TV Review Shane HegartryOn Monday night, Faria Alam took the route well-trampled by spurned mistresses. In Sven and Me she used a television interview to explain the whys and wherefores of her trysts with Eriksson and FA chief executive Mark Palios. She even managed a few tears. Quick, you thought, somebody hand her a bank note so she can blow her nose.
Blame Princess Diana. It was she who started this trend of confessional and self-vindication, of wretchedness veiled as righteousness. Monica Lewinsky has done it, as, more recently, has Rebecca Loos. Their pillow talk shall echo through the ages.
Diana was interviewed by Martin Bashir, but ever since that, it has been female reporters who ask the questions. They are there to give an impression of sisterhood, but are simply agents of the press, manufacturing trust until it lulls the subject into revealing intimate details. When Kay Burley interviewed Loos for Sky News, she used giggling cajolery. She shared Loos's infamous text messages; led her into the tantalising euphemisms of the romance novel. Fiona Foster interviewed Alam on behalf of Tonight with Trevor McDonald, but she did not turn the thing into a pyjama party.
Instead, she maintained a pretence that this story should be taken most seriously indeed; that this story actually matters. Foster is a kind of identikit reporter. Here, she kept her lips pursued and her face stern. She asked her questions slowly and deliberately. She even blinked slowly and deliberately, as if the weight of the topic dragged at her mind.
She brandished a pen, perhaps as a visual aid. She is the journalist, it reminded us, because the camera so often focused on Foster's reactions that it could be confusing as to which of these two women was centre stage.
So, in a hotel somewhere - a set of carafes on the window, distant, blurred figures visible through the window - Foster yanked and pulled at the details. But having already had a couple of weeks of the story, climaxing over last weekend with Alam's interviews in the tabloids, it was not a juicy romp but slow and methodical, dulled by familiarity. Foster seemed most amazed that a secretary could keep such exalted company.
"Just the two of you went to lunch?" she asked.
"Yes," replied Alam.
"A PA and the England coach?" "Yes." And so on. As with Loos, Alam had succumbed to the temptation to blurt, while the men involved stayed quiet. It might be about sexual politics being splashed out on a grubby canvas, but it is more likely about economic imbalance. At least Diana, alongside her emotional desperation, had the concerns of a feud with the most powerful family in Britain and her place in history. With Loos and Alam it was about gambling reputation against financial opportunism. It seldom works out well. Goran-Eriksson is still the England coach. Alam, goes the joke, will always be known as the office bike.
It's some time now since TG4 moved Curb Your Enthusiasm into prime time, where its dirty brilliance now shines brightly. It remains something of an acquired taste. The deliberately shoddy camera work and editing; the confusion and hesitancy in the acting. They can be distracting and off-putting, but once you get used to the motion sickness, it is an unmissable sitcom revolving around David's Jewish, middle-age, male, artistic neuroses all wrapped up in a tight ball of frustration and incomprehension.
As is the way with TG4, the series repeat until the tape snaps, so don't be afraid to dip in and out at will. This week's show was a particularly good example of David's ability to find humour where humour does not normally lurk. He and wife Cheryl were renewing their marriage after 10 years, only he was disturbed by how her revised vows included a bit about loving him for eternity. He had been busy making plans for an eternity of single living. "I thought this was over in death. Isn't that what it said? Till death do us part." The vows were being renewed by a sensitive rabbi whose brother-in-law was killed on 9/11. Knocked down by a bicycle courier in Los Angeles. He had arranged infidelity with a Hasidic Jew, only to be told, wrongly, that they have sex only through a hole in a sheet. Meanwhile, a dinner party ended in a row between a contestant from TV show Survivor ("We had very little rations. No snacks. It was miserable") and a Holocaust survivor ("You want misery!") whose glass eye later reflected the sun with tragic consequences.
Curb Your Enthusiasm has no business being on TG4, of course. But at least it can be found somewhere.
On Tuesday night, Channel 4 introduced us to The F**ing Fulfords, remnants of the landed aristocracy who were most obliging in allowing a camera crew to come and revel in their decaying upper-crustiness. The landed gentry now exist almost solely for the entertainment of the watching plebs. Accents so in-bred that they've developed speech impediments. Personalities heavily swathed in eccentricity. Opinions formed on the croquet green of far-off battlefields.
The patriarch was Francis Fulford. He laughed like a Blackadder character. "Whoff, whoff, whoff." He had a gap in his teeth through which his prejudices flowed. Homosexuals: "It's like breeding a mule." Germans: They have a fat gene." Scottish: "Gits. MacFrasers, MacDougals and MacF**k-ups." Management trainees: "A bigger bunch of w**kers I've never met."
The Fulford's house is grand enough that the kids can play games of cricket in the drawingroom, but the family is no longer so grand that it can afford to repair the damage done by them. Francis won't sell off chunks of land ("Not the done thing."), so has turned instead to various money-making ventures and blind optimism. His wife, Kishanda, cleans by day and goes on treasure hunts by night. She has a recurring nightmare about finding staircases she never knew were there.
They have four children, who spent much of their time on this vast estate watching television in the smallest room in the house; at least, until Kishanda tore it from the wall and flung it in the lake. The children then resorted to adventures in mud-ponds, fights in the forest and free-wheeling across the fields. It would seem such a delightful Swallows and Amazons existence if they weren't so likely to shoot at the swallows and ridicule the Amazons.
Francis is keen to pass on the heritage and traditions of the family. His children will be successful only if they "understand and agree with one's own prejudices. Whoff. Whoff. Whoff". He's full of such epigrammatic delights. "A family can survive one idiot, but can't survive two." Cue a shot of young Arthur Fulford, heir to the crumbling manor. Tubby and obnoxious. The kind of child you can only be delighted is somebody else's.
He is quite good at tearing the house apart, but only time will tell if he is any good at putting it back together.
"Our lives in Ireland are relatively unaffected by great natural catastrophes," explained Dr Phádraig Kennan in Written In Stone. You had probably noticed that already. That your breakfast remains uninterrupted by earthquake. That you park your car without fear of volcanic cataclysm. That you go to bed at night and do not wake on top of a mountain in Djibouti.
We live in a geographically passive land, but it hasn't always been so.
There are fault lines running through the country, but they have become cosy, having shuddered their way here and decided that it's a nice spot to settle down. Dr Kennan's programme examines the clues as to how excitable our land used to be. Mountains bent double. Rocks where rocks oughtn't to be. The timescale of such geological events is unimaginable. If the earth's history was the length of this programme, he told us, the human race would appear only half a second from the end. Or if all of earth's history was his span from fingertip to fingertip, he added, then one scrape from a manicurist's file would erase the human race. There's nothing like coming home from a hard day's work to be made feel utterly insignificant.
Anyway, millions of years from now, when we might constitute a whole fingernail, a TV scientist will be able to tell Ireland's geological story with some fresh examples. The Atlantic will have closed and Ireland will be the mangled bumper on the front of the continent. Our island is on the move, Dr Kennan promised. Where is it going? You'll have to tune in next week to find out. Please let it be somewhere sunny.