with bubbly and toothsome Texan Rose Erin Barnard ruffled the US arboretum.

Barnard was an able contestant, a broadcast journalist working on her "resumé reel" in Huntsville, Texas. Huntsville, learned the teary-eyed Festival Dome (full of proud grannies and nervy boyfriends), is the execution capital of the US, where condemned prisoners are brought 24 hours prior to their deaths.

Barnard, dazzling smile faltering, explained that she had never used her press card to gain access to an execution (although apparently it is an option) and, when D'Arcy asked if she was in favour of the death penalty, took a moment before replying no. Phew.

D'Arcy's question was deemed, according to some reports, to be too political. Too political for whom exactly? I wanted to know her answer.

I'm sure Royston Brady (yes, that Royston Brady) and the rest of the judging panel (including an increasingly glumlooking Sharon Ní Bheolain) wanted to know. I'm sure many of the great viewing public wanted to know. Personally, it would have stuck in my craw like a hastily swallowed tiara if this idealised version of womanhood, brimming to the full with youthful optimism while gadding about the world in a haze of silky altruism, had declared her support for lethal injections in a room full of press-card-wielding voyeurs.

Eventually (and I really mean eventually), the Queensland Rose, Kathryn Feeney, became the 48th Rose of Tralee - a late favourite for the crown, she looked exactly like the reigning Rose, Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin. Feeney has ambitions to redesign the clothes peg (seriously) and owns a one-legged canary and a guinea pig with a brain tumour. She had been to Ireland before, she informed D'Arcy happily, for a quick "duckabout" (that would presumably be a two-legged duckabout).

I liked the Armagh Rose, Bláthnaid Carlin. From the depths of her voluminous, plum-coloured gown she told us that, such was her excitement when she spotted the Armagh football captain in the congregation of her local church as she was midway through the stations of the cross, "Jesus nearly didn't get crucified in Lurgan".

Compassion was at the heart of War Stories, a new strand from the RTÉ archive unit, which focuses on the untold stories of Irish people who served in the second World War. The War on Land, the first of seven programmes, saw war veterans (including Sir Jack Leslie, Brother Columbanus and Canon Robert Marsden) face the camera in a series of uncomplicated yet emotional and moving interviews.

Their (and other) eyewitness accounts of capture at Dunkirk, of brutality in PoW camps, and of the desolation and horror revealed on the liberation of the concentration camps, made absorbing television.

Startlingly evident in all those interviewed was their sense of the immediacy of the events they described. Their recall was disarmingly vivid, despite the fact that many who had left Ireland to fight were only in their early teens when they did so, some to avoid hunger and unemployment, others out of conviction, still others out of a sense of adventure. Brother Columbanus spoke of burying comrades in communal graves with their dog-tags in their mouths to aid eventual recognition.

Tommy Meehan recalled the shock of survival: "I was one of eight men to walk away from the glider. It had held 32 - I was one of the lucky ones." "Death can and does happen very quickly," said veteran Sam Notkin, visibly upset.

"Seeing that as a teenager is very shocking. The turmoil diminishes, but it never goes away."

Sympathetically narrated by RAF veteran Cathal O'Shannon, who served in Burma, this was a quietly powerful programme.

There was nothing gung-ho in the dignified accounts of these men and, given the increasingly bellicose nature of our times, their testimonies demanded to be heard.

DAWN FRENCH WALKS a dangerously thin line between being a courageous, sassy comedienne and a smugly confident, finger-licking celeb beloved of

Yuletide advertisers and doyens of the Home Counties. Dawn French's Girls Who Do: Comedy saw her pow-wowing with a flock of fellow comics from both sides of the Atlantic on the relationship between comedy and beauty or, to be less coy, the question of whether you can you still pull if you're funny.

No. Apparently not. Blokes don't like funny women, the combined comedienne- ship asserted. Those performers who had married one of said blokes, however, all claimed to have discovered the exception, their spouses being sensitive, intelligent and downright hysterical (barring the lugubrious Jo Brand, that is, who told French that she had married a man-hating feminist).

It was all tooth-wateringly tame and cosy, despite faux-hysteria over the word "menstruate" and Lisa Tarbuck getting wet-eyed and confessional about her early marriage (questioning the meaning of life over the washing-up - as you do).

Most interesting were the contributions of two veteran American funny women, Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers, who had both achieved the looks they coveted via chequebook and scalpel without losing their sense of humour.

"Bob Hope liked all my faces," said Diller, grinning happily through her mask, while Rivers, who has an appointment with the knife every two years, lamented to French, through preposterously taut lips: "I'm still waiting to be asked to dance." I'm sure they would ask, Joan, it's just that they're terrified they'll cut themselves on your cheekbones.

AS THE SO-CALLED war on terror continues to dominate our news media, and in a climate of renewed suspicion and paranoia, the 10-part American series Sleeper Cell has arrived on this side of the pond courtesy of Channel 4.

Similar in style to 24, Sleeper Cell focuses on the efforts of undercover FBI agent and black American Muslim Darwyn Al-Sayeed (Michael Ealy) to infiltrate and incapacitate an LA-based Muslim terrorist cell that is bent on destroying the American Dream.

The cell in question, led by Faris Al- Farik (Oded Fehr), is home to a hotchpotch of malcontents and grudge-bearers, all of them ex-army: the white, Berkeley-

educated, blue-eyed blonde who has issues with his mother; the French former skinhead with a Moroccan wife; and the Bosnian who witnessed the slaughter of his family by Serbs.

Sleeper Cell didn't take the US by storm. Maybe it was too close to the bone, maybe it was just so very like other countdown-to-catastrophe TV dramas that it failed to stand out, or maybe the over-simplification of complex politics - such as Al-Farik's line, "I have a team of holy warriors ready to strike without mercy" - is no longer sufficient for American viewers.

didn't take the US by storm. Maybe it was too close to the bone, maybe it was just so very like other countdown-to-catastrophe TV dramas that it failed to stand out, or maybe the over-simplification of complex politics - such as Al-Farik's line, "I have a team of holy warriors ready to strike without mercy" - is no longer sufficient for American viewers.

Its production values are high, however, and there is an attempt to humanise those whom some Americans see as the enemy within. But one was left with a slight sense of manipulated unease after the first episode, which depicted brutal fundamentalist punishments and all-American toddlers innocently playing beneath vials of anthrax.

Worth a look to see how it develops.