TV REVIEW: Brian Keenan: Back to BeirutBBC2, Monday; Celebrity BainisteoirRTÉ1, Sunday; Poppy ShakespeareChannel 4, Monday; Trish's Paris KitchenRTÉ1, Wednesday
'PEOPLE OF Lebanon, if you sleep in a graveyard you are bound to have nightmares." So read propaganda leaflets dropped from the sky by Israeli aircraft over the pockmarked country of Lebanon. Four-square among the rubble of an ancient cemetery, where blasted coffins gaped open-mouthed at the unfamiliar sun, Brian Keenan picked the tattered notice from the rubble and read the sinister message aloud. Brian Keenan: Back to Beirut, an emotional and demanding documentary, charted the writer's return journey to that city more than 20 years after he first went there from Belfast to take up a position as a teacher in the American University.
"I am emotionally and intellectually breathless," said Keenan, having visited Palestinian refugee camps where generations of families live in a limbo of teeming, darkened alleyways - and that state of heightened anxiety permeated the programme.
Keenan is not an easy host: the enormity of the suffering and the intricacy of the politics of the Middle East, refracted through his experience in the four years he spent captive in Beirut (enduring beatings and deprivations which he said often left him longing for death), seem to have permeated his skin. But it was that intensity, that lack of panache, that refusal of cynicism and that deep anger towards indifference that made the programme so compelling.
"Seductive, dangerous, cosmopolitan and beautiful" was how journalist Robert Fisk (who has lived in the same Beirut apartment for 30 years) described his adopted home. In that spirit, Keenan's journey through a "city which devours and renews itself", where chewed and wounded buildings glance wryly at their sparkling, newly constructed chrome-and-glass neighbours, did not feel like a journey of reconciliation, but more of an intoxicating reunion with old friends.
"Where are you in terms of forgiveness?" asked a confident and beautiful young Lebanese woman, who works to rejuvenate the scarred city. It is "an incident in my personal history - our future cannot be built with corpses", Keenan replied.
Central to the trip was the writer's wish to bring his wife and two young sons to Lebanon to demonstrate to his children that "evil does not endure". It was poignant, having previously seen Keenan undone by a photographic memorial to Palestinian families killed in an Israeli bombing mission in Cana (many beautiful young children among the dead), to watch his innocent sons delight in the azure water of a majestic landscape, one which has buried so many of her own.
CROSS-BREEDING CELEBRITIES, as is the current movement in the bowels of celeb/reality televisionality, has produced some pretty unappealing hybrids, from ice-skating footballers to ballroom-dancing cricketers (the trend, one suspects, is inexorably heading towards celebrity chefs performing brain surgery). RTÉ, doubtless buoyed by the merriment of Celebrity Jigs'n'Reels, has now adopted an idea by Fiona Looney to further this elucidating genre on our wet turf, and from here until God knows when it looks like we'll be up and down the Celebrity Bainisteoir. Although muddying our screens with banality, this is, however, an idea with juice.
The series sees eight "non-sporting" Irish celebrities (what do you mean, do we have eight non-sporting Irish celebrities?) take over as managers of local intermediate football clubs from their home counties and chaperone them through an official GAA tournament. The first programme kicked off with lots of muddy, ruddy, grinning boys in steamy changing-rooms, rubbing their chapped hands in anticipation of finding themselves under Glenda Gilson (that particular honour went to a Crumlin club in Dublin, where all the lads were well "cheered up" when she and her Ugg boots appeared in their dressing room).
Elsewhere, Mary O'Rourke bobbed up in Co Westmeath's Maryland. "We'd a fair idea it was her, we were just hoping . . . dreaming it was someone else . . . younger," said one of her team as his Gilson fantasy evaporated. On an hysterically wet pitch in Co Derry, a similar reception awaited Nell McCafferty, one which she deflected with dour self-deprecation, announcing: "I am not Nadine Coyle." Indeed. Why Nell chose to be a guest at this particular feast of bruised knees and jock-boxes remains a mystery, although she said she had wondered "what it would be like to work exclusively with men - so far, extremely difficult".
