TV REVIEW: We never met the wives of Noel and Roy Spence, but they must be very patient women indeed. When Noel and his other half bought a crumbling property in Bangor, Co Down, it came with a disused chicken shack at the side. He took one look at the run-down dwelling and knew what he needed to do. Priorities are priorities, so he got straight to converting the chicken shack into a 66-seat homage to 1950s cinema. The wife had objections, but they were drowned out by the roar of The Thing That Couldn't Die.
His brother Roy, meanwhile, has a relatively restrained 25-seat picture house in his farmyard. They are both places snagged in time, the results of endless hours scavenging the shells of abandoned cinemas to make theirs authentic, down to the flock wallpaper. Noel's is called The Tudor and Roy's The Excelsior, and both names are written in neon above the door, winking nostalgia across the car park. They show 1950s horror movies with titles sometimes more exotic than the plots. Monster on the Campus. The Screaming Skull. I Was A Teenage Werewolf. Terror from the Year 5000. It makes complete sense to see that Noel has permanently shocked hair.
Their favourite movie of all is The Blob, starring a young "Steven" McQueen looking identical to the old Steve McQueen. Perhaps the most shocking thing about The Blob is its jiving title theme. It sounds like an ad for toys. "Beware of The Blob/It creeps and leaps and glides and flies." The film's most famous scene, a psychologist might interject, involves The Blob invading a small town cinema.
The title of this documentary comes from the club Noel and Roy run for 50s sci-fi buffs. The entry test involves completing 10 movie poster blurbs. "We'd give them one like: 'Science's Greatest Terror . . .' Which everyone knows is 'Tarantula'." Amazingly, not everyone. "If they don't score seven or more, they're phoneys." There are only a handful of members of The Chowder Club. All of them, it seems, are men.
The Creep of the 1950s Cinemas has well and truly taken hold in their part of the world, with eight cinemas within a few miles of theirs. They have built five others apart from their own, catering to the whims of nostalgic middle-agers for whom a Ferrari would be a mite predictable. One man had his bedroom converted into a 12-seater cinema. Another now steps from sitting room to The Waldo in seconds. "I had a sort of early mid-life crisis," said Noel of his decision to quit teaching and live the dream. It briefly made you want to throw it all in and live your own life to the soundtrack of a Bernard Hermann score and the scream of a prom queen in distress.
Noel and Roy would have been no challenge to Lord Robert Winston. The brothers wear their nostalgia on their sleeves, carrying it from an adolescence spent hitching across the country and sleeping in hay sheds in search of the latest terror flick. With Child Of Our Time, Winston is tracking the children of 2000 from birth to adulthood. They are in their second year, an age when the children are "absorbing information like blotting paper". They learn at least two complex manoeuvres a day. Memories become stored away at the back of the subconscious, to be re-animated when the nostalgia arises, or if survival necessitates it.
At the centre of this first episode of the current series was Charlotte, a little girl living in a home for broken families, and developing a relationship with her mother in which the onus is increasingly on independence rather than nurture. It showed a clip from last year, in which we observed the reactions of toddlers when their mother left the room for a moment. Charlotte was the only one year old to react with nonchalance rather than tears, the conclusion being that she wasn't sure if her mother Emma actually loved her. "There may be costs later on," suggested the psychologist on hand. Psychological or financial, he didn't specify, although you can't have one without the other.
"Many of her unconscious memories will be sad," explained Lord Winston of a girl living a life in which her father is physically absent and her mother emotionally so. The programme introduced a "Play Therapist" to show mother and child how to do it. The results were promising, although it's still too easy to believe that her story could ultimately be a disheartening one. Child Of Our Time is a model of popular science for television, not the social observation of Seven Up. Yet this tracking of individual lives over 18 years already hints at the inevitability of tragedy. If the whole experiment is beginning to look like a manual for the psychologists of the future, it may also become a file for Charlotte's future psychologists.
If you are impatient you can fast-forward to the teenage years through Channel 4's Teenage Kicks series. Drugs Are Us attempted to give us the teens-eye view on the drug-use it insisted is prevalent among British kids. It contrasted the experience at either end of the classes. The middle-class schoolboys with drugs as a designer decision and slightly fretting but oh-so-liberal parents, versus the working class girl burning her future up on a spoon with her mother resigned to the inevitable.
Ashleigh is 17 years old and has been using heroin since she was 13. She is physically undeveloped (she has never had a period) and is slipping into addiction like it's the most natural thing in the world. Her friends prostitute themselves for the money, she borrows from a mate's uncle she once "went with" and sells one of her childhood dolls when necessary. She spends ages on her hair, wears her make-up crudely and jabs the needle into her porcelain skin like she's painting her toenails.
Two of Ashleigh's sisters are already long-term addicts. Heroin is becoming the family hand-me-down. "It's beaten me," said the mother Maureen, with the matter-of-fact air of someone who knows she could never have won.
There have been few better title sequences than that to Six Feet Under. It is a sublime, ethereal, deaths-eye view, scored by a quirky, addictive theme. They are opening credits to really look forward to, a little fix every time you see them.
The drama itself promised the same, but the fact that the credit sequence is the most affecting thing about it says much about how profoundly disappointing it has been. The plot is developing all the time, but the characters have remained rooted in the opening episode. With that first hour it seemed as if we were being shown sketches from which the characters would gradually emerge. Instead it turned out to be the full picture.
Episodes work well in isolation, where the thrust of the plot, an abrasive script and flashes of ingenuity can make it a fairly wholesome hour of watching. But the underlying storyline hasn't evolved with any real skill. There are also a growing number of cameo caricatures rather than characters. It often looks great, it often sounds great, and given the right conditions it even often seems great. But Six Feet Under increasingly looks like an impressive make-up job on a cadaver's skin.
Keith Duffy has arrived in Coronation Street. It will take some time before he blends into the yellowed wallpaper of the Rovers. Every time someone calls him Ciaran you half expect him to glance around confused, before realising it's himself they're referring to. It would be understandable. The audience at home is doing the same.
He is, of course, a charmer. He has a grin that is fixed by superglue. Every sentence ends in a wink. His lines tattooed across his body. He is a big guy and when he stands beside Fred Elliott, you realise that they are both the same size only with gravity working in vastly different ways.
Keith has arrived as a friend of Peter Barlow, son of Ken. If you ever wondered just why Ken Barlow is so dull, it may be because Peter skived away with all the personality during conception. He has misadventures at every turn. His eye sockets are so black it has coloured his entire outlook on life. He has settled down with Rovers Return barmaid Shelley, and only a few months back was a man of pure jealousy, spying rival suitors in every snug. Now he's happy to let Ciaran sleep on his couch and spend the evening with Shelley. Does Peter not watch the soaps? In EastEnders, Colm O'Maonlai plays a charming Irish cad with a brogue that would bed a nun. In soapland, Irish men have a way with women that is baffling to those of us stranded in reality.
We Irish don't like to be stereotyped. There are times, though, when we must accept the burden gracefully.
