Eyelifts, attitude and some real 'Turkish delight'

TV Review:'There is no such thing as love, Eileen" said Ulas, chilled glass to his lips, the Aegean sparkling behind his uncompromising noggin. "What is it then?" asked Eileen. "A misunderstanding between two fools?" "That's it."

Welcome to The Turkish Wives Club, a witty documentary which featured Eileen Ozdag, a 55-year-old Dubliner with eyelift and attitude who was talking to her young Turkish husband on the occasion of the renewal of their eight-year-old wedding vows.

Kusadasi, Turkey: weathered old men like olive trees, sipping tea in the gathering dusk, cats scavenging under their feet, look on in quiet amusement as the clubs and bars in this tourist town fill up. By nightfall the hostelries are bursting at the neon seams with busloads of middle-aged Irishwomen, their highlights multiplying in the disco ball, their cocktails fizzling, their sunburnt décolletage heaving over their party frocks as young Turks in sleeveless white T-shirts, their teeth madly white in the fluorescent glare, descend to get the party thumping.

RTÉ producer Mary Martin followed the vivacious "call me ever-ready" Eileen as she attempted to initiate her two mates, Susan and Amelia, both single again after difficult relationships, into Kusadasi society and the promise of some walking, talking "Turkish delight".

From their departure from a Dublin housing estate in a bright pink limousine (accompanied by a tuneless rendition of Cliff Richard's Summer Holiday to the women, clad in skin-tight Kylie togs, being voraciously pummelled in a Turkish bath, to the treacherous sunlight of "the morning after the night before", Martin's film was a joyful eye-opener.

In a kind of mad tango of tradition and modernity, the three women, when not splashing about in rubber rings and pulsing bars, visited a "Virgin Mary house" where they cried and prayed and petitioned for their families ("I'm praying for world peace and the cats and dogs of Kusadasi," whispered Susan) and, in the next sunlit breath, sought the guidance of a cut-price plastic surgeon, whose pledge to erase the visible stresses of a difficult life seemed equally as alluring as the less temporal promise of the shrine.

"Went for a tan and found a man," said Eileen, surveying her friends as they bobbed around the bay on a sweet little boat. "I opened like a flower," agreed a satisfied Susan, wine glass beading.

Then the determined Eileen and her taciturn young husband crammed into the tiny bow to receive their renewed blessings. "I don't like being called Shirley Valentine. Valentine's toy-boy left her. I prefer Shirley Temple," said Eileen, tossing her sun-baked locks.

"Cheers," said her travelling companions.

"Sharifa," said Eileen, uttering the Turkish equivalent. "Think of Omar Sharif and say it fast."

THE SEXUAL PREDILECTIONS of middle-aged women didn't confine themselves to the former Ottoman empire this week. BBC2 made a light-hearted attempt to lift the lid on frustrated sexual misadventure and that endless English plague, class, in a lukewarm Abigail's Party-esque play, The Dinner Party, which, despite an impressive cast, managed to turn what could have been a diverting comedic hour around a Home Counties dinner party into a depressing, predictable and unappetising slice of the suburban zeitgeist.

Described as a one-off black comedy, it seemed more like an episode from a 1980s sitcom. The story revolved around three neighbouring couples in the English commuter belt, one of whose household's grass was distinctly greener than the others.

The hosts - Roger (Rupert Graves), self-made, power-crazy millionaire, and his tightly-coiled wife, Shru (Elizabeth Berrington) - had their heavily-exploited eastern European staff make a stunningly choreographed dinner (all served with a dribbling of balsamic vinegar) for their neighbours, the howlingly nouveau-riche Juliette (Alison Steadman), tightly swathed in turquoise silk and misery at not being married to Roger, and Jim, her achingly unhappy husband (the terrific Alun Armstrong). Joined at this hedonistic supper by a couple newly arrived to the neighbourhood, the dinner party proceeded to amicable emotional destruction until the rapidly uncoiling Shru was performing fellatio on a depressed Jim underneath his olive tree and Juliette was being spurned by her host in his pool complex.

"You are officially no longer our badminton partners," said Roger to Juliette, which was about as funny as this ham-fisted farce got.

The problem, I suspect, is that this kind of social-comment drama (you're a broke-but-good leftie deserted by the politics of avarice, and I'm a rich bollox with a swimming-pool who couldn't give a toss) has been done to death, and no matter how much larking around a bunch of talented thesps do with an essentially hackneyed plot, they are going to be outstripped by reality shows such as Wife Swap or How Clean are Your Underpants? (or whatever it's called); sociology without a script, and often far more dramatic than drama.

A SOCIOLOGICAL EXPERIMENT of somewhat epic proportions is currently taking place on RTÉ1, with Diarmuid Gavin (he, more usually, of the hip herbaceous border). Gavin, while participating in a BBC show for Comic Relief, Only Fools on Horses, discovered a passion for our four-hoofed friends, and also thought up a way to bring together the bareback urban cowboys of outlying Dublin estates (kids who gallop up and down grey roads on nervy ponies) and the well-shod elite of stud farms and showjumping arenas. His aim was to train five "pony kids" over a course of 10 weeks to a standard that would allow them participate in the RDS horseshow.

To this end he inveigled Olympian Jessica Kürten and breeder and trainer Ronan Corrigan to marshal the multifarious talents of the young riders, Squeeky, Dean, Jade, Daryl and Thomas. The result makes fascinating and utterly compelling TV.

These children's natural abilities have, of course, been hampered by poverty of opportunity, living on estates with no facilities and few outlets for their curiosity or skills. The likelihood of any of the five ever seeing the inside of a riding hat, let alone of the RDS showjumping arena, was about as remote as finding Kürten hogging the karaoke in Kusadasi.

The process of transformation is not as simple, however, as swapping plastic trainers for leather boots and shellsuits for jodhpurs, as a rather stunned-looking Gavin is currently learning. The children range from being wildly undisciplined and arrogant to being painfully underconfident; like winter flowers in a blaze of heat, they slouch against walls and dig their heads into the pit of their hoodies, only coming alive when they eschew Kürten's orders to trot, and instead take off galloping around the training ring on their equivocal but somewhat shocked and awfully polite ponies.

The series, which was shot over the course of last summer, runs over the next four weeks and is worth its weight in wet manure. One might hazard to hope that county councillors watching these young riders' tenacity might be moved towards providing facilities for the bareback riders and their ponies, rather than dismantling them.

DOUBTLESS A TRIP to the gymkhana in a well-upholstered 4x4 was a formative part of the "okay hey!" childhood experiences of Dan and Becs. The pair are back for a second season of snapshots from glittering SoCoDu (that's south Co Dublin for you non-Dart travellers). The interlinking monologues on the life and times of these two increasingly vapid youths are occasionally wry but feel more than a little repetitive second time around. Engaging again in a video-diary format, Dan and Becs is a Facebook confessional that is, one hopes, a less accurate portrayal of the progeny of the Celtic Tiger than it appears. Though with Dan back from a week or so roughing it in three-star South American hotels and Becs auditioning for the part of a Russian in Fair City, one gets a sinking feeling that this particular foray into Oirish Loife has a gleaming ring of authenticity. Shame.