Not half as difficult as it could get for crazy guy and travel presenter Baz Ashmawy, who tottered around his Ballymanus team in Co Wicklow in his nicely polished footwear offering his bemused footballers some rather unique motivation: the opportunity to "spank" Mary O'Rourke (the alternative being to "climb trees for coconuts like a bunch of monkeys"). I know which one I'd pick.
FROM THE innocuous native fun of burly wet sportsmen in sodden shorts to the grim, if heightened, reality of a London mental health ward was an uneasy and endomorph-puncturing trip. Poppy Shakespeare, a feature-length drama written by Sarah Williams, from a novel of the same name by Clare Allan, was one of those grey, grisly, inescapable games of two halves, which dragged you reluctantly into your armchair and left you too depressed and exhausted to stand up and reach for the off button.
Intelligently worthy, the drama had at its heart an uneasy and unresolved premise, which gave the proceedings an annoying instability. The eponymous Poppy Shakespeare (Naomie Harris) was a beautiful and ostensibly sane woman, a mother who had recently lost her job and split from her child's father. Applying for an online training course, the character explained to her lawyer, she had proceeded through various levels of computer questioning until she was suddenly, and entirely inexplicably, declared by some unseen Big Brother software to be a volatile woman in dire need of psychiatric help, and before you could say "pass the Valium" was assigned to the day ward of a local mental hospital.
There, in an L-plate version of the vastly superior One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or Ken Loach's Family Life, Poppy attempted to prove her sanity with the help of long-term patient "N" (Anna Maxwell Martin), an actress whose naked face is so often found trudging around Channel 4 dramas atop a grungy anorak that she is beginning to embody humourless, right-on earnestness. Of course, it was all a bloody disaster. "N" (a self-described "dribbler", which seems to be the parlance for mentally challenged or whatever phrase is supposed to come tripping off one's PC lips) falls in love with Poppy and can't bear to lose her. The overstretched staff, in pursuit of performance-related bonuses, are denuding the service and granting ill patients unwanted independence while, in the midst of this, Poppy is caught up in the lunacy of proving that she is "insane" in order to be granted the "mad money" she needs to hire a shoddy lawyer to prove that she is "sane". After losing her child, her mind and her liberty, she ends up a broken shell on a grubby institutional bed.
I'm sure this play was intended as a provocative satire on the state of British mental health services, and certainly its faculties were startlingly well focused on proving how arbitrary and unjust systems can become when freighted with cutbacks and unreachable targets, but its occasional lapses into dream-like pantomime and broad-stroke "I'm-crazy-look-at-me-rocking-in-my-plastic-chair" acting simply let the viewer off the hook. You know the kind of thing: someone on the telly is beating their head off the walls of their council flat in actorly anguish, and you're mentally counting how many fish fingers you've got in the freezer.
I WOULDN'T actually mention my fish-finger dependence to cook Trish Deseine if I met her: although she seems an entirely likable woman, I can't see her Parisian larder including a family pack of Captain Birdseye digits. Trish's Paris Kitchen is a gentle culinary trip around Deseine's adopted city and a tasteful exploration of the charmed art of French cooking. Pot au feu and soufflé au fromage materialised with unhurried grace, and Deseine even had time for a genteel dinner with a deeply French father and daughter, their table littered with little pots, gastronomic delights culled from the yellowing pages of their forebears' impeccably preserved cookery notebook.
Deseine is a tentative hostess, unlikely to litter the Parisian spring air with Ramsay-esque expletives or to shake her refined booty like the lickable Nigella. But you could feel Deseine's producer getting restless when she was encouraged to pop her iPod in her shell-likes and attempt a discreet little boogie around the free-range oeufs. Leave the woman to cook, for Christ's sake, she's better being bourgeois.