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- Graham Linehan: out for the count
Sat, May 19, 2012‘The IT Crowd’ is at an end, but his ‘Ladykillers’ is a West End hit. Now the ‘Father Ted’ writer is preparing a new sitcom – and it involves working with another Arthur, he tells
JAY RICHARDSON - Racism gets the green lightSat, May 19, 2012 RADIO REVIEW : AT THE RISK of never being able to hail a cab again, it is probably safe to say that the prospect of agitated taxi drivers arguing about race for an hour is not everyone’s idea of an enjoyable afternoon’s radio.
- Has it really been seven years since we last caught 'Up'?
Sat, May 19, 2012 TV REVIEW: FIFTY-SIX IS one of those nothing ages: neither the big-deal half-century nor the 60 slide-towards-retirement landmark. It’s just so solidly middle-aged that a programme catching up with a bunch of pretty ordinary 56-year-olds doesn’t sound promising. - After the libel: How RTÉ investigations must change
Sat, May 12, 2012 OPINION There’s no indication that, before RTÉ defamed Fr Kevin Reynolds, anyone at the station was unhappy with how it conducted its investigative journalism. But the investigative unit’s targets and its methods need to change, writes former RTÉ journalist
MIKE MILOTTE - Doing it for themselves: Edna O'Brien and the brides of Franc
Sat, May 12, 2012 TV REVIEW: ‘LITERARY SCENES CAN be very over-rated,” said Edna O’Brien in Life, Stories (RTÉ1, Tuesday), a beautifully made, carefully considered profile of her life. For this arts documentary – at last, an arts documentary on RTÉ! – directed by Charlie McCarthy, concentrated not on her work but on O’Brien, teasing out through a series of interviews her development as a writer and her enviably colourful life in London, where she lived as a literary outsider who still managed to know everybody. - Rash acts and savage wordsSat, May 12, 2012 RADIO REVIEW: CONTRARY TO POPULAR opinion, not all politicians are congenital liars. But when it comes to succeeding in politics, honesty is not always the best policy, as the Dáil career of Paul Gogarty testifies. During an interview on Moncrieff (Newstalk, weekdays) on Tuesday, the former Green Party TD recalled his notorious contribution to Irish parliamentary lore in 2009, when he urged Emmet Stagg of Labour to go forth and multiply, at least colloquially speaking.
- 56 and counting: the return of the original reality-TV show
Sat, May 12, 2012THOSE OF A CERTAIN age can measure their lives to the seven-year beat of the Up series. This week it is at 56 Up, and that title winds you a little. It was a series, after all, that was supposed to watch them grow up. Now it is on the verge of watching them grow old. - Camera is a little too candid in New York sitcom
Tue, May 8, 2012Lena Dunham’s new sitcom may be true to life, for a narrow white American elite, but it is too close to the bone to make anything but unpleasant viewing, writes
ROSEMARY Mac CABE - Another great Dane or a bit of a dog's dinner?
Sat, May 5, 2012 TV REVIEW: HAVING FOISTED box sets of The Killing (or Forbrydelsen, as I’d like to call it – if I could pronounce it) on friends; considered buying hairy wool and knitting a Sarah Lund jumper; and dissected every aspect of Borgen, from the minutiae of Danish coalition politics to the weird layout of the prime minister’s house – the bedroom off the kitchen? Really? – my love affair with Danish TV imports has been steady and unconditional. But not any more. It’s not that The Bridge (BBC4, Saturday), the latest Nordic noir BBC import, isn’t very good; it’s that it’s a very ordinary police procedural that makes all that subtitle-reading hard to justify. - Stories of abuse hit homeSat, May 5, 2012 RADIO REVIEW: IT IS A GRIM SIGN of the times that once-taboo tales about authority figures abusing their young charges have in effect become the lingua franca of Irish radio. No matter that this sadly durable subject is painful to hear about; it is a sure-fire way to get people listening and, just as crucially, talking.
- Mike Murphy's public service message about the artsSat, Apr 28, 2012IT’S RARE WE get an RTÉ presenter having a public go at the broadcaster.
- Torres scores the winner? You're having a laugh
Sat, Apr 28, 2012I FELT I HAD A MINOR personal stake in Champions League: Barcelona v Chelsea (TV3 and Sky Sports 2) on Tuesday night. Back in 1997, Chelsea’s caretaker manager Roberto Di Matteo was just another brash young Premiership star with an apartment in the middle of London. I was working on a construction site next door. - The curse of morning radioSat, Apr 28, 2012THE ECONOMY IS IN tatters, a succession of reports have uncovered abuses of power in civic and clerical life, and countless numbers of people sink daily into a morass of debt and despair. Ireland in 2012 has no shortage of subjects worthy of vocal indignation, but it seems that the best way to exercise the public’s emotions is to take a reliable old route: swear on air. Nearly 50 years after the late theatre critic Kenneth Tynan (deliberately) caused outrage by uttering a taboo four-letter Anglo-Saxon epithet on BBC television, Ray D’Arcy discovered that there’s nothing like a well-placed F-word to stir up controversy and its close cousin publicity.
- Masterpiece? More of a curate's egg. And as for Brian and Pippa . . .
Sat, Apr 21, 2012 TV REVIEW: ‘THE NATION has its shortlist,” said Mike Murphy in a portentous kind of a way in his introduction to Masterpiece: Ireland’s Favourite Painting (RTÉ1, Tuesday). I suspect I wasn’t the only one idly musing that I didn’t even know there was a longlist – and who is this “nation” he’s talking about, anyway? - Hair today, God tomorrowSat, Apr 21, 2012 RADIO REVIEW: ‘A MIXTURE OF SADNESS . . . and I’m slightly appalled.”
- Black humour in the White House
Mon, Apr 16, 2012Julia Louis-Dreyfus remains best known as Elaine in Seinfeld, but in new comedy Veep she plays the woman not quite inside the oval office. It’s the part she’s ‘been preparing for my whole life’
