Doctor on walkabout

TV REVIEW: Incredible Human JourneyBBC2, Sunday The House RTÉ1, Tuesday

Bibeanna MheiriceáTG4, Sunday

The Eurovision Song Contest 2009 Semi-FinalRTÉ2, Thursday

GOODNESS, I'VE learned a lot from the box this week. All of a sudden my television seemed to turn over a new leaf and, in some belated attempt at mental spring-cleaning, became all brisk and efficient. I was perfectly happy with it being slovenly and louche, throwing up nothing but weight-loss programmes and reruns of The Wire, but no, the BBC is once again requiring that I stick the cork in the Chardonnay bottle halfway through Sunday lunch and polish up my receptive skills so as to fully appreciate the immense and, to be fair, pretty fascinating trip being undertaken by the competent and friendly, not to mention well-scrubbed, pinky-reddy-blondey-haired Dr Alice Roberts, in Incredible Human Journey, her around-the-world-in-80-fairly-modest-shirts series.

Alice Roberts has a moniker like that of a fictional heroine, the kind you’d find in your musty local library in the spiffing-adventure section. In keeping with Blyton-esque ideals, Roberts seems to represent all that is good and wholesome and tomboyish and sturdily built in a science presenter. Eschewing khaki jackets and cork hats, she has been jogging through the Kalahari in a pair of crumpled linen trousers and a sticky T-shirt, and camping out alone in the savannah with just a hand-held camera, a torch and the howling of yonder lions for company. Well, you see, there you go, that’s what you get for having a solid education, an innate curiosity about ancestral bones and a personal fascination with joint disease in ancient human remains. The good doctor should have developed a passion for reducing a gluteus maximus to fit under a rah-rah skirt, and she could have stayed in an air-conditioned studio with Gok Wan.

All cheesecloth shirts and ethnic neckwear, Roberts is a trouper, and, my god, I’d give my eye-teeth for her job, travelling all over the world in search of our origins and sitting on rocks observing various frothy oceans. And the medicinal end? Well, that seems to be confined to sticking a thermometer into the willing ears of a couple of sanguine bushmen. No problem.

Tracing the journey of our ancestors from east Africa along the banks of the Omo River, Roberts proffered the theory that a small tribe of a couple of hundred homo sapiens (“human people, like you and me,” she said, rather perkily and perhaps a little optimistically, as most people I see are nothing like Alice Roberts – they look tired and grumpy and need to wear their sports shoes over their tights in order to walk to the bus stop).

Anyway, Roberts, with the help of a beefy, tattooed archaeologist working in Arabia, figured that this aforementioned ancestral tribe walked across the Red Sea when the tide was out (I’m being facetious – it was dry due to some cataclysmic climate event) and found a kind of oasis, a paradise around the Persian Gulf, from whence they did go forth and multiply. And if some boffin in a white lab coat puts your DNA in a milk bottle and shakes its molecular booty around, the likelihood is that, unless you are African, you too will have sprouted from that slender genetic tree. Now, put that in your clay pipe and smoke it.

' ME MA DRANK,me Da drank, me Da left, she drank, she died. That's it." Genetic inheritance, and the inheritance of loss, was central to an arresting and highly unusual autobiographical documentary by Dublin film-maker Tanya Doyle, which was screened on RTÉ this week. The Housetold the story of five siblings growing up in a council house in Clondalkin, west Dublin, in the 1980s and 1990s, and of how that house became a repository for the family's memories, both good and painful, right up until 2007, eight years after their alcoholic mother's death, when the siblings made the decision to sell the family home and move on with their individual lives.

In the days prior to boarding up the house and selling it back to the council, Doyle interviewed her father (who had long left the family and their home) and each of her siblings, three sisters and her brother, in candid conversations exploring the legacy of their family tribulations, their parents’ separation, their mother’s depression and their own struggle to live together after her death. The outcome of these encounters was not a gruesome misery memoir or a sentimental portrait of a family’s struggle to come to terms with alcoholism; rather, it was an urban poem, a pastiche of broken and disquieting images and memories, startlingly shot, a story straightforwardly told.

