Notes from a catastrophe

TV Review:David McWilliams, having assembled the cast for his sequel to The Pope's Children (possibly from a bag of cliche remnants left by the back door after that pretty memorable party), is back on the box with more pop-art economics, this time with Ireland's Generation Game.

Introducing, for our delectation, "Botox Nation", McWilliams acquainted us with a few of its residents, from "Miss Pencil Skirt" (two-tone hair extensions, spindle heels, three maxed-out credit cards, a job as a west Dublin estate agent) to the equally irritating but far better-off "Botox Betty" and "Billy Bunker", a couple of well-tanned 50-something "Accidental Millionaires" in matching plaid, licking the cream off their coveted seaside bungalow through their wrinkle-free pouts.

McWilliams, the "Boffin with the Bons Mots", has a whale of a time populating his new series, which implores us to wake up and smell the incense. The Tiger is ripe for the taxidermist, according to McWilliams, and he argues his case pretty convincingly. His theory is that China (where labour costs are one 26th of their equivalent in the US) is about to inherit the century and that eastern Europe is the new economic tart, jumping into the sack with any old multinational with a wad of cash in its fat fingers.

Meanwhile, we (that's you and I) are living on a fantasy island, paying nine times more for our houses than are our aunties in Houston, Texas, miring ourselves in debt, and about to wave bye-bye to a slew of industries that will soon be warming their pharmaceuticals in Poland or Ukraine.

Once again, as with his previous series, McWilliams's timing is bang-on, with programme one hitting the screen just as people were pulling on their woollies to queue up outside a trembling bank to get their readies back. Some hamfisted presentation aside (there was one particularly naff sequence where an "Irish" has-been madonna gets bullied off the dancefloor by a belly-topped Bulgarian beauty), Ireland's Generation Game is entertaining television, and McWilliams's talent for translating grey economic theory into gaudy soap opera should continue to have mass appeal despite the fact that he can leave no cliche unturned.

However, given we are up to our Bluetooths in warnings about global recession, rising interest rates and the unsustainability of our current economic climate, there was really very little that we haven't heard before. Barring, that is, McWilliams's eureka idea, that we disengage from Europe and beat out an appeal on the bodhran to the Irish diaspora, who (I'm not terribly sure how) will then re-inflate our sagging economy with some kind of kinetic Celtic puff.

Presumably, part two will illuminate this somewhat hazy notion. Regardless, the book to accompany the series will doubtless be stretching the Christmas stockings - and if we don't read it, we can always use it as a paperweight for that growing pile of unpaid bills.

DESPITE GRADUATING FROM my convent school just as most of the country was making a quick dash for the mailboat, I never got it together to be a part of the diaspora and always missed having a share in the exotic title. One of its number, however, poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch, who grew up in an Irish-American family in Michigan, was the subject of Cathal Black's visually arresting and quite beautiful film, The Undertaking, a programme with a strong Irish interest which managed to end up hidden in the recesses of BBC4. Whether Lynch, who describes himself as "a dancing bear" given his dichotomous professions, is one of the diaspora that McWilliams is planning to consult, I have no idea, but if the Tiger needs some metaphoric embalming, his unique combination of skills surely means there could be no better man.

Lynch (who, besides running six funeral homes and writing several collections of poetry, was the inspiration behind Alan Ball's) Six Feet Under) is a regular resident in his great-great grandfather's cottage in Moveen, Co Clare.

A gentle patrician presence, he followed his father into the family business when he realised that undertaking could be a thinking man's occupation, and his unusual perspective on life and death has imbued both his poetry and person with an idiosyncratic take on love and grief.

"Somebody better be dead," his wife would say when the telephone rang in the middle of the night, "this is no time for casual conversation." But despite the sparsely lovely images (many of the shots looked like bleached still-lifes), there was a vague air of sentimentality that hung over Black's film like a Clare mist.

Lynch described "pissing in the whitethorn trees under the stars" with the kind of mystical reverence which only people who have the facility to urinate in the comfort of their glorious Michigan homes can summon, and his attachment to the ancestral brogue and language of his forebears was at times a little cloying.

Nevertheless, this was an interesting film, worth watching out for when it eventually hits the home channels.

THE SEARCH FOR Ireland's most talented teenager is on, and Jackie Healy-Rae is in there with a shout, chequered cap nicely complementing his blushing jowls . . . oh no, sorry, wrong programme. A much-flushed Healy-Rae was in fact engaged in a monologue of such opacity as to have passed entirely over my head on RTÉ's other talent show this week, True Lives: The Naked Election.

Following nine candidates over the course of last May's general election, including three independents and others ranging across the main parties, the documentary was really a distillation of hours of footage of them traipsing across people's back gardens in a desperate scramble for "number one" votes and, in this usually excellent strand, The Naked Election possibly looked more promising than it was.

The busy snapshots of the candidates' campaigns were, of necessity due to the numbers involved, fragmented and overly brief. What was clear, however, was the emotional investment they were making in their political futures, a constant as firmly fixed as their rosettes. The resulting exhaustion of the individuals came across once the campaign was over, at the end of a long night which had, from somewhere around mid-count, bolted the door against change, leaving some despondent contenders in its shadow. Nobody fights an election thinking that they are going to lose; as political analyst Sean Donnelly said, "they all think they are going to win, they are convinced of it".

It's easy with hindsight to see where the really interesting stories of the election lay: independent Richard Boyd Barrett, for example, put up an almighty fight in Dún Laoghaire, but of all the gleaming hopefuls who littered count centres across the country (which was, staggeringly, bathed in May sunshine), Michael McDowell, glimpsed smouldering with irritation in the background as PD hopeful Frank McNamara's bid for power tinkled to a close, would have made a truly riveting centrepiece for a documentary such as this.

SO THE SEARCH for Ireland's most talented teenager is on. Class Act boomed on to the screens complete with imitation American voice-over articulating some hyperbolic nonsense and presenter Síle Seoige, all wrapped up in a cerise shirt and shiny hair, telling us that our faith in the TV talent show was about to be restored (or maybe that gem came from her running mate, perky Aidan Powers).

With 10 grand and a trophy up for grabs, the first bunch of teens strummed, kerplonked, drummed and sang their way through a competition devoid of competition. How one can compare a classical child singer in a velvet dress to an obsessive teenage drummer or a hip-hop dancer with her braces around her bottom is beyond me. That task, however, lies with Twink and her hair extensions, Tony "Lord of the Dance" London and the gorgeous Cora Venus Lunny All three judges were packed into a Perspex pod telling the contestants they are "fab" and "have a long way to go", which of course they all are and have in their own way.

Class Act isn't bad, I suppose; nobody is trying to reduce the young hopefuls to snivelling wreckage, everybody seems to be having a pleasant evening and nobody is too traumatised by the rather flamboyant set.

Oh, forget the ballot box - we'll just get Twink to judge the next election from her pod. "Potential, entertainment and performance" is what it's all about, apparently, and who better than our very own Goldilocks to tally up the talent.