TV ReviewOn RTÉ2, the continuity announcer introduced The Dinner Party: "You may want to change channels now if you're faint-hearted, prudish or easily offended." She shouldn't have been so coy. There were so many reasons why you should have changed channels that if she were to go through each one she would have been reciting them all the way up to the national anthem.
In this, five young strangers have dinner. They talk about sex. Then they talk about each other. Somebody wins €1,000 at the end of it all. If nothing else, then, it establishes the price of dignity.
They talked about sex as if it is the only thing on the mind of a generation. That it's sex aids and "f***buddies" and bananas from dawn until dusk, from cappuccino until carpaccio. That this is the natural discourse of everyone under 40 rather than the end product of the producer's clumsy conniving. It was engineered, I suppose, under the presumption that their sex lives would make for better entertainment than their opinions on the next budget or the state of public transport.
The contestants wallow in their collective inanity until the part of the show where presenter Amanda Brunker shows up, at which point it all gets sucked into a black hole of vacuity from which it should never return.
The Dinner Party is sleazy, gratuitous, stupid. But that doesn't have to be such a crime. Television will always find room for sleaze, gratuity and stupidity. Worst than all these, though, The Dinner Party is tedious. Mind-numbing, monotonous. Somebody inform the continuity announcer. In the meantime, you may want to change channels now, just to be safe.
There was plenty of sex talk in The Snip, but in an altogether different context. This was a sparky documentary about the vasectomy. Actually, much of it was about Larry O'Rourke's vasectomy. This father-of-five let the country watch something most men wouldn't look at themselves, and did so with a winning mixture of vulnerability and wit. "I'm more nervous of having a camera at me than I am having my testicles chopped," said Larry. His kids, you feel, will have had an interesting week in the school playground.
The film was too keen on visual puns between scenes. A vasectomy is pretty much irreversible (cue 'No u-turn' road sign). It stops the sperm from getting through ('Swimming prohibited'). It doesn't stop your sex life (a popping champagne cork). It's just they can't get through the tubes (DART going through tunnel). There have been legal problems (a can of worms is spilled. Really). OK, enough. You've made your point. (Strings of sausages. Chopping of meat.) Cut it out.
Anyway, back to Larry, who was in the waiting room and looked like he was having second thoughts. About having the cameras there, that is. "Impressive, isn't it?" he said to us once he lay on the table, his underpants stretched around his knees and his testicles sagging like a pudding that hadn't risen. Once the valium kicked in, though, it was party time. Doctor: "Oops Larry, I need you to stop laughing." The doctor did what a doctor has to do. Larry's testicles were clamped, sliced, burnt. At that moment, you could have put your head out your window and heard a deep, collective groan drifting through the Irish gale.
Not Larry. After the op, he rang his wife, Nicola.
Larry: "I'm buzzing! It was great! But I think I've developed a valium habit." Nicola: "You're on a high, are you?" Larry: "Oh God almighty!" Since the operation, the couple has enjoyed "Hollywood sex" while Larry looks like a man with a weight off his mind. Or whichever bit it is that men are reckoned to do their thinking with.
The Catholic church considers it a sin to have a vasectomy, we learned in The Snip. Making Babies didn't tell us, but it's a sin to have in vitro fertilisation as well. So it's wrong to not make babies and wrong to make them. You are expecting to feel guilty for not wanting them and guilty when you do. This three-part series follows couples as they go through fertility treatment, and it is a reminder that there are many people out there who do not have the luxury of deciding not to have children. "We're kind of the forgotten people," as one remarked. They grieve for the loss of something they have never had, a loss largely invisible to the rest of the population.
If the programme went a little too quickly to the science, perhaps the remaining programmes will tease out further the emotional aspects that dominate every moment in between. But if Larry O'Rourke showed an unconventional heroism this week, these people's quiet, relentless courage in lonely and desperate circumstances will have brought a certain solace to other couples who face infertility, and a greater understanding to those who do not.
BACK TO RTÉ2, which has been disinterred after 16 years. Although, unless it returns to the old routine of only getting started at four in the afternoon then it's only a new coat over an old suit. RTÉ2, for the moment, is still Network 2. The only confusion comes in remembering to refer to it by its new old name.
It arrived in a blaze of comedy this week, most notably with sketch show Stew. No longer does comedy shuffle on to RTÉ like a clown with a malfunctioning dicky-bow. Stew is confident, well-made and well-acted. None of which would be any use if Paul Woodfull and Paul Tylak's show wasn't funny. That's altogether trickier.
The problem with modern sketch shows is that sometimes you don't know that you've enjoyed it until you find yourself, several weeks later, repeating catchphrases you didn't used to think were hilarious but suddenly seem indispensable. That was the way with The Fast Show, which Stew owes a debt to, and Little Britain, which it most obviously resembles. Like those, it wears you down through recurring characters and repetition. Some succeed quickly, such as the recovering alcoholic who arrives at inopportune moments with his story of redemption, and Tylak and Tara Flynn's moronic breakfast DJs. Others are less certain. Maybe the crumbling aristocrat for whom excrement brings back memories of faded love will become funny with further sketches, but he is very similar to The Fast Show's "very, very drunk" character.
It's not comedy that hits you square in the gut, but its characters are recognisably Irish and it might develop through the episodes. However, it could do with losing the irritating audience laughter. Stew is not the only thing that comes in cans.
Pat Shortt's sitcom Killinaskully is as Irish as Stew, but is mired in the comedy of another era. When its pilot episode aired last Christmas, it was imperfect but at least carried the potential for a popular prime-time sitcom. Instead, it returns slack and spent. Shortt's comedy is far less buoyant without a theatre audience to lift it.
It's got a German character who talks like zis and who described someone getting flattened by a steamroller with lines to make you grimace. "My friend has been knocked up from behind." OK. "He got laid from behind." Yes, yes, we get the joke.
Shortt is a talented excavator of the Irish character, but Killinaskully settles for hollow cliché and tiresome double entendre.
THE ACTOR KEVIN Kline showed up on Parkinson on Saturday night. At least, it sort of looked like Kevin Kline. It kind of sounded like Kevin Kline. It must have been Kevin Kline. It's just that a person calling himself Kevin Kline had appeared on The Late Late Show the night before, but had been a tepid enough guest, the interview eking out 20 minutes. Throughout it he sat with his fingers bridged and the discomfort creeping into his brow; perhaps he was trying to figure out why the conversation got carried away in the vacuum between host, guest and audience.
But on Saturday night, well, what a delightful guest this Kevin Kline was. An animated 10 minutes of banter and anecdotes. It helped that he had Joanna Lumley and Ricky Gervais for company, of course, but it helped more that he had Michael Parkinson, not Pat Kenny, as host. As is Parkinson's way, it was an interview disguised as conversation. Ithad a flow to it, not governed by a checklist of questions. With his first question, Parkinson revealed that Kline had originally wanted to be a composer, but what he eventually did was reveal him to be an entertainer.
Alongside Pat Kenny, though, Kline's personality had shrivelled. Kenny had done his research and looked like he would let nothing interrupt his recitation of it. It left no room for rapport, yet there were still gaps for the viewers. Kenny mentioned parts in movies, but not the movies. He talked about Kline's actress wife, but didn't name her (Phoebe Cates). A chat show needs a certain amount of performance from its host as much as his guests, but we were left with neither. Like so many guests before him, Kline had arrived breezily, only for the wind to drop immediately. For some reason, a low hiss is often audible from the Late Late Show studio. You have to come to the conclusion that it's the atmosphere leaking from the room.