All about his mother

TV REVIEW: Best: His Mother's SonBBC2, Sunday The TudorsTV3, Tuesday Hell's Kitchen: The FinalTV3 and UTV, Monday BallybraddanRTÉ2, daily

‘THE WORLD has gone to hell in a first-class hand-cart.” So said beleaguered old Dickie Best, father of the more famous, nay infamous, George. Writer Terry Cafolla and director Colin Barr’s film, Best: His Mother’s Son, focused not on the talent and tribulations of George, but on his mother Ann, who died in her 50s from an alcohol-related illness.

Partly filmed in the former paint-hall of Belfast's disused Harland and Wolff shipyard, where once the Titaniclifted her bow to accept her livery and which, for this occasion, was suffuse with the busy Formica furnishings and the migraine-inducing geometric wallpaper beloved of the 1960s, this was a sombre, moving and ultimately bleak portrait of a life hijacked and destroyed by insecurities and by drink.

The film was borne aloft by a series of restrained performances from a superb cast, with Michelle Fairley’s brittle and dark evocation of Ann Best at its centre. Like a twig being tossed about in a fickle wind, Best was a woman who, after George had left the family home for Manchester and after she had given birth, in her 40s, to the last of her six children, seemed to snap from the tree of order and sobriety. The story goes that she began to lose control of her life after taking her first drink (an innocuous-seeming thimbleful of sherry) at her youngest son’s christening party. The film pretty much used this as its starting point, and then followed her as she succumbed to a cruel and relentless fate at the hands of a disease which ran through her veins – and those of her beloved George – until her death within a decade of taking that first drink.

Fairley’s was a powerful performance. Over the film’s 90 or so minutes, she seemed to shatter in slow motion, growing thinner and more distracted as addiction took hold. Alongside her, and heavy with the grief of losing his wife, Lorcan Cranitch produced a finely pitched performance as the stolid but besieged Dickie Best. Indeed, the characterisations of the Best family were nigh-on perfect, while Michele Forbes was a lesson in self-possession as George’s bird-like and sympathetic Manchester landlady, Mrs Fullaway.

George himself was played by Tom Payne, a gorgeous-looking young man with all the insouciance of youth, but there was something about his cheery tenderness that exposed a flaw in the piece: we were never really given enough background to understand or make sense of the relationship between mother and son. The massive sense of loss, both of her privacy and of her son, that was shown to have destroyed Ann Best’s life and that was so clearly communicated in Fairley’s performance, felt strangely undeveloped in the drama itself, due possibly to the script or maybe to an over-enthusiastic edit. Somehow, although the film set out its stall quite beautifully, there was a certain emotional incoherence to the piece. (Also, on a pedantic note, did people really talk about “hissy fits” and getting things “sorted” in 1970s Belfast?)

The film ended with Ann Best resuming drinking after a short period of abstinence. Maybe we just needed to see more of her destruction, and its impact on George, in order to slip under the gauze and feel what was being shown.

DRAMA OF THE bustier-ripping, flaxen-hair-uncoiling, throw-another-pig-on-the-spit-there nature has returned to the screen with season three of The Tudors. “Passion, ambition and madness” were the treats promised by the press release, and if a piece of paper could have a deep tremolo, this one would have been shaking my desk.

The new series began like the last one, with Henry VIII (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, an actor who can munch fruit like a tyrant and flare up like a thoroughbred) enjoying untold riches and undressed wenches. Meanwhile, the first buds of syphilis festered in the royal court and political intrigue intensified as Henry’s stocking-clad courtiers skulked around the draughty corridors of the kingdom, bear-pelts over their shoulders and burning ambition in their eyes. Henry is now three wives down with three to go (Christ, this drama will run and run). The third, the beautiful and noble Jane Seymour (Annabelle Wallis), is still currently decorating his table, but even when she manages to produce the much-desired son and heir, we all know her queenly days are numbered.

The Tudorsis tremendously engaging and provides a great casting opportunity for four-legged horses and blokes with beards. What with the hairy peasants revolting under the leadership of Robert Aske (a superb and intense Gerard McSorley) and Henry's incendiary armies dashing around the English countryside burning down abbeys and evicting tonsured monks, there must be a couple of hundred male extras employed on the series. However, it is not the performances of the manly pike-holders that stand out in this sumptuous drama, but a light and reserved portrayal of Henry's banished daughter, the young Princess Mary, by Irish actress Sarah Bolger. There is a grace and weightlessness to her acting that makes her entirely believable even in this highly theatrical slice of television.

THAT STALWART of the schedules, Hell's Kitchen, reached its steamy climax this week with a cook-off between the series' two finalists, Ade Edmondson (once Vyvyan in The Young Ones, now bald, married to Jennifer Saunders, and beginning to embrace his heretofore reluctant celebrity with a little too much luvvie gusto) and Linda Evans (once famous for playing Krystle in Dynasty, a performance oft obscured by her lip-gloss and a pair of shoulder-pads that had sharper lines than she did). With the blessing of le chef, Marco Pierre White, who for some reason had bequeathed all the contestants PLO headscarves (are they called that any more?), the two celebs battled it out over the hot-plates and leaky cauldrons, making use of various previously jettisoned contestants to shell their prawns and peel their quail eggs.

It was all predictably watchable and, sinking deep into that soporific hinterland of inconsequential reality-tellyness, I found the competition vaguely enjoyable. There were one or two conversational gems that I shall store for future reference. For example, MPW (that’s short for Marco Pierre White, by the way) told us from beneath the flimsy tassels of his headscarf that “self-control is real power” (actually, it sounded a little more edifying in a French accent), while Ade Edmondson, his hand stuck in a pot still simmering on the hob, brought this little nugget of advice to humanity’s table: “Boiling hot asparagus really does hurt.”

Linda Evans won the public vote, and thus the series. “She’s got my vote,” said dancer Wayne Sleep, licking the hollandaise from his ruched lips. A sweet woman who emerged from underneath the Botox like a reluctant swan, she was an entirely palatable winner, but of course you have to take the whole thing with a pinch of salt.

tvreview@irishtimes.com

Anyone who hasn't had the character to banish the slew of vile children's television that spews out of the box most weekday afternoons (whoops, I'm talking about myself again) will be familiar with some of the more horrendous TV role models that one's children pal up with during the course of the week. Most satellite packages come with wall-to-wall access to over-made-up pre-teens with floppy hair and flimsy intelligence, who get into and out of endlessly repetitive scrapes with their mothers/hotel managers/agents/

long-lost twins/witchy aunts - and it's all, like, totally duh! Refreshing, then, to abandon the Nickelodeon reruns and watch some quality home-grown animated entertainment for children. Ballybraddan, which airs twice daily on RTÉ2, is a witty and warm drama following the lives of the fifth-class children of the fictional Ballybraddan primary school. Among a gentle assortment of recognisable types, there's a Polish kid with glasses and identical twins caught in the crossfire of art and sport; and then there's the coach, the broken-nosed bainisteoir for whom life comes in the shape of a sliothar. With a nod towards strong and direct Scooby Doo-ish drawing, this is a humorous and engaging series whose characters are entirely local. At one point, one pretty little girl drawing, talking to one of the identical twin brother drawings, says: "You're a hurler with the hands of an artist, and an artist with the hands of a hurler." You'd be waiting a long, long time to hear such existential chat from the alien 10-year-olds beamed in through your satellite dish.