TV REVIEW/Shane Hegarty: If you ever find yourself killing time at a bus stop with Donal McIntyre as a companion, don't be tempted to indulge in small talk about the weather. "'Tis a soft day?" you'll say. "It'll creep into your lungs and slowly rot you from the inside out," he'll reply.
Wild Weather, BBC1, Tuesday
Supertramp: Tommy Tiernan's Walking Tour of Ireland, N2, Monday
Bodily Harm, Channel 4, Monday & Tuesday
McIntyre used to go undercover on the mean streets of Britain, unveiling the thugs and the racists and the muggers and the shysters. He worked in a nursing home and exposed the casual abuse of patients. He joined hooligans on the football terraces. He festooned himself in electronics and wandered into the nearest tenement.
The last time I saw him he was doing just this; playing with an expensive mobile phone while acting lost in some part of Britain where muggings are a part of the cultural heritage. He had spent two nights hanging on street corners like Chum in a shark pool, but nobody had bitten. He looked mightily disappointed. Finally someone pulled a knife on him, making it all worthwhile.
Having a relentlessly high profile tends to eventually erode the prospects of the successful undercover reporter, and in Wild Weather, McIntyre has been taking on a new foe: nature. It doesn't recognise his face from storm to storm. Nor does it sue.
This would be a science programme, if Donal McIntyre didn't keep rubbing his palms on the petri dish. He juts his chin at the weather and tells it to give him its best shot. Nature gives it to him. It ends in a score draw. Scientific facts come sparingly, muscled out of the way by lots of computer graphics, a couple of dramatic reconstructions and one bristling ego.
This week he took on heat. He touched lightening. He put his face to the force of a Saharan sandstorm. He ran across dunes in the Earth's toughest marathon. He hacked his way through a tropical rain forest, where the air is so damp that sweat can't evaporate and cool your skin. It's like walking around in a lagging jacket, apparently. A lagging jacket filled with spiders.
He delivers his lines in peaks and troughs. Heat, he will say calmly, is nice. It is our friend. It makes us happy and gives us tans.
But - and here, his voice will whip up a little, a chill will blow through the sentences - it can cause CHAOS and DEATH. The results can be LETHAL. Can cause a DEADLY cycle of events. Like the HEATWAVE in Chicago, 1995. HUNDREDS DEAD. Heat like a HOT TOWEL over the city. LETHAL. FATAL. CRUEL, BIZARRE DEATHS. People's insides literally MELTED. Victims were found BLEEDING from EVERY ORIFICE. Did I use the HOT TOWEL simile already? Well, I'll use it again because IT WAS like that. These DISASTERS don't happen often. But, boy, when they do, it helps make for UNNECESSARILY BOMBASTIC TELEVISION.
He should really take a leaf out of Tommy Tiernan's book. He's on a Walking Tour of Ireland and the rain seems to have a personal grudge against him. He did this tour over the summer, when, as we will never forget, the rain seemed to have a personal grudge against all of us.
For this series, he's been walking from gig to gig, with head down, hood up, drenched. The second episode saw him cover Cavan, Monaghan and Leitrim, "this vortex of counties". When he met people on the trail, they all asked him the same general question. "What do you think of round here?" The inhabitants were generally less impressed with their surroundings than their visitor was.
It's got all the necessary quirkiness, capturing the way in which Irish life often casually indulges in its Flann O'Brien-esque leanings. The election poster in Drogheda promised: "This Man Would Stand on his Head For Drogheda". Oliver Plunkett's head, remember, is on display in a local church so this was no idle boast. Tiernan had a particular fondness for the town. "This is where people from Navan go to be born and to be stabbed."
The ramble is punctuated by earthy philosophising and musings on the nature of his own performance. He is fascinated by stories and by how he can tell stories better, and the whole exercise is far more lyrical than you would expect.
Not always during his stage segments, however. Here, Tiernan delivers his routine as if he's the only one who's noticed that the aliens have taken over the Earth. "There is a fine line between saying something cheeky and something offensive," he says, before we see a clip of a joke in which straightforward vulgarity has overruled both.
He met a priest, who came to one of his gigs just in time to catch the final, flithiest part of the routine. He accused Tiernan of playing to the lowest common denominator. "Do you remember what Shakespeare said? About hitting the ears of the groundlings?" This man, remember, is paid to look into the soul. "Are you afraid it might fall a little flat if you don't end on that?" The priest has a point about the stage work, but happily there is nothing at all flat about the TV programme.
The rain, though, was not the only thing conspiring against Tiernan. His programme forms part of a schedules pile-up in which it is never going to win. Ten o'clock on a Monday night currently represents a test of the couch potato's will. Which child to love? The Shield on TV3? Six Feet Under on E4? Most pertinently, The Office on BBC2. That Tommy Tiernan has been thrown up against the latter, never mind the rest, is a stroke of scheduling ineptitude made altogether unforgivable by Network 2's refusal to move it. Things float around the RTÉ schedules with maddening regularity, but they seem to have superglued Tommy Tiernan's show to that slot. It demands a repeated run.
One of the juggernauts which Tommy Tiernan found himself up against was Bodily Harm, which ran its first episode on Monday night. The second followed on Tuesday; an episode twice as long as the first,making it the latest drama to swallow three hours of your television watching over successive nights, as if they have something of such worth that they just can't hold it back any longer.
Many viewers will have found it all a little too much, technically a little too much of a Mike Leigh homage, and its narrative another re-telling of modern suburban bliss as Sysiphian nightmare. But two things in particular lifted it out of the ordinary.
First, it had Timothy Spall. His face seems to have been born crestfallen, which is just as well, because he has rarely played a character whose crest was not well and truly plummeting. He played Mitchel, whose birthday began with him being sacked in the morning, being told that his father is dying in the afternoon, and in the evening discovering that his wife's faithfulness has crumbled under the temptation of a "Spanish kiss" at his fancy dress party ("It's like a French kiss, only further south").
It was unveiled after a double act of fellatio so abrasive and explicit that your eyes roamed towards the tea, at the ceiling, towards the fire, anywhere but at the television, which continued to grunt and groan and squelch with much indelicacy. When the couple left the bedroom, Mitchel sat up from underneath the guests' coats piled on the bed, a monkey mask hung pathetically on his head. It was a brilliantly executed sucker punchline, and the final nudge towards an explosive breakdown. Many happy returns, Mitchel.
Second, it was also rescued by George Cole and Annette Crosbie as Mitchel's parents, Sidney and Sheila, who agreed on a suicide pact predicated by his terminal cancer. Theirs was a storyline with a horrible twist. In a most moving extended scene, they took the overdose but she - healthy yet sacrificing herself to be with him - died. He - rotting away - survived to face the loneliness.
That it could carry you to this point and beyond must be credited to acting of insouciant craftsmanship and Tony Grounds's careful script. Cole's and Crosbie's scenes resembled those of the old television plays; a set, two actors, no soundtrack, plenty of silence. Cole was especially impressive, playing both the Jekyll of a tender husband and the Hydeof a bullying father to Mitchell. But between them, they succeeded with a rare storyline; that of a compelling, sexually-charged love story featuring an elderly couple.
While the piece concluded with a predictable emergence of order somehow leaping from the chaos, these were scenes of unusual power, ones that were genuinely thought-provoking. And with the drama ending at a quarter to midnight, it meant you carried them with you to bed, and got immediate re-runs in your sleep.