Television: RTÉ’s unreality series is not your grandad’s immigrant experience

Made in another era – six years ago, say – a series called Exiles (RTÉ2, Thursday) might have had a different meaning: construction workers forced to head to the other side of the world, graduates clutching their expensive degrees as they left to have careers, tearful wives and parents waving them all off at the gate.

So maybe it's another green-shoot sign that the economy has turned. Exiles, the shiny new RTÉ reality show, follows six gorgeous twentysomethings on a three- month skite in a beautiful lakeside house in Vancouver. They're playing at being emigrants, in search of work, but not mundane, wage-slave work: they want glamorous careers in photography, fashion styling, TV presenting and singing.

One is called India, another Jade. Dylan, an author and film-maker, wants to make a web series about hipsters. No point suggesting that he could just have got the bus to Camden Street – Dublin’s own hairy petri dish of hipsterdom – although it is fun to watch him pitch his idea to a mystified producer. “Maybe juice and bicycles or juice and weed,” says Dylan, who has a dreamy way of looking into the middle distance while flogging an idea long past its sell-by date.

Exiles is Made in Chelsea on a J1 visa, with a bit of Geordie Shore and Big Brother thrown in to the synthetic mix. And there's even a crossover – oh, the metaness of it – in that one of the exiles, Nicola Hughes, is dating Made in Chelsea's Alex Mytton.

George, a tenor from Derry – and the only OMG non-Dart Dublin housemate – wears his GAA jersey like a proper Irishman abroad. That’s the only authentic bit. Otherwise the thinly veiled idea of spontaneous reality is blown open every time the path is paved for them by the production company’s bulging contacts book. (In the first double episode Sean, a fashion stylist, gets work with a top photographer, and George gets singing work at a festival.)

Still, they're a well-chosen group, particularly the boys, with their distinct, interesting personalities. The girls, with their layers of slap and world-weary attitude, are oddly Identikit, and Exiles is more innocent than other reality shows. There has been some Irish college-style flirting, whereas by now in Geordie Shore we'd have seen at least one tattooed backside bobbing around in the Jacuzzi. Harmless, forgettable fun.

Exiles is made by the people behind Fade Street, an earlier (highly) scripted reality show on RTÉ2 that put another set of beautiful young ones together. Vogue Williams, Fade Street's most successful graduate, is a poster girl for what these series can do in terms of exposure. She quickly moved on, successfully, into UK shows.

The Dubliner is a natural on TV, funny and self-deprecating. The latest instalment of her RTÉ2 series is Vogue Does . . . Straight As (Thursday). It’s a breezy, fact-filled gallop through all facets of the Leaving Certificate, from grind schools to community colleges, people who failed and people who got 600 points.

Vogue’s message is the same one that parents of stressed-out Leaving Cert students everywhere have been repeating all week: the exam doesn’t define you, there are many ways to get where you want to go. Vogue got 300 points in her Leaving 10 years ago, 50 less than last year’s national average – which, she tells us over and over (you can take self-deprecation too far) hasn’t done her any harm.

To further suit this narrative she meets members of the “600 points club”. There’s Christiane O’Mahony, who hit the points jackpot, studied psychology and is now a stand-up comedian; and Fergus Denham, who got nine A1s – 900 points – went to Harvard, returned home and worked in a carpet shop. He’s now doing a degree in Russian.

I suspect the show could just as easily have found some 600-pointers with fabulous, lucrative, high-flying careers.

There is a lot of teasing out of what intelligence is. Vogue, who is up for a laugh, fails the Mensa test but is clearly smart, and she passes the Irish oral. Psychologists, teachers and graduates point out how poor the Leaving Cert is if intelligence is what you're trying to measure.

I’m with Mabel, an elderly member of Mensa who defines intelligence as the absence of stupidity.

Never having had a cleaner – all that cleaning up before they arrive sounds exhausting – I find Modern Times: The Secret Life of Cleaners (BBC Two, Wednesday) fascinating.

It’s not just a film about how filthy people are. It’s much more about the immigrant experience in London, about women struggling to establish themselves in a new country, to find accommodation, to learn a new language, hanging on by their chipped fingernails.

The talking-head accounts from several cleaners are frank, funny and knowing. “They have an attitude you have to be fundamentally flawed to end up with your face down their toilet,” says one young Irish women of her bosses. “I’m not your psychotherapist. I am your cleaner,” says an eastern European, describing how she has to listen to her employers chirp on about their day, how busy they are, their kids, things she has no interest in.

That strange neediness of the haves, not the have-nots, is a thread running through several stories as we get to know some cleaners and bosses better.

Julia, a cleaner who was an accountant back home in Bulgaria, is shown a new purchase by her boss, the plummy Isabelle, who greets her with an air kiss at the door. It’s a bathroom cabinet commissioned from Indonesia. Julia, who has little English, smiles and nods dutifully – another chore, part of the transaction, just like scrubbing the kitchen floor.

In another part of London Maria is paying herself, as directed by her unseen employer, from the coins in his change jar. But it’s £2 short of the £30 she’s due. His marble-clad bathroom is bigger than her £130-a-week slum-landlord single room. Maria works, she says, to send money home to her two children in Romania, to give them a better life.

This Modern Times strand of documentaries is exceptional. It takes a subject and gently peels back the layers to reveal simple, uncomfortable truths about big, complex subjects.

Here they are inequality, immigration and the complex dynamics that simmer beneath what on the surface appears a very simple “I’ll pay you if you clean up after me” transaction. tvreview@irishtimes.com

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