When scientists attack

TV REVIEW: FringeTV3, Wednesday The ClinicRTÉ1, Sunday Tubridy TonightRTÉ1, Saturday CogarTG4, Sunday

'THIS WILL RIP open your consciousness." Hey, geeks, sci-fi nerds and extra-terrestrial television lovers, your Wednesday nights just got some extra fibre-optic illumination. Fringe, a "hotly anticipated" new drama, forged from the combined talents that made (among other mind-bending entertainments) Lostand Mission Impossible 3, has arrived this side of the pond courtesy of TV3 (which must have shot off the starting blocks to nab this one).

Now, Lostbored me to tears (yes, yes, I can hear your cries of indignation: how can she get dewy-eyed over costume dramas while suppurating with jadedness over such an imaginatively spooky epic?). Well, there you go: by series 97 of the interminable high-jinks in the jungle, I was willing to disappear into a Bermuda Triangle all of my own. Happily (and I use the adjective with a degree of caution), Fringeseems like an entirely less complex and yawningly self-referential entertainment. With some ironic detachment and a nod towards its (and Lost's) creator, JJ Abrams, it opened with flight 627 landing, by remote control, on the runway of Boston's Logan Airport, its portholes sticky with vomit, its interior suffuse with molten corpses. Enter the FBI and CIA in anti-contagion suits, or some such silliness, and hey presto, the Fringecurtains were parted.

It's all a bit of a giggle. There is a deadly serious blonde called Olivia (Anna Torv), whose colleague and lover gets moltened by the in-flight chemical cocktail and ends up on a gurney looking like a side of barbecued ribs wrapped in cellophane.

Olivia, undeterred by the enthusiasm of the special effects department, dashes off to Iraq in pursuit of the son of a Frankensteinian scientist, springs said scientist from a mental hospital, has her cranium shot up with LSD, gets into a rusty flotation tank in her handily matching underwear, and metaphorically swims into her charred lover's coma to unlock his memories.

Don't ask. It's fringe science, mate, the pseudo cutting edge: mind control, genetic mutation, reanimation (that's interrogating corpses), the underbelly of techno counter-intelligence (the "real war").

"What kinda terrorism is this?" asked one special agent, entering the mystery plane to view the liquefied trolley-dollies. Good question. It seems the makers of Fringehave consigned Iraq to the status of playground for dodgy American entrepreneurs and savvy Arabs looking to make a fast buck, and have chosen much scarier monsters than al-Qaeda to eat up the homeland with their gnashers: techno-baddies. Yes, we are back to those cosy old power-crazy scientists with their pussycats on their knees. As the blurb has it: "Someone out there is experimenting and the whole world is their lab." It all adds up to terrific escapism and, as each episode seems pretty contained, you can tune in for the occasional shot rather than committing your psyche to an eternity of jungle hallucinations.

THERE IS A kind of architecture in big American shows such as Fringethat tells viewers they are in the hands of an immensely moneyed production: the gargantuan, snowy, avant-garde lobbies of futuristic offices, or the hospitals pulsing with electronic tics and ultra-modern equipment, staffed by alluring Hollywood wannabes creeping around in surgical boots with expressions of direst concern. Then there are the home-grown dramas, the ones without the big bucks, where a surgical mask and a pen in a shirt pocket means doctor and a computer screen bleeping mournfully behind a bed means dead patient.

And so we come to The Clinic, RTÉ's very own medical drama, which is back for a sixth season. The series kicked off somewhat glumly with the departure of linchpin character Dr Cathy Costello (Aisling O'Sullivan), who, after a pretty hectic soap opera life, succumbed to a subdural haemorrhage (and perhaps the prospect of more taxing work elsewhere).

