Falling for a Dancer (RTE 1, Sunday)
Chippendales - The Secret History (ITV, Tuesday)
Back Alley (Network 2, Monday)
Limelight (RTE 1, Thursday)
The opening episode of Deirdre Purcell's TV potboiler, Falling for a Dancer, was like a Maeve Binchy yarn meeting a monsoon. Set in west Cork in the late 1930s, the rugged Beara peninsula looked like Poldark's Cornwall with the shower left running at full pressure. Rain fell, teemed and cascaded in harmony with the mood of the heroine, Elizabeth Sullivan (Elisabeth Dermot-Walsh). Caught in the Catholic Tiger of the period, 19-year-old Liz, pregnant after a fling with a travelling actor, had reasons to be gloomy.
Certainly, in terms of atmosphere, the elemental empathy emphasised the suffocating darkness of rural Ireland of the time. The problem, however, was that the characters seemed much too thinly drawn to warrant such an almost gothic severity of mood. Domestic in terms of plot and character, the tone was discordantly melodramatic, almost apocalyptic. A visit, for instance, to a Magdalen Laundry-style home, was presented so histrionically that Liz immediately bolted into a marriage she did not want. The kitchens at Auschwitz could hardly have been more ghastly.
It is, of course, typical of the potboiler genre to crank-up the dramatics. Your emotions are not being seduced in miniseries such as this one - they are being bludgeoned. Still, such yarns - essentially they are updated Victorian romances - remain very popular and RTE is unlikely to regret setting this one as its centrepiece against TV3's opening night. But, as drama, it is too stagey; the characters fitting inhumanly neatly into roles from which to launch a morality play.
Liz's uptight, snobbish, middle-class parents - "mummy" (in 1937 in Cork?) Corrine and daddy, St. John (pronounced "Sinjun"), are not best pleased when they hear how Liz has been relaxing. Mind you, sensible viewers could not be best pleased when they hear daddy's name. Why not John, or Paddy or Mick? No, Sinjun! This urge for smarmy dramatics, to aggrandise at every opportunity, is, in fact, what diminishes these potboilers. Indeed, the correlation is pretty much a direct inverse: the more the yarn is unnecessarily embellished, the less it can be taken seriously.
In Purcell's case, this is a pity. Given the revelations of the last decade or so, concerning the rampant abuses during the heyday of the Catholic Tiger, there are real and topical stories to be told. And sure, middle-class girl gets pregnant and is forced into an arranged marriage with a widower twice her age, is a real and not atypical story. But such stories are of resignation, drudgery and claustrophobic social and religious pressures. It is smothering banality, not theatrical crises, that constitutes the genuine horror in them.
Like the empathetic weather, Holy Ireland is evoked with the broadest strokes. A priest is the matchmaker, Corrine and Sinjun freak when Liz misses Mass, the laundry nuns display a Treblinka-like severity and religious pictures hang on every wall. And then, of course, there is sex: Liz's joyful, loving rumpo with the strolling player and her brutish wedding night with hubby Cornelius. Grunting and growling like a dog, Neeley would never cut it with Cosmopolitan. A plain man, certainly no Casanova, he shows that he has no time for any of that namby-pamby, foreplay nonsense.
So, as Liz lies rigid as a corpse, grunting Neeley satisfies himself. Perhaps this sort of carnal coarseness enhances viewers' sympathy for Liz. But as the brooding, wild Atlantic crashes on the cliffs beyond the house, the tawdry boorishness of Liz 'n' Connie in the sack just seems diminished by the grandeur of its setting. Meanwhile, Mossy Sheehan, smouldering like a turf fire, has got the hots for Liz. . .
In fairness, the central performances are commendable and the scenery is magnificent. But the characters lack depth - they are merely role-players in a potboiler. It would be unfair to apply the standards of serious drama to Falling for a Dancer. It is what it is - a hyped-up yarn with garish and loud emotion piled on with a shovel. Clearly, RTE has plumped for what it hopes will be a ratings, if not a critical, success. You can understand their reasoning. . . but ultimately, it is a reasoning which is likely to continue a dumbing-down in the face of the threat from TV3. That is the saddest aspect of all.
Plenty of melodramatics in Chippendales - The Secret History. Plenty of vulgar sex too. Indeed, this one may have created a new genre hybrid for TV - the half investigative documentary/half peep-show ("docupeep" for short?). It told the story of the troupe of male strippers, so wooden they were named after furniture, from their founding in a seedy Los Angeles nightclub to the suicide of their homicidal founder, the Indian-born hustler, Steve Banerjee.
Really, it was quite a bizarre programme, flitting between reconstructions of murders and footage of muscled hunks gyrating in g-strings. Actually, the lads' funniest outfits comprised collars, bowties and cuffs - but no shirts! With their blow-dried hair-dos and rip-off (literally!) trousers, they drove women not only to hysterical laughter but also to frantic arousal. Cornelius would never have made a Chippendale.
