TV Review/Shane Hegarty: If medical dramas were viruses, they'd have pulled the plug on all the televisions by now. They infest every corner of the schedule, eating away at mid-afternoons, forming a hard crust over late evenings.
There are British, US and New Zealand strains. In Australia, they make and export hospital dramas like the Chinese do cheap tellies. Now Ireland, finally, has its very own medical drama.
I suddenly feel a little queasy.
But here's the thing: The Clinic isn't that bad. Its first episode bright and confident and though the credulity creaked, it remained quite engaging. There was cause for concern. Fair City runs irregular episodes set in a local hospital and when they do it is like transplanting a hand on to a leg. It has a paper set, paper scripts and constantly refers to Casualty and Holby City to see what it needs to do next.
The Clinic is not set in a hospital, but in an urban surgery. Run by the good, honest, how-could-you-not-love-that-face Dr Ed Costello (David Wilmot) and his wife, Dr Cathy Costello (Aisling O'Sullivan). They run what may be the most inept clinic in Dublin. Its waiting room is always full, yet it is losing money. It is overstaffed.
RTÉ seems to have taken seriously its responsibility to service the entire country, by casting enough actors to cover all the country's accents. The patients are average for these things; the sort who come in with a scraped knee and leave having been reunited with the daughter they didn't know they had.
It did a fine job of introducing the characters, sometimes taking a short cut through stereotype. It's cleaner is Eastern European. Its male nurse is gay. Ooh, matron. It may have panicked a little once it needed them to do something, because it quickly got a touch of whatever it is that infects Footballers' Wives and pushed the receptionist, Fiona, into the role of boiling psychopath. There was no time for deft characterisation. She had been introduced as a character whose mind was slightly unhinged until the script suddenly yanked it clean off the hinges. She has a crush on Dr Costello, meaning that she'll crush anyone who gets in her way. By the end of episode one, she had turned up in his house late at night at a moment when she knew he was having sex with his wife and thrown his talking hamster in the bin.
Norma Sheahan plays the part well, pruning her words to keep the madness from bursting out all over. Yet, it suggests that The Clinic has decided to go over the top early, to overdose on melodrama. If it can get the tone right, then it may not be as painful as first feared.
Take three plot-twists and see me next week.
The idea behind The Underdogs is ingenious. Send Brian Mullins, Jarlath Burns and Mickey Ned O'Sullivan around the country to find the gaelic footballers previously ignored by county selectors and then, when you've cleaned them up a bit, send them out against the Dubs. It is a wonderfully local concept , because it is hard to imagine another national sport in which guys who normally confine their heroics to remote, gale-whipped pitches and bed-time can be allowed to take on one the sport's leading teams - yes, Dublin is one of the leading teams
The thinking here is that there is a disgruntled player in every town in every county; yelling obscenities at the telly on match days, grumbling into their pints about being passed over for selection because they didn't sleep with the county board or whatever. Now they have been given their chance to prove themselves on television, where disgruntled rejects from The Underdogs can yell obscenities at them.
There was a little disgruntlement in this first trial, for Leinster, but there was more misplaced cockiness. Selectors across the county will have been smug this week because there was little to make Tommy Lyons quake in his tracksuit. One chap had never played football before. Others treated the ball like a piece of hot coal. You watched it and decided, I could do better than that, they should pick me. Which is the whole idea.
Superstars is back on the BBC. "It's iconic television," said presenter Johnny Vaughan. No, it's ironic television. For those too young or amnesiac to know, Superstars features sportsmen (and, these days, women) from various disciplines competing against each other in eight events. It used to take itself seriously, but Vaughan has a smirk that sits sideways in his mouth and eyebrows that are permanently arched. He is assisted by Suzi Perry. You always know a programme is made for men when the female host is obliged to dress like Lara Croft. "Who do you fancy?" Vaughan asked her. "And who do you think is going to win?"
Vaughan is here as a representative of the thirtysomethings for whom the mention of Superstars brings back warm, fuzzy memories of footballers with exploding perms and short shorts, of Brian Jacks doing squat thrusts and Kevin Keegan falling off his bike. Those kids who watched the television of the early 80s now make the television of the early 00s, so, like Mastermind and Parkinson before it Superstars has been rescued from oblivion.
This time around the stars are not so super. Where once it could rely on the glamour of top footballers, Keegan's loss of balance saw an end to that and no manager will risk injuring a player during a kayak race against a jockey. This first programme featured plenty of people who were all former somethings. Former athletes Colin Jackson and John Regis, former rowers John and Greg Searle, former rugby international Phil de Glanville. The only footballer was former player Stuart Pearce.
Wayne McCullough has been told by several doctors that his refusal to become a former boxer may result in him becoming a former human being. He was doing quite well in Superstars until he burnt all the skin off his big toes while doing the squat thrusts.
There was a time-out for some footage of Brian Jacks. Excuse me, "The Legend that is Brian Jacks", as Vaughan is obliged to call anyone who has ever featured on I Love 1982.
If it stopped reminding us of how much fun it used to be, we might just be able to see if it is any fun now. There's still something gleefully pseudo-scientific in the concept of discovering if a rugby player can beat a cricketer at golf (he can) or if an athlete is a better cyclist than a boxer (he's not). A snooker player features in a future programme. If he beats any of the athletes at anything he'll forever be introduced as The Legend That Is...
There was a warning during the first episode of the three-part documentary series Bombers. "A bomb cannot be made from any information contained in this programme," it told us, as if this country isn't already weighed down with bomb-making expertise.
The IRA and UVF gained much of their early knowledge from children's textbooks and found much of their equipment in the local corner shop. They called it "the co-op mix". Weedkiller and sugar makes an effective incendiary, as do condoms filled with sulphuric acid. A detonated petrol canister killed 12 people at La Mon House Hotel in 1978. "It was like the sun exploding," said Rita Crawford, whose daughter and son-in-law were killed that night.
From early incendiary devices, the story traced the development of more sophisticated timers and booby-traps. The IRA gave the world the car bomb, and hardly a day passes when the world does not get some use from that gift.
Like Peter Taylor's more ambitious Troubles trilogy for the BBC, Bombers is narrated through interviews with former terrorists, policemen, soldiers and victims. The combatants describe it all in a similarly matter-of-fact tone, laced with knowledge of its futility that came too late.
"It is not a matter of whether it was wrong or right. Nothing that happened then was right," said David Ervine, whom the British army once made defuse his own bomb.
This is a history of The Troubles through the explosions that formed its murderous drumbeat. The footage is often horrific, but to see the period reduced to the sight of flesh being shovelled off a street remindsyou that it is the only motif needed.