TV Review: I would like to report a crime. Someone has stolen the accents of the TV3 news staff. Reporter after reporter appears, each with the polish of a garda's toecap but with all trace of their origin buffed into oblivion, writes Shane Hegarty
You could be persuaded that they have been raised in no-man's-land. It is possible that some may have lost their accents in a struggle, because it sounds as if their voices have been wrenched violently through their nostrils.
RTÉ news staff have been exhibiting a similar phenomenon. There are some reporters in Montrose who could sew their mouths shut and it wouldn't stop them from delivering the news. This seems most prevalent among younger reporters, indoctrinated by a college curriculum idea of reporting. Shoulders back, microphone up. This is Kermit the Frog, reporting live from Dublin Castle, where Goliath is clobbering David.
On TV3, the reporters like to end their reports with a big number. An item about rats on Tuesday ended, inevitably, with the reporter walking to the camera with one of the little buggers wriggling wildly in his hand. Another on boy racers was signed off as a car circled the reporter in a violent screech of smoke. The previous week, following a rather saucy report on pole-dancers' unions, as the reporter signed off, a lady - wearing a bikini smaller than most atoms - took a shower behind her. The stripper writhed as if suffering from a severe but sexy itch. Although this was something of a relief, given that it wasn't out of the question that the reporter might sign off while herself sliding, wrong way up, down a pole.
The station has adopted a style calculated to distract from its inadequacies.
Its news reports are bubbly because its news content is flimsy. On TV3 news bulletins too many of the sentences begin with "in other entertainment news . . ." It cannot wait to get to the Hollywood stories, the celebrity photocalls and the cute animal stories. It fills the rest of the gaps with a loose grouting of pointless viewers' polls and previews of the weather forecast. There are two commercial breaks within the half-hour of the early evening bulletin.
It has no authority. Analysis is absent. The studio does not receive guests.
When one of its reports told us how "the American people are losing their patience" with George Bush, it didn't help that you knew the reporter was sitting in an office in an industrial estate beside the Red Cow roundabout, reading the runes off a wire service.
TV3 cannot, of course, be expected to have the resources and reach of RTÉ, but it would help if it could develop the nose for a story. There is too often the feeling that a story only becomes a story if TV3 can get a camera to it. On Wednesday evening, Michael Flatley flying home to Cork was the third item on the news. Neither the hepatitis C charges nor the Economist's revealing book of statistics featured, both only becoming stories after they had been covered at length on RTÉ's Six-One News.
Of the reporters, only political correspondent Ursula Halligan appears not to have arrived fresh from a graduation ceremony. She is a bottle of stout on a shelf stacked with alcopops. Oddly, in her Wednesday report on the Mahon tribunal we saw as much of Charlie Bird as we did of Liam Lawlor, who walked to his car under a cloud of journalists. As one journalist's microphone was shattered by the closing car door, we saw Bird raise an eyebrow. He had the keen smirk of a man who had enjoyed his walk. We saw why on the Six-One News. The supposedly coy Lawlor had been quite chatty to Bird, engaging in an entertaining debate over which of the two was more of a waste of the taxpayers' money. The other journalists dared not interrupt, their microphones siphoning the conversation. Then who should appear at the end of Bird's report but Ursula Halligan asking Lawlor a question. Lawlor told her to get out of his way.
In other entertainment news . . . in the land of Frasier, Friends, Sex and the City, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Malcolm in the Middle, Scrubs and endless, blissful reruns of Seinfeld, Everybody Loves Raymond, says the Emmy Awards, is the best comedy series of all. In a year in which The Sopranos should have won everything from Best Drama to Best Children's Series, Everybody Loves Raymond won as many awards.
You may not have noticed it arriving on our shores, but it is here, in the small print of the television listings. It is on at 3.20 p.m., sandwiched between repeats of About the House and Holby City. While Open House is off the air, this slot is television's remainders bin. There is a simple rule of thumb: the closer a programme is scheduled to Murder, She Wrote, the less anyone cares about it. The most popular, most lauded comedy series in the most television-saturated nation on Earth is separated from Murder, She Wrote by only half an hour.
Watching it, the reason becomes quickly apparent. Everybody Loves Raymond is mediocre light farce, as neutral as a TV3 news reporter's accent. It is, say the credits, based on the comedy of Ray Romano, but that suggests a modicum of originality. He plays a working man much put-upon by family and friends. Some day Jackie Gleason's going to rise up and come looking for retrospective royalties.
This week, Raymond dropped his daughter to a friend's house and misread the mother's advances with the traditional consequences. Everybody Loves Raymond is scheduled perfectly at a time of the day when no-one is watching television and those who are, are watching Countdown, but the Best Comedy Series is not the best comedy series.
Its fellow nominees, by the way, were Sex and the City, Will and Grace, Friends and Curb Your Enthusiasm. The latter, now much fêted in the US, is also stranded at the outer reaches of our schedules, clinging to the end of Wednesday by its grubby, chipped fingernails. Larry David's cynical and bleakly neurotic comedy is on our screens late on TG4, which is altogether the wrong place for it. You wouldn't buy the Hope Diamond and put it in a dusty box in a drawer at the back of the museum.
The opening programme of BBC1's One Life series was Lager, Mum and Me, in which we met 12-year-old Nanza Russell and her alcoholic mother, Diane. We met the producer, Min Clough, too. There is a genre of programme inhabited by a genus of programme-maker where those who are supposed to stay behind the camera don't do so. The trailers for Mum, Lager and Me suggested that it would be about the girl and her mother, but Clough - whose own father was an alcoholic - was all over this. She spoke of her fears for Diane almost as much as Nanza did. She chased across pubs and dosshouses looking for the binge-drinking Diane. It muddies things somewhat when the film-maker overtly begins to stake an emotional claim on her subject. This being television, sincerity must always be greeted with suspicion.
Which is a pity, because this film was honest and tough. Diane is 39 and the mother to six children. Her face is doughy from booze. As the result of a violent relationship, she had been drinking for 15 years. She had decided to go into a three-week detox regime. "I want to be me," she said.
As she sat in the dregs of a three-day binge, swigging cheap cider, a mix of contrition and petulance it was hard to believe that she was prepared to quit.
Nanza had been in and out of care homes for three years until finally settling with her gran. She talked to the trees and animals in the local park. "They don't have their mums in this world and it feels like I don't have mine," she said.
She also loved her mum dearly and openly, even as the anger inside was being vented through gritted teeth ("My mum always used to let me down when I was young and I ain't gonna let that happen no more!"). Her teacher had told the class that all the girls will end up like their mothers.
When she visited the detox unit, Nanza inadvertently introduced herself as Diane's mother. Theaim of the detox was to reintroduce the natural order and, remarkably, Diane is still sober after five months.
"My mum's doing perfect," were Nanza's last words to her video diary. A tale that promised only heartbreak had instead left us with a tingle of warmth.