Although the central theme was the despair felt by Doyle’s mother, who, without resources or education, eventually succumbed to the anaesthetising power of alcohol, this fresh, honest and moving film illuminated a much larger tale than that of one family eroded by drink and frustration. Their house, and this film, looked out on to a much bigger landscape and experience: the vast expanse of west Dublin and the fate of thousands of people uprooted from city-centre communities to fester in featureless estates, abandoned without schools, churches, bus stops or a local shop – Ireland’s own apartheid.

This was an interesting and rewarding choice for RTÉ Factual to put its weight behind, and whoever made the decision to support the project should be applauded.

A JOYOUS NEWseries, Bibeanna Mheiriceá, chronicling the lives of 20 women who left the area around the Dingle peninsula in the middle of the last century to find work in America (when that swell continent opened her doors to immigration after the second World War), is whipping along on TG4.

Built around entertainingly irreverent conversations with the women, many of them living in the Irish enclave of Hungry Hill in Springfield, Massachusetts, the documentaries are sprinkled with glorious archive of solid-looking lassies and grinning bastúns set-dancing in the Irish clubs around Boston. Speaking from womb-like living rooms enhanced with Irish souvenirs, or from airy New England houses with plaster Virgins in the garden, these women shared vivid memories of leaving Ireland, of families waving them off in currachs, of sisters and mothers weeping in an austere Shannon airport, and of arriving in the US in borrowed dresses. (One woman’s suitcase contained a severed pig’s head, the ring still through its nose – a strange dowry for a new land.)

This week’s film saw the women reminisce about summer weekends in the Catskills, about new-found freedoms and about blossoming romances among the emigres who remained, and indeed remain, a tight-knit community.

Exhilarating, nostalgic, at times moving viewing, this is an absorbing series, a valuable social record of a time when these tenacious young women relinquished the windswept familiar for the vast acreage of a new continent.

[ tvreview@irishtimes.com ]

Meeting our Waterloo again: Is this finally the end of the Eurovision affair?

Well, well, to coin a singalong cliché, what’s another year? What’s another year of eastern European block voting, gyrating babushkas and lots of muscular Ukrainians shaking their manly booty in plastic gladiator helmets? Oh yes, once again Ireland has failed to grip the Eurovision baton so proudly passed down to us by Johnny Logan and Johnny Logan and all the other Johnny Logan-alikes who bolstered our fickle pride with their straining tonsils during those fast-receding halcyon years.

“Are you nervous?” asked Natasha, the back-combed Russian supermodel, of her co-host, a diminutive Sarkozy-esque man with the same manic intensity but much glossier locks, who may or may not have been called Andre, on the second long night of the Eurovision Song Contest 2009 Semi-Finals, live from Moscow.

No, Andre (if that was his name) was not nervous, he vas excited! And so began a plague of twirling Cossacks, unravelling ballerinas, needy Hungarian disco fantasists and many, many emotional young women ferociously bleating on about heartbreak or bikini-waxing. (Who knows? It was all Greek to me, darling.)

Ireland's entry, called, somewhat uninspiringly, Et Cetera,was a boppy, entirely forgettable tune that sounded like the title music for a teen drama on Nickelodeon. It was sung by a pleasant-looking girl called Sinéad (right), doing her best in carefully slashed nylons to give her entry a little eastern edge. Her band, Black Daisy, also included a Lithuanian drummer, which made absolutely no difference whatsoever to the predictable outcome. When the cull came (the acts were vying for 10 places in Saturday night's final), Et Ceterabecame extraneous.

Maybe we should just slip away from the party now, while the hosts are busy with the louder guests. Maybe we should take a very grown-up decision to just say no when the next invitation plops on to our collective mat. Let’s be really daring and write back, no thank you, not this time, not another year.