TV REVIEW/Shane Hegarty: Do television producers hold dinner parties at which they discuss the value of their property programmes? ("Our property show has a book deal to accompany it." "Well, that would make our programme worth a book deal too, because ours has been given a two-year contract with BBC2.")
Househunters, RTÉ1, Wednesday
Location, Location, Location, Channel 4, Wednesday
The Planman, ITV, Monday
Manchán Sa Mheán Oirthear, TG4, Sunday
Prime Time, RTÉ1, Tuesday
If they do, then Househunters is the crumbling terraced house with outside toilet of property programmes. Over on Channel 4, meanwhile, can be found millionaires' row. This week, Location, Location, Location returned, alongside Tuesday night's Selling Houses, replacing the recent programmes, Property Ladder and Relocation, Relocation.
The Channel 4 offerings are minimal and classy, all clean lines and floorboards. Househunters, meanwhile, has a dado rail and heavily patterned wallpaper, the shag carpet and furniture consisting of pieces from three different suites. By the way, it is almost impossible to write about property programmes without making lazy property metaphors in the process.
This column is in need of extensive redecoration.
Location, Location, Location is the original of the species. Presented by Phil Spencer and Kirstie Allsopp - a woman whose boots reach the neck and coats reach the calves - it is simple and addictive. It gives us one story in the half-hour, such as this week's first-time buyers seeking out cheap property in south-east London. It picks the properties, views them and does the bidding on their behalf. There are snippets of advice and much bad-mouthing of properties. It pokes around inside plenty of other people's houses, which, of course, is the primary reason for watching. Other people's décor is always so tasteless.
Spencer and Allsopp are genuine professional homefinders and fill the programme with a no-nonsense confidence born of the enjoyment that must come from regularly outsmarting estate agents. The only one of those to be found this week was at the end of a phone line, being bullied into bargaining by Allsopp as she mentally heeled her stiletto into his forehead.
In Househunters, estate agents are everywhere. They drip from the gables.
They float through rooms, with their clipboards and clipped sentences, quietly calculating their commissions. Househunters speaks the empty language of a property supplement. "This three-bedroom house could be the house of your dreams," said its property expert, Kevin Murphy, implying that the Drumcondra semi he was standing outside would beat a Caribbean beach-house any time. By the way, at a little more than €500,000 and with a bit of work needed, "this house could be great value for money".
The format is awkward and frustrating. It eschews the narrative neatness of a single househunt in the half-hour, and we must instead trudge through several weeks with different people before closure. Anyway, it was 15 minutes before anyone in this first episode of the new series actually hunted for a house, and even then it was in Manchester. Over the winter, this programme became "Househunters in the Sun", searching for holiday properties across the globe. During the summer, it seems to have become "Househunters in the Rain".
It is, though, the only programme of its kind on the Irish market and it fills a gap, even if the finish is sloppy. It used to be interiors programmes that television concentrated on. When we got a little money, they told us how to fix up the house we were living in. Now they help us move on. The next big wave of programmes will be a genre in which young, well-dressed experts deal with the bailiffs on our behalf.
In The Planman, Robbie Coltrane plays Jack Lennox, a successful barrister who robs banks in his spare time. The set-up lacks the drama promised and any comedy implied. Rather, it is only one contrivance en route to a pile-up.
His wife, Gail Forrester (Celia Imrie) happens to be a Scottish government minister heading up an anti-crime initiative. She also happens to be having an affair with a Chief Constable Richards (Neil Dudgeon), whom Lennox has recently humiliated in a trial. That's the same trial, by a strange coincidence, in which Lennox defends the bent copper (Vincent Regan) with whom he strikes up an unlikely criminal partnership. You couldn't make up it up. Unfortunately, scriptwriter Stuart Hepburn has.
This is Coltrane's first television drama since Cracker, and he carries the role with his customary gruffness, full of penetrating clarity in the professional arena but stubborn and truculent in the personal. He careens from portentous silence to explosive outrage. In other words, he plays Fitz from Cracker. The script, though, is a shaky scaffold on which to perch such weight. It is lazy and obvious, taking shortcuts through cliché. "There's a line there. Don't cross it," the judge warns. "I don't like being made look a fool," the copper threatens. "You and me, we're the same, Jack," the bent copper insists. One early scene occurs at a press conference, from where the soundbites seem to have escaped and infected the entire piece.
It is preposterous from beginning to middle, which we reached by the end of Monday night. By then, Lennox had masterminded the robbery of a bank which, by incredible fortune, happens to be across the road from the station where Chief Constable Richards is working.
Lennox has a brilliant mind that successfully defends clients by day and plots perfect bank robberies by night. Not so brilliant, however, as to remember not to leave evidence lying around at home. His wife finds maps of the bank peeking like untidy shirt-tails from his office drawer. Now Lennox must somehow play cops against robbers and leap clear on the other side. It will be as messy as that image suggests.
Having just completed the series on China, TG4 are repeating Manchán Sa Mheán Oirthear, in which Manchán Magan travels through the Middle East.
He starts in Istanbul, a city sitting in the crevice between west and east, between Christianity and Islam. It was founded by Emperor Constantine to mark the Roman Empire's conversion to Christianity.
"With great humility, he called the city Constantinople," comments Magan pointedly, briefly forgetting that with a similar humility he has put his own Christian name in the title of this programme.
It is one of the brighter aspects of TG4 that its travel programmes tend to involve some actual travel. The only glimpse of tourists in Manchán Sa Mheán Oirthear was in the distance as Magan visited the villages carved into lava at Cappadocia. Against the dusty backdrop of poverty and struggle the tourists looked preternaturally pink, clean and wealthy. They looked, in other words, disturbingly like us.
Magan is another of the station's backpacker presenters, travelling with a digital camera and several languages. It does not have the spark or unpredictability of the Amú Amigos series, but aims for a little more of the seriousness that its subtitle of Global Nomad suggests. It is another notch for a station that was intended to reflect ourselves but has had a knack of teaching us plenty about others in the process.
Those who saw Tuesday night's Prime Time report, including the graphic pictures from Iraq that television news has generally shied away from, will not forget it easily. Miriam O'Callaghan warned in advance that these were pictures usually withheld from broadcast earlier in the day, when sensitivities are greater and when children may be watching.
Television, though, rarely shows these images at any time. RTÉ's 9 p.m. news bulletin had already broadcast pictures of the body of a baby that evening, a step that was necessary but brave in an environment where the lifting of the watershed does not mean the lifting of self-censorship.
Television news revels in violence, but not in its consequences. It dwells on what a missile can do to a building, but baulks at what it does to the people inside. When the market bombing took place recently, we were shown a pulverised street, but no bodies. We know there were cameras present to capture the horror because the following day newspapers on both sides of the Irish Sea led with graphic photographs of incinerated bodies. Yet television continues its self-imposed exile from reality.
It shields us from the brutality of war, yet has a fetish for the hardware that causes it. ITN gives 360-degree views of weapons, with an array of accompanying statistics. CNN presents computer graphics of jets flying bombing raids over towns. Across the news bulletins, there are maps dotted with cartoon tanks and little explosions. But each time a bulletin marvels over this high-tech weaponry, it should have the courage to balance things out by showing some pictures of what these weapons actually do to a human being.