In Bachelors Walk, Barry - part-time theatrical agent for buskers, full-time dosser - has the best lines. "That's Chinese philosophy," he said, pointing at the two-tone circle he's painted on the bedroom wall. "The Cheech and Chong." Well, as Barry might explain it, on Network 2's new-look Monday night comedy schedule, Bachelors Walk was a healthy Cheech to seriously askew Chong of The Cassidys.
Putting two new comedy series back-to-back is like putting all your fish in the one barrel and handing the critics elephant guns. RT╔ is good at lots of things, but the world and its sidekick knows that it usually takes to the comedy stage with all the success of an agoraphobic. Some things change, some things stay the same. Bachelors Walk is natural, unhurried, sharp and funny. The Cassidys isn't so much a sitcom as a televised muscle relaxant.
The Cassidys came first, a Friends homage brashly - and unflatteringly - scheduled immediately after the US sitcom.
It's usually preferable to wait a couple of episodes before reviewing a sitcom in order to allow for a bedding-in period and to allow for the introduction of the characters. The Cassidys, though, neatly side-stepped this problem by just not bothering to introduce the characters at all. It is apparently about two sisters and a brother living together in a suburban Dublin house. Exactly which of the five characters hanging around the house are related was anybody's guess, until about 10 minutes in when two of the characters began to have sex, which hopefully rules them out.
The big joke in the first episode was about the sisters (Sinead Keenan and Alison McKenna) forgetting their brother's (Ed Byrne) birthday. If you think that looks pallid as a sentence, you should try it as an actual plot. Everybody tried very hard, but caught in comedy quicksand, the more they struggled the deeper they sank. Short scenes at least help things go nowhere snappily, even if they are linked by shots of the outside of the house and a guitar jingle guaranteed to drive you absolutely insane by the third hearing. One of these little interludes showed young folk milling about Dublin (Temple Bar, of course). If they try and do that again, Dublin might turn to the camera and insist that it not be dragged into this.
On television's evolutionary ladder, the comedy-drama is currently bashing the sitcom to extinction. The format - with hand-held camera, real locations and no laugh track - is the seam from which the best contemporary television comedy is being mined. The hamminess is instantly taken down a notch or three, the need for quick-fire jokes is eliminated, the sets don't look quite so rickety. There were two jokes in the first minute of Bachelors Walk and they both raised a decent chuckle. In The Cassidys there were plenty of jokes but no laughs. In sitcom world, silence suffocates. In comedy-drama, it's that same silence which allows the script to breathe easily, to let the characters develop and the actors act without fear of the live studio audience, wheeled in and given a couple of free drinks to get them giddy.
Bachelors Walk has a way to go yet, but now that the introductions are over there's something about it which suggests it could develop very nicely indeed.
At a basic level, this comedy has much in common with The Cassidys. Three guys, struggling to get lives and deal with women, while living together in the centre of Celtic Tiger Dublin. The Zeitgeist alarms go off loudly when you hear that. Bells that warn of dotcom satire, epileptic camera work and txt msg jokes.
Tom Hall, John Carney and Ciaran Carney's series turns out to be much more than that, or - in a way - much less. Dublin is a backdrop, not quite a central character. The script, leisurely and confident, strolls through the city without making too much of a fuss. In The Cassidys, the characters drink in a trendy bar/cafΘ called Gonohawa because, like, duh, that's where young Dublin cubs go. In Bachelors Walk, the thirtysomethings take refuge in the more traditional and real spots of Mulligans and Nearys.
Michael (Simon Delaney), Raymond (Don Wycherly) and Barry (Keith McErlean) are loafers in a timeless tradition, the sort of men who live on grand ideas, but have none of the application to actually carry them out. Barrister Michael isn't exactly minting it from the Tribunals, leaving for work but going straight for the pub. When his girlfriend opened his briefcase to discover only two cans of lager and The Irish Times crossword, men all across the country will have hugged their briefcases close.
Introducing the characters with a tour of the house for a prospective tenant got the immediate exposition over with quickly, and when the visitor left five minutes after the opening credits we were already left in the company of three instantly recognisable characters.
Strong performances delivered the words as if they were infused with a heavy dose of improvisation. Compared to the superficiality of the characters in The Cassidys, they will be peeling layers off these for the rest of the series.
Episode one belonged to Wycherly's movie critic Raymond, and his potent awkwardness when meeting with an ex-girlfriend, returned from the US and obviously far more successful than him. He attempts to impress her by transparently talking up his stagnant career and about how he's getting into his "serious writing"; after which we see him struggling with rogue children at a press screening of Rugrats In Paris. I would like to assure confused readers that this is a serious misrepresentation of the fine mind of the critic. No, really. Honestly. Come back . . .
As a story of conjoined twins, the tale of Chang and Eng wasn't a typical one. Joined at the stomach, the brothers (the original and famous "Siamese" Twins) became circus freaks; but only so long as it took for them to earn enough money to buy a farm in North Carolina, settle down as gentleman farmers, marry two sisters and have 21 children.
Then again, none of the stories in Joined: The World of Siamese Twins could be called typical.
Hussein and Hassan were separated at eight months. Twelve years on and the boys still dream of Chang and Eng arriving and sticking them back together. The boys often sleep in the same bed, chest to chest, in the same position in which they emerged into the world.
Two halves of what was once one.
The good stories are the kind Allison and David Lawler need to hear.
This tender, revealing two-part documentary is following her pregnancy with Siamese twins, linked by the heart. Chances of survival are slim, but Allison will not accept it. An ultrasound technician was asked what she thought of the mother's attitude. "I think self-denial is definitely her place." As Allison watched the ultrasound, the two children with two hearts beating as one, you did wonder how she could be anywhere else.
Whatever happens, her daughters' lives will be better than that of Masha and Dasha, the oldest living conjoined twins. Born into Stalin's Russia, they were taken from their mother at birth and raised in institutions. The state films of them as children show two beautiful girls moving through the world on one pair of legs.
We heard the heart-breaking story of how Dasha fell in love once, to a boy with Multiple Sclerosis. Masha couldn't stand the idea of either losing her sister to another man or of having to live with the couple once she had. She quickly put paid to the idea of her sister having a husband. Fairy-tale romance gave way to a life of extraordinary compromise.
They are now elderly and alcoholic, living in a retirement home and not too inclined to venture outside, where the public, taught to think of disability as freakish, react by stopping dead in the street and gawping. You don't mess with Masha and Dasha. "What are you staring at shit-face? You're not so pretty yourself." The camera caught sight of their target, peeking out from behind a tree.
They had a point.
tvreview@irish-times.ie
