Television: Grabbed by the long arm of the law

Watch Crimecall, RTÉ's monthly plea for us to help solve crimes, and when you've stopped wondering why the quality of the CCTV footage is so rubbish, and why Gráinne Seoige and Philip Boucher-Hayes look so stiff copresenting the programme, note the straightforward Garda public-service announcement.

That’s the segment where the force shows how it’s tackling drink-driving, fraud, burglaries, cyclists without lights . . . take your pick. It’s pitched as a reassuring “Don’t worry: the Garda are on the case”. And that’s when you remember that the programme is part of Garda’s communications machine.

You get the same feeling watching The Guards (RTÉ One, Tuesday), a two-part series that goes behind the scenes of policing the middle of Dublin. Directed and narrated by Barry O'Kelly, and filmed over two years, it's like a longer Crimecall segment but with top-notch production values.

We’re told about several initiatives to get drug dealing off O’Connell Street and see several drug busts.

The gardaí – mostly young, mostly Dubs – are an impressive bunch, brave and committed. It is by any measure a tough job. The problems, we are reminded many times, are not about policing: wider structural and societal issues are at play. The north-inner-city drug squad achieves its targets and gets dealers off the streets, but the problem then moves southside for the police there to deal with.

We are told that having six methadone clinics in the city centre brings addicts in from all over, creating a ready market for dealers. After several dramatic, difficult busts we’re told of the dealers’ short or suspended sentences or of their release on bail. We follow the community guard to the aftermath of a burglary: “One of 48,000 victims who have been contacted by Dublin south central.”

Watching The Guards, particularly the parts where top brass talk to camera about successes and strategies, it's hard to shake the feeling of being on the receiving end of a PR offensive – the same result as other behind-the-scenes series about State institution, such as The Probation Service and Life on the Inside (about Mountjoy Prison). But perhaps there's no other way for these types of programme to be made.

There's reality TV, where real people act out versions of themselves on shows such as Made in Chelsea or Big Brother, and then there's real reality TV, such as Louis Theroux's new series of documentaries.

In its first, powerful film he interviewed alcoholics; most viewers probably comforted themselves with the thought that it couldn't happen to them. Not so for his second film, A Different Brain (Sunday, BBC Two). The people here, he says as he walks around a residential care unit, "are here because of car crashes, falls, strokes and aneurysms", and all have acquired brain injuries.

These are simple events with catastrophic results that could happen to anyone. In the background we see other users of the service, some in wheelchairs, others being fed, and all immediately recognisable as living with a profound disability.

That’s not true of his interviewees, who bear out the description of an acquired brain injury as being a hidden disability. When you injure your brain, Theroux says, it not only causes physical problems but can also transform your personality and behaviour. It’s sobering, count-your-blessings viewing for a Sunday night.

Theroux does what he does best: hangs out, chats, asks ordinary questions. The people he talks to are so comfortable with him that you suspect he has spent much more time with them than what is shown.

It’s the contrast that is most painful to see as he visits their families to get a sense of who they were before their injuries. There’s Amanda, a 38-year-old veterinary nurse, married with two young boys, who fell off a horse and banged her head.

Theroux meets her as she returns to live with her family – and a round-the-clock carer – after two years in hospital. She is a different person; her children seem almost afraid of this mother who looks mostly the same but who can’t relate to them as before.

All the cases are tragic, even if they are never presented as such, but that of upbeat, chatty Natalie is particularly poignant. Fifteen years ago she tried to kill herself with an insulin overdose. Instead she was left brain damaged and in need of residential care. There are multiple cruelties in that sentence.

Most of Theroux’s interviewees have supportive, loving families who are trying to come to terms with the new people their loved ones have become. Theroux sees hope in that, ending his thought-provoking film with an upbeat speech.

I don’t buy it, though, and I suspect the people with brain injuries whom he speaks to wouldn’t have bought it before their accidents, either.

The book Love, Nina always seemed ripe for TV treatment. The bestselling, vivid collection of letters from Nina Stibbe to her sister recounts her experience as a young, clueless nanny from up north who finds herself deep in the eccentricities of the London literary set while looking after two textbook precocious boys.

It’s witty and light, affectionate without out being cloying, with social observations about the self-obsessed literary world that hit the nail on the head.

Nick Hornby's adaptation for this five-part miniseries, Love, Nina (BBC One, Friday), is not this at all. Instead, it has the relentless forced charm and grating tweeness of a Richard Curtis movie. Faye Marsay as Nina (familiar to some viewers from Game of Thrones, though looking like Lena Dunham here) is an odd choice, and her character – surely the easiest to draw – feels inauthentic.

If her Nina ever scoffed a pork pie I'd be astounded – and for Love, Nina to work she's supposed to the relatable, authentic one in a sea of barking eccentrics. The device of her commenting on events in a voiceover is just annoying.

Helena Bonham Carter is terrific, and it's her who makes Love, Nina worth watching. She's the effortless centre of every scene she's in, as the distracted, poshly slovenly single mother and literary-review editor in need of a nanny.

And there's something about the stilted dialogue and set pieces – about canned food versus fresh, whether a neighbour has crabs (a lot of groin scratching) – and the stagey tone that makes Love, Nina seem as if it was actually made in the 1980s, not just set there.

tvreview@irishtimes.com