Anyway, the secret (about as secret as the lads' physical attributes) recounted the tale of how the legendarily mean Banerjee hired a friend, Ray Colon, to have a business partner murdered. In turn, Colon hired a junkie (a mere semicolon?) to shoot Nick DeNoia, a choreographer who was sharing the Chippendales' touring profits with Banerjee. This really was Sleaze City and if you were in any doubt, producer Nick Aarons piled on the action from early Chippendales performances.
It certainly takes a hard neck, at least, to parade around in a spandex g-string. Women, all big hair and big make-up, wild with lust, tugged at the hunks' miniscule outfits. Meanwhile, some of the hunks simulated the most gross acts to stimulate further their audience. As crass TV goes, this one would surely win all the, eh grand prix awards at any Vulgarvision ceremony. It was truly and monumentally gross.
Mind you, the original police investigation of De Noia's murder was equally monumentally gross. This led Banerjee to become even cockier about contacting Colon to have the leading members of Adonis, a rival male-stripper outfit, murdered. Colon, however, told the US embassy in London about the plan and Banerjee's game was as up as his troupe's bold bits. Colon, filmed throughout in silhouette, prefaced most sentences with expressions of regret for his partnership with Banerjee.
"I became a piece of shit," he said, "but he became dead." Arrested on taped evidence of discussing murder with Colon, Banerjee committed suicide. It would be difficult to find a seedier tale of a "high-caste" Indian with lower morals. More pertinently though, it would be difficult not to conclude that ITV is dumbing-down towards mega-sleaze with this docupeep. Really, there were far too many clips of the Chippendales behaving badly. Of course, some footage of the strippers in action was necessary as background. But the bloke with the ejaculating banana?
If News at Ten, often a tabloid monstrosity itself, is to be moved to make way for more Vulgarvision, then we are entering a new era of prime-time sleaze. Pitched as the unmasking of an evil killer, Chippendales A Secret History, was more concerned with showing shots of big, beefy blokes unmasking their bodies. As an investigative documentary, it was well short of being The Full Monty. As a slice of sleaze, it was enough to drive even the most liberal viewers bananas. Sure, some of it was very funny. But its spirit was crude and tasteless.
Back on Network 2, the female band, Back Alley, was the focus of a documentary titled. . . Back Alley. The band, comprising Sandra Bagnall, Victoria Carlin and Chrissie Melvin are a raunchy act, playing the less than genteel pub circuit. It was impossible not to admire their determination to persist. More often than not, their changing rooms are toilets and money is so tight that they have to act as their own roadies, humping heavy equipment into their van in the early hours of the morning.
Their clothes are as tight as their budgets and when they mount a stage in front of ogling drunks, you've got to give them credit for nerve. Mind you, the women (Sandra explained that the band's name, contrary to popular myth, is not a double entendre vulgarism) seem keen to emphasise their sexuality. Publicity pics, taken with the Back Alley babes in Santa Claus outfits, displayed an almost Spinal Tap sense of parody. We weren't quite in the same tree as the Chippendales' bananaman, but we certainly were in the plantation.
Yet, there was genuine humour in this one, directed by Angela Ryan. Sandra wants money, Victoria wants to make it into musicals and Chrissie just wants to be a star. I suppose even Frank Sinatra started with small gigs. But cavorting on stage (to the strains of You Sexy Thing) with an intoxicated, wannabe Chippendale, drawn from the audience, is some distance from Carnegie Hall. Its humour and the spirit of the band saved this from being mere Vulgarvision. But when Back Alley behaviour makes it onto television's main street, you know that society is coarsening. So be it.
Finally, Limelight. Presented by the reclusive Carrie Crowley, a kind of bubbly Bibi in sequins, this too dealt with showbiz. More mainstream than Back Alley, it was a standard guff 'n' music effort. The focus of this week's opening show was singer-songwriter Kieran Goss, who can only have been delighted with the hour's PR afforded to him. Goss, from Rostrevor, Co Down, qualified as a solicitor from Queen's University. His childhood hero was Val Doonican. Rock-on, Kieran.
The format of Limelight is to have the principal guest present throughout and to supplement him/her with other showbiz punters. So, we got, for instance, " Ireland's tallest DJ", Mike Maloney and "Ireland's sexiest magazine editor", Alannah Gallagher, on to talk about Goss and the music industry generally. Maloney made a few pertinent points, but really, the show was yet another anachronistic example of RTE talk-TV.
It was, in fairness, not unpleasant. But as anecdote heaped upon anecdote, it was, ultimately, bland. There is a place in the RTE schedules for such a showband showbiz chat-show cum magazine programme. But half an hour would easily be sufficient. This is not just middle of the road TV, it is dead centre of the white line TV. Compared with Vulgarvision, it does seem very slow-moving and dated. Still, tightened-up and repackaged, with just a sliver of flint added, it could be reasonable. As it is, it's as corny as airport romance.