Television: Big house cookery show is a feast of the palate

It's not quite "What's a weekend?" – the Dowager Countess of Grantham's line in Downton Abbey – but Brendan Parsons's observation around the dinner table that "there is nothing in the world better to wean a baby on than caviar" comes a close second as a reminder that the folk in the big house are different.

The owner of Birr Castle, in Co Offaly, is the lord in Lords & Ladles (RTÉ One, Sunday) a zippy hour-long series that takes its ingredients from just about every other lifestyle genre to make what turns out to be a tasty Sunday treat.

Lords & Ladles is cooking in great Irish houses using ancient cookbooks – which means ingredients you've never heard of and dishes you'd never make, as on any cookery programme, really – and the talents of three of our best-known chefs: Catherine Fulvio, Derry Clarke and Paul Flynn. The twist is that each week one of the trio sources the ingredients, another cooks and the third does the tour of the house.

In the first programme Fulvio goes on a pheasant shoot and forages for hedgehogs, which turn out to be not another meat course – of which there are many, each one more sinewy and bloody than the last – but a type of mushroom. She also skins a rabbit. “I’m way outside my comfort zone,” she says cheerily as she rips the skin, like a furry pullover, over his little head. The rabbit doesn’t look like he’s in his comfort zone either.

In the kitchen, Flynn, the chef for the evening, with help from his unflappable friend Helen, surveys the bowls of cows’ eyes, lips and tongues and the huge pot with a pig’s head simmering on the stove. “It’s enough to make you a vegetarian,” he says.

Clarke gets the short straw, the history bit: “Yes. Tell me about that harp. It looks really interesting,” he says to Lord Rosse in the tone of a man who’d rather be tearing into some animal carcasses with his bare hands below stairs.

Later Clarke does the Come Dine With Me bit and sits at the stuffy dinner party where the mesmerising number of courses are served. The pig's head, apple in mouth, is brought to the table to a round of applause, but no one digs in. And a good thing, too, because as Flynn, a practiced and entertaining TV performer, remarks, not the least bit contrite, it isn't fully cooked.

Lords & Ladles is a thought-through, tightly formatted show that feels original despite being a mash-up of so much other telly. It pings so many TV buttons – cooking, posh people, interiors – that I'd be surprised if the idea weren't sold abroad.

Far out

Kevin McCloud is a man who knows his way around a fancy house. For his new series, Escape to the Wild (Channel 4, Monday), he also looks beyond the bricks and achingly cool interiors and into the lives of the owners. And these lives are spectacularly different, being of people who have left the rat race – is that still a phrase? – for a different way of life.

Five years ago Boris and Karyn took their three small children far off the grid, to a remote kilometre-long island in Tonga, where they live a life of determined – and exhausting – self-sufficiency. It takes McCloud five days to get there, in progressively smaller boats. Throughout he’s in awe of everything, from the sunsets to Boris’s amazing housebuilding and fishing skills.

The place is idyllic, the family happy. But as a clearly unconvinced McCloud scratches his mosquito bites and quizzes Karyn about the drawback of the isolation and loneliness and the weirdness of living just with her husband and three children, the lifestyle envy that peaked in the first part of the programme starts to ebb away.

At the end there’s not quite trouble in paradise but maybe some realism, when the couple’s eldest, bored with it all as his teenage years loom, opts to go to boarding school in New Zealand.

The four-part Whiskey Business (TV3, Monday) follows brothers John and Stephen Teeling as they develop their new distillery and visitors’ centre in the Liberties in Dublin. Theirs is a good-news story – young entrepreneurs starting an exciting, challenging business – and the film captures the ambition of the early phase of their €10 million project.

It’s a respectful look, tentative even: the Teelings tell the story rather than letting the film-makers nose around for themselves. In a scene with classic fly-on-the-wall dramatic potential Jack and his team visit the factory in Italy where their giant copper stills are being made. He arrives expecting to see them nearly finished, but there’s nothing but giant discs on the floor. Cue, surely, raised voices and enthusiastic contract waving.

But if there is a row – always the meat and two veg of these programmes – we don’t see it. “I was worrying on the inside. I was really burning a hole. The ulcers were kicking in big time,” says Jack in one of the interviews filmed after the scene we’ve just witnessed – so long after that we get no sense of the drama nor a real feeling for the event.

The birth of the Teeling whiskey brand is an interesting story. But, for the TV show documenting it, a bit more spontaneity would have given the amiable Whiskey Business some bite.

Banksable thriller

Not having read Stonemouth (BBC Two, Thursday) I can’t say how faithful this BBC Scotland two-part adaption is of Iain Banks’s novel. It’s good, though, a story of love, loss, revenge and small-town tribalism that kicks off when Stewart Gilmour (Christian Cooke) returns to the Scottish village of Stonemouth for his best friend’s funeral.

Gilmour had been run out of town (somewhat implausibly) two years earlier by his girlfriend’s crime-boss father (Peter Mullan, doing what he has done so many times before: played the grizzly, man-of-few-words Scottish drug lord).

Stonemouth is atmospheric, with its plaintive soundtrack and beautiful establishing shots. As a thriller it's not edge of your seat or, despite all the hard-man posturing, as menacing as it thinks it is. But this is quality drama, compelling enough to drive the action into next week's denouement, when, presumably, we'll find out if Gilmour can get to the bottom of his friend's death.

Ones to Watch: A history of CSI and the late Lenihan

One for armchair Sherlocks: Catching History’s Criminals: The Forensics Story (BBC Four, Thursday) charts two centuries of the science of sleuthing. Presented by the surgeon Gabriel Weston, the first episode in the three-part series looks at the difficulty of identifying the body in a murder case using real, gruesome stories.

The first in the three-part series Lenihan: A Legacy (RTÉ One, Tuesday) explores the life and work of the late Brian Lenihan (left), now best – or worst – remembered as minister for finance during a time of unprecedented economic crisis. A test, surely, of the cultural taboo of never speaking ill of the dead.

tvreview@irishtimes.com