TV REVIEW: The Byrne UltimatumRTÉ2, Monday Maeve Higgins' Fancy VittlesRTÉ2, Tuesday Sarah and SteveRTÉ2, Monday Who Do You Think You Are?RTÉ1, Monday Fair CityRTÉ1, all week The Liberties RTÉ1, Tuesday
WIT WITH THE biting savagery of a drooling gum permeated RTÉ2’s panel show,
The Byrne Ultimatum
, which kicked off the channel’s new comedy season and saw its host, Irish comedian Jason Byrne, attempt to wheedle wacky, off-the-cuff-humour from his four studio guests. The panellists for this inaugural outing included comedians PJ Gallagher, Bernard O’Shea and John Bishop, the latter a Liverpudlian who, possessing significantly more bone structure than his co-stars, got to sit beside the fourth of their number, former Miss World Rosanna Davidson.
“Silly, that’s what the country needs right now and that’s what it will get with this brand new six-part panel show,” reads RTÉ’s television sales website, and indeed silliness would have been a welcome relief from the forced hysteria and wanton lack of subtlety and originality on offer. There were tasteless, deadly unfunny riffs: “Nazi Germany – well, he’s killing the Jews but he did a great job on the roads!” or “Michael Jackson – let him loose in Funtasia and you’ll see why he’s dead”. This reductive nonsense was followed by an entirely imitative attempt to claw humour out of the complexity of GAA rules and how it confused the British into leaving the country.
Byrne, the slightly panic-stricken ringmaster, managed to survive the mirth with the help of two unsuspecting audience members, one of whom acted as musical director (perched on the floor atop a miniature piano), the other, at Byrne’s side, keeping score as the rounds progressed and the hilarity trickled like toxic fumes from a broken pipe.
THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, a shivering, enervated, suspicious wreck, I went ahead and reluctantly handed myself over to Maeve Higgins' Fancy Vittles. Higgins, formerly of Naked Camera,is back with a bravely quirky half-hour in which she and her sister, Lilly, prepare a minor feast for various people. This week her guests were former schoolfriends from Cobh and, over the course of the preparations, Higgins (who just about managed to peel a carrot while her efficient and relaxed sister prepared a couple of courses in the background) chatted to the camera about "being a girl, incorrectly". Peppered with archive clips and occasional sketches illustrating her scattered themes, Higgins's show manages to lift the lid on her own steaming neuroses (anticipating the arrival of her guests, she predicts that "we'll eat, drink, gossip, then go home and cut ourselves"), and the result is more than palatable.
She brings qualities to her comedy that are desperately rare on RTÉ: she is original and relatively calm, her observations are pithy, her wit delicate, her persona oddly alluring and deftly honest. She’s also absurdly informative – I never knew before that 12 or more cows were collectively known as a “flink”.
Given the hit-and-miss nature of comedy on RTÉ, Higgins is rarer than a blessing of unicorns (on misleading Halloween parties, she says: “If I’d known it was a sexy dress party, I wouldn’t have come as a medley of winter vegetables”).
IT WOULD BEa little churlish to shrug off RTÉ2's comedy overcoat without mentioning Sarah and Steve, a series of 10-minute video-diary excerpts from a fictitious young Tallaght couple who are struggling with various life issues, from giant bouncy castles to inflated desires.
From the makers of Dan and Becs(a successful series of shorts illuminating and satirising the middle-class sensibilities of two vacuous young southsiders), this new series sees a departure from poking fun at great big Ugg-booted fish in a leaking barrel and instead opts to explore west Dublin life with a degree of cautious sensitivity. Whether this will ultimately reduce the show to edible chunks of working-class sentimentality remains to be seen, but the first episode looked vaguely promising.
BUSY OLD WEEKfor the national broadcaster, what with its glittering star, Ryan Tubridy, revealing his blue-blooded ancestry in Who Do You Think You Are?and the residents of Carrigstown celebrating 20 years of duplicity, deceit and drama in Fair City.
Tubs has a pretty full-on family history behind him – past generations of Tubridys have found themselves either incarcerated in Kilmainham Gaol or at the heart of government (both his grandfathers were founder-members of Fianna Fáil, Todd Andrews on his mother’s side and Galway East TD Sean Tubridy on his father’s). But, much to his obvious astonishment – nay, discomfort – it turns out that, despite his Fianna Fáil pedigree, the perennial young fogey is a descendant of Edward III (and if you grab hold of that lineage and hoist yourself backwards, you end up with Tubridy rumbling around King John’s DNA while he signs the Magna Carta – my goodness, is there a single pie your host hasn’t got a finger in?).
“It’s like filling the soul,” said Tubridy on his experience of tracing his roots. And I’m sure it is, but the problem with these who-am-I shows are that, although they must be fascinating and emotional journeys for their subjects, the viewer can be left waiting for a table at someone else’s family feast. In truth, what such shows teach us is that most of us probably have fascinating genealogical stories in which to do our own delving, however mundane we might assume our roots to be (don’t know that we’d all glitter quite as brightly as King Tubridy, though).
SO, FAIR CITYis 20 years old! There are taxpayers and exhausted parents with double buggies walking around this town who have always known the beat of its theme tune, the shape of its arching bridge straddling the Liffey throughout their lifetime. A hard-working and solid show, its nerves and temerity have long since been dispatched, and three nights a week the actors and writers present quality drama which, for some (read my mother here), is quite unmissable.
In celebration of its significant anniversary, the fictitious Carrigstown itself is celebrating its 100th birthday. To mark the occasion, the somewhat frayed streets of this malleable town were filled with ringleted dancing girls, a police car bedecked with balloons and comedian Jon Kenny (who has climbed aboard to play Crazy Chester, a country and western singer with a deal more wig than talent) astride a frisky pony. No sooner, however, had Kenny ridden off into the sunshine, than one of the series’ long-standing characters, Yvonne Doyle, played by the sleekly lovely Ciara O’Callaghan, managed the complex soap-opera manoeuvre of switching from rampantly heterosexual uber-bitch to wannabe lesbian. This is one storyline that is set to run and run.
Oh, it's far from lesbians in steaming bistros and Limerick comics on horseback that we were reared. Where's Tolka Rowwhen you need it? Happy birthday, Fair City, you've housed some heavyweight Irish acting talent in your young life, and long may you continue to prosper.
Rich pageant A compelling portrait of life in Dublin’s historic neighbourhood
Every now and then a TV film turns up which is utterly compelling and entirely fresh. Directed by Tom Burke and Shane Hogan, The Libertieswas one of those pieces, a series of 12 beautifully shot shorts, each focusing on a different character in this historic area of Dublin.
The Liberties is undoubtedly changing nowadays, evolving into “the united nations of fruit and veg”, as one of the participants called it, describing the multi-ethnic make-up of the customers who come into his greengrocer’s shop. It is also a community which has, in recent years, had to contend with the ravaging effects of drugs.
But the film, while acknowledging the area’s difficulties, was bright, vivid, airy and intimate, telling the stories of those living and working in the area, among them the tailor, the butcher, the stonemason, the sphinx-like women on the flower stall, the statuesque newspaper seller, the actress Brenda Fricker (polishing her Oscar in her modest redbrick) and the solid, benign women patiently awaiting the bingo-caller in the vast church.
These portraits celebrate “ordinary lives well-lived in the Liberties” like a series of paintings, which hang in the memory long after the film has finished.