Shane Hegarty reviews And Here Are Your Hosts, Unit 8, Billy Connolly's World Tour of England, Ireland and Wales and Channel 4's Black Books
'This has to be the biggest obituary in history," said Derek Davis on Sunday night's And Here Are Your Hosts - RTÉ's centrepiece of its current look back over the station's 40 years. He was referring to his gathered colleagues rather than RTÉ itself, and it was a pre-recorded show, but it was a double-edged quip given that this was another week in which management consultant reports thrust the knife deeper still. The past of the station was laid out before us like a lukewarm buffet. As for the future, well even RTÉ doesn't know what that looks like yet.
The audience wore black tie and ballgowns. This is the uniform of the public broadcaster, inherited from the BBC, dusted off and worn like parade dress on such occasions. It is the direct link to the past, to the days when the presenter always wore black tie, even when on radio. The direct link to the future was drag act Shirley Temple Bar, sitting in an audience of tuxedos and best rig-outs while wearing a pigtail wig and a little girl's dress. He usually wears this twice a week when, as presenter of Telly Bingo, he baffles the nation's elderly. There is nothing on television that makes you want to reach in and pull the presenter to safety more than Telly Bingo. The idea, it seems, was to have a quirky, ironic presenter that would appeal to the students and give the grannies a giggle. Instead, it's a grown man in a child's dress calling bingo numbers to an audience that probably preferred that nice Liz Bonnin. Nothing, you had thought, could be more out of place. On Sunday night, the bar was raised on that standard. At one point the camera focused on him three times in quick succession. It may have been your television's way of doing a double take.
The other nod towards the future - actually, more a saucy glance - was that it was presented by Brendan Courtney. Courtney made his name as the presenter of Wanderlust, a programme so pumped up on zeitgeist it was inevitable that the pressure would be released through its presenter. It combined sex, alcohol, e-mail, pop music and foreign holidays in a package so shiny it attacked your eyes while Courtney went for your hearing. It proved remarkably popular, and Courtney - camp, brash, armed to the teeth with single entendres - was the right man in the right place. Not so on Sunday night.
To put him on the same couch as Gay Byrne was like pulling a Lada up next to a Rolls. His chief emotion is expressed through a fixed look of camped-up mock horror. If the word "fabulous" did not exist, he would be lost for words.
Of course, it's easier to sneer at the guy who did the job than think of an alternative. As a nursery of talent, the RTÉ soil has been overly acidic for a long time now. Anyway, they deserve some credit for the past. And Here Are Your Hosts was a gentle, deserving exercise in self-congratulation for the talent it has produced, a warming nostalgia in the middle of an ice age. There were plenty of clips of RTÉ years gone by. Former presenters told stories of the "Twink then said to me . . . " variety, and managed to recount their times in RTÉ without betraying any visible signs of bitterness at how they might have been treated along the way. Presenters laughed at how daftly they dressed in every year until this one. There was a great Live at Three clip involving rabbits doing what rabbits are famous for. There was a bit of live music. There's always a bit of live music.
It was less a gathering of buoyant party-goers, than a band of survivors who know they're coming to the end of a war, but aren't quite sure whether they've won it or not. Gallows humour was plentiful. Towards the end, Courtney asked Pat Kenny and Gay Byrne what the future holds for RTÉ. He had to ask the question a second time after the initial answer came in the form of sarcastic snorts.
If the future for RTÉ does turn out to mean turning to independent producers, then it may not be the worst thing for the viewer. With the exception of the current affairs output, it's from the independent sector that the best programming has come in recent times. This week gave us another one, Unit 8, which hurdles the obstacle of it being yet another hospital-based fly-on-the-wall by making simple but gripping television. Set in the neo-natal intensive care unit of Dublin's National Maternity Hospital, like last year's Nurses this is not of the genre in which we meet porters who really want to be pop stars. It is humane, subtle and often beautifully shot by producer and director Edel O'Brien. The slightly under-exposed look of the digital film gives it a certain texture, one that hints instantly that this is not going to be all heart-warming.
This week's film of the birth of a girl, whose hydrocephalus meant her emerging with a tremendously swollen head, was remarkably honest television. Having been told that if she didn't cry within five minutes it would indicate possible brain damage, the subsequent silence was painful and moving. And yet, Unit 8 left her this week with a note of optimism. Not so for baby Amy, whose three weeks of life, as her mother Patsy told it, has been filled with more struggle than most grown adults. Her dad Graham said that every time he rings the hospital the doctors add a "very" to their prognosis. "You do realise," they say, "that she is very, very, very sick." Television likes to avoid stories with unhappy endings. In this case, let's hope that holds true.
Billy Connolly this week finished the middle bit of his World Tour of England, Ireland and Wales, driving a bike that looks like the result of a night of passion between a juggernaut and a Harley Davidson around the Galway and Kerry coasts.
Connolly remains a wonderful storyteller. He is everybody's funniest friend. He is the person you believe yourself to be when you are outrageously drunk. He is also a genius of observational comedy, which is why he makes such a good travel correspondent, kind of like Bill Bryson on a giant lawnmower.
Sentiment can muscle aside the empirical evidence, though. At the end of this week's programme, he sat by the Killarney waters and described the difficulties of leaving Ireland. You have to visit this country, he told the British public; a sizeable wave forming in the lake as the entire staff of Bord Fáilte leapt with delight.
"Come to Ireland," he said, "but be warned, it's a very hard place to leave. Each time you depart a sadness tugs at you." As a Scotsman, though, Billy should know that the sun here always shines for foreign travel shows, and hides when they're gone. A couple of months of incessant rain can have a big effect on sentiment.
Connolly has had considerable success as a straight actor, but his forays into sitcom never came to much. His character didn't squeeze comfortably into the rigid format of a scripted show. Fortunately Dylan Moran's incessantly grumpy persona does.
IN Black Books, he seems to have a migraine that has spread to every nerve in his body. I've harped on about this before, but watching him on screen it's still impossible to discern if there is any kind of line between character and actor, whether his bookshop owner Bernard Black is anyone other than Dylan Moran.
Anyway, we're half way through the second series, and fears that the departure of Graham Linehan from the writing team would see everything go horribly awry have long dissipated. Thankfully, Moran assuming the bulk of those duties, hasn't turned it into a vanity project, or reduced Bill Bailey's Manny and Tasmin Greig's Fran to supporting players, there to set up the gags for the star. It is still funny on every level down to the hell that these characters are trapped in.
It's hard to picture it now, but there was a delayed reaction to Father Ted when it was first shown. It needed word of mouth and a repeat ofthe first series before the second series would launch it into the sitcom Hall of Fame.
I thought the same might happen to Black Books, that it would inveigle its way into the public conscience before a mass moment of awareness. I was wrong. There are no catchphrases. The tone is too nasty. The characters aren't instantly recognisable caricatures. It is not yet being watched by Grannies and kids alike. Which is no bad thing. If they are trapped in hell, then it's better that it doesn't get too crowded with bystanders.
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