The Clinicis not ER, but the characters have a certain authenticity, the script has mellowed to emotional plausibility, and generally the actors are strong. There was some interesting direction going on in this episode, too: as well as the shots of characters distantly reflected in glass, there was Dr Costello's fatal subdural bleed, rendered in a kind of visual poetry, with the viewer being invited to experience her receding world from the cavern of her diminishing consciousness - most Fringe-like indeed. Someone on the programme is secure enough to let the actors get on with it and allow the camera a bit of artistic freedom, and that is a welcome sign of confidence. But the series really needs an injection of adrenalin; there is a prevailing torpor that only a really rocking script is going to shift.

Anyway, with Cathy Costello gone, we are left with a HIV-positive doc, a male nurse with a delinquent son, and a couple of lovelorn receptionists to bolster up Costello's former partner, Dan Woodhouse (Dominic Mafham). This is a soap opera, after all, so maybe, by Halloween, Dan will be bobbing for apples with the Aids doc's handsome nursing sister, who has just gotten herself out of rehab.

IT'S TAKEN ME three days to watch an hour and a quarter of Tubridy Tonight. I've been approaching the chat show in spurts, basically whenever I can face the medicine. I'm confused about Tubridy: he's obviously a bright bloke (though I don't buy the young-fogey-in-pinstripes persona), relatively unflustered, and with greater ease in front of the camera than Pat Kenny, but he still comes across as a gangly peg in a short hole, if you can bear the analogy.

I'm long enough in the tooth to remember the days before Kenny Live, when there was just one talk show during the weekend, and that, of course, was The Late Late Show. (Come to think of it, maybe it was the only thing on the box all week, besides Mart and Marketand Crossroads.) The reason I bring this up is that I wonder why RTÉ still persists in believing there is a sufficient amount of passing celebrity trade to generate two baggy talk-shows per weekend, when for almost two decades the evidence has been to the contrary. No matter which way you swing it, it feels like Tubridy Tonightis bargain-basement Late Late, a receptacle for those guests that didn't measure up to Kenny's scrutiny.

The show's raison-d'etre, presumably, is to provide exclusively light entertainment, with its lanky and potentially far more serious presenter forever consigned to the grinning television limbo of being an unprovocative Mr Nice Guy. He is helped out in this by his cheesy quartet and an uncritically enthusiastic studio audience, so eager to shine in their bland role that, as Tubridy himself pointed out, they applauded as enthusiastically when he said the country was in recession as when the girl on the orange space-hopper won them all a weekend in a B'n'B. Maybe one day Tubridy will chew the fake library set, masticate the papier-mâché tomes and initiate a coup out in Montrose to get himself into Kenny's swivel chair. It is by no means assured that a more diverse or serious imprimatur would suit Tubridy better, although I suspect it would. I speak purely for humane reasons - it's about time someone put the chap out of his toothy misery.

TIME TO MENTION a moving documentary, Scoil an tSolas, by Indian film-maker Pranjali Bhave, the first in TG4's new series of Cogar, and one, in this uniformly excellent strand, which halted my exuberant rush to the news channels to join in the sordid credit-crunch party. Bhave filmed Moya Mac Eoin, a retired Galway schoolteacher, on one of her frequent trips to Kolkata (Calcutta) in India, where she works with Loreto nun Sr Cyril Mooney. Sr Cyril founded a school for street children in Kolkata, incorporating the Rainbow Project for girls, some of whom have experienced terrifying and brutal experiences on the streets of the city. She has also, remarkably, opened up her classrooms to provide night shelter for 700 children.

Her enlightened approach to education includes allowing older and more privileged girls to teach and mentor the younger students, and making provision for these students to remain under the protection of the school until they have completed third level.

Bhave's documentary, tender and unobtrusive, recorded the students, their innocence, their small triumphs and the pain of their separation from families who cannot take care of them.

There are 13 million people in Kolkata, Mac Eoin told us, a third of them living on the street. "You wouldn't believe it until you see it," she stated simply.

This was a quietly inspirational film which (though maybe I'm being naive) seemed once again to testify to the power of that single drop in an ocean.

tvreview@irish-times.ie