TV Review: Shane Hegarty reviews Murphy's Law BBC1, Monday, Hack TV3, Thursday, Any Given Sunday RTÉ1, Tuesday, Tabloid Tales BBC1, Tuesday, and Ryan Confidential RTÉ1, Thursday
Jimmy Nesbitt had last appeared on the screen approximately 47 seconds before he turned up in Murphy's Law. It's good to see him making a comeback after all this time. In this drama, he plays a cop who specialises in going undercover to root out the bad guys. It is a silly notion. There is not a person left who would not instantly recognise Jimmy Nesbitt. Nobody who has not accepted his hang-dog face as so ubiquitous it seems to have been stitched into the very fabric of the ether.
In Murphy's Law, Nesbitt plays a wise-cracking Irish cynic with a heart of gold and eyes of melted tin. It's a role he successfully carries off in a large percentage of the advertising you see on television. He's your best mate. He's your girlfriend's best mate. He's the funniest bloke in the pub.
He's the funniest bloke in any pub. They employ people to be his friends in all those commercials he stars in, but you just know there is a queue of people outside, waiting to buy him a pint.
Murphy's Law, scripted by Colin Bateman, is a series that follows a pilot episode broadcast back in 2001. In that, Murphy went deep undercover among a nasty drugs gang, punning his way through the danger as if it was open mic night down the local comedy club. In this week's return episode, he went deep undercover in a nasty prison, where he jigged his way through like a guy crossing a dance floor. He quipped in the face of death. He japed in the face of horror. His indefatigability was indefatigable.
He was asked to befriend a kidnapper and find out where he had stored his last victim. Thanks to the voice distortion used on his ransom tapes, the villain went by the moniker of Electric Bill. With a pun that blunt he could never be a match for our quick-witted hero. When Murphy got kicked in the testicles, he grimaced, "God, take away the pain and leave the swelling". When he narrowly avoided having his throat cut in the prison gym, he cracked, "Exercise. It's bloody dangerous!" When he got put in solitary confinement, he had smuggled in a baseball, à la Steve McQueen. There was reference made to some past horror in his life, something to do with his daughter. If I can recall the pilot episode correctly, she was kidnapped and murdered at the hands of vicious criminals. Suddenly, it all begins to make sense. Murphy must be compensating for not having come up with a wittier eulogy at her funeral.
Hack is not, as the title suggests, about a journalist who solves crimes in his spare time. Instead it is about a cop who solves crime in his spare time. Or rather, it is about an ex-cop who finds redemption through solving crime. This is about the only scenario in which you can get away with the premise. A drama about an ex-ice cream van driver who finds redemption delivering ice-cream would not pack quite the same punch. Or an ex-management consultant driven to offer pragmatic business solutions to those in need.
David Morse plays Michael Olshansky, a Philadelphia cop busted out of the force for finding $40,000 in a drugs bust and handing only $32,000 to the authorities. Now he drives a taxi, escaping the memories and his wife by doing double shifts, making him a taxi driver who drives taxis in his spare time. The city passes by the windscreen. Neon curves around the bumper. The roof light ticks on and off. The steam that fills the streets may be coming from Paul Schrader's ears as he sees Taxi Driver so shamelessly imitated.
Meanwhile, Olshansky is bemoaning his fate. "I took a bullet for this city!" His whining would be more convincing if he didn't seem so keen to take a few more. In this first episode, he picked up a man in town to find his missing daughter. Olshansky helps him, calling in a few favours from some old clichés along the way. He scoured the underbelly of the city until the girl appeared, and he beat plenty of people up along the way. Morse is an actor of stoic dignity, struggling with a script of brash ignorance. Over the weeks, we can expect his cab to become such a crime magnet that when it drives away, a chalk drawing of the car will be left behind on the street.
Murder, He Drove.
In Any Given Sunday we are watching someone go broke underestimating the taste of the Irish public. This two-part fly-on-the-wall documentary is charting the failed attempt to set up Stars On Sunday, a "newspaper without news". It was launched in April of last year and torpedoed 10 weeks later.
It would have sunk to the bottom, but it was already there.
We have no dot.com documentaries, but this will do. Only a year on from its collapse, already it represents something from another age. There is an optimism among the protagonists that grows more inauspicious with distance.
Stars on Sunday was a ridiculous idea, but we didn't know it at the time.
John Ryan and his partners put their money on the line so that we could measure the depths of our superficiality. In Any Given Sunday, Ryan's charisma lifts everything around him. He is splendidly self-aware, heading you off just as you draw breath to comment. "Listen if I was to see me on the street I wouldn't be crazy about me. I'd say, 'well, he's just a wanker, a total wanker'." He assessed the financial consequences of failure. "Stars on Sunday, bankrupt on Monday." Which, of course, is what makes for great television.
The Mirror editor Piers Morgan is currently presenting a series, Tabloid Tales, in which he interviews the people normally seen at the end of a very long lens in the pages of Heat magazine. It started with a dull interview with Victoria Beckham, despite having far better in the bag.
Further into the series, we will see Anthea Turner weep for a career that was destroyed because of a scandal that involved a chocolate bar, but which had none of the spice so famously associated with Marianne Faithfull. It might have seemed obvious for Morgan to turn to Michael Barrymore, but then Barrymore's problems were not so superficial as to be purely the cause of some tabloid heat. Besides, British television is not ready to welcome him back yet.
Someday soon, it will slide open the door to the celebrity confessional. Contrition will be demanded of him, and once he has done his penance on every show from Parkinson to Richard and Judy, then it will mark the beginning of the comeback. In the meantime, this week's appearance on Ryan Confidential followed his recent interview on the Late Late Show. Purgatory, it turns out, has taken the form of Irish television.
Barrymore remains something of a weeping wound, to be prodded at by interviewers keen to find exactly where it hurts. The residue of shock still hangs about his face. He looks as if he has just been lifted off the ground after being dragged behind wild horses. Ryan asked him about religious belief.
"We're in hell, the good bit's to come," he answered. Gerry Ryan spent a good deal of time trying to put himself in his interviewee's position, picturing how he would react if he found a body in his swimming pool and his career in the toilet. Barrymore insisted that his job was not the first thing he would think of.
"Trust me," said Ryan. "I know myself well enough . . ." Barrymore has been doing interviews largely to put forward his case for a re-trial. He is contrite, but only when he believes it is warranted.
"I think that will add three to five years on to your rehabilitation on television," said Gerry Ryan of his campaign. "What choicedo I have?" asked Barrymore.
The interview was conducted in Mayo, from where Barrymore's mother hailed, and where he continues to spend a good deal of time. He agreed with Ryan that it would be a tempting place to settle, to step away from everything and retire. Only, to hide away on the edge of Europe would be to signal defeat, to walk away from his life.
Yes, but what if he had a job to keep him occupied? RTÉ has a complicated applications procedure, but the pay is good and the holidays are very generous indeed.
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