Behind The Hall Door - RTE1, Friday
The Weakest Link - BBC1, Friday
I am to be married. Yes, it sounds too incredible to be true, but, to paraphrase Bono, life moves in mysterious ways. Orla and I have overcome our previous difficulties to the extent that we are willing to put our previous disagreements behind us, and plan to be joined together to each other in an extravagant ceremony at Lurretstown Castle in Co Mayo at the end of May. Orla has already sold the exclusive wedding photos to An Phoblacht.
To paraphrase Bono again, I have found what I am looking for, and that is a feisty Northern Ireland poetess with a fondness for hard drinking and militant republicanism. Are we mismatched? Why, of course we are, but then again so are all happily married couples. Hopefully, with myself and Orla, we'll be so hopelessly drunk all the time, we won't even know if we're happy or not.
Plans for the wedding of the year (our wedding) are proceeding nicely, and there has only been one minor disagreement so far. This is over Orla's insistence on wearing paramilitary style fatigues rather than a conventional wedding dress. I have told her I don't want our (hypothetical) children looking at the photos in 20 years' time and thinking that their daddy married Che Guevara.
Typically, she told me to f**k off. I really hope that when she settles into her role as my other half, she resorts to a more conventional wifey/matronly look. After all, she's as frumpy as hell. In fact, the word was actually daubed on the gable wall of her house in the Bogside in the mid-1980s by the Red Hand Commandos. "Frumpy Orla", they wrote in white masonry paint, so that it wouldn't wash off. You can still make it out today.
What with the preparations for the wedding and all, I haven't really seen much TV this week. I had tuned in to Behind The Hall Door expecting it to be a thriller in the Scream mould, with lots of students being knocked off one by one by a crazed, knife-wielding psychopath. However, it turned out to be much scarier than that. I have personal experience in this area, as in 1975, after a casual remark I made on the Late Late Show, my house was burned down by the cast of Joseph And The Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. For reasons which I've long since forgotten, I employed RTE personalities to renovate the property, and they made a complete bags of it. They never turned up on time, went home as early as they could, and spent most of the time drinking tea and acting as if they were in the RTE canteen. One sports commentator told me bluntly he didn't know one end of a paintbrush from the other, and I had to explain to him that you dip the end with the hairs into the paint, and use the other end as a handle. He's an excellent rugby commentator, but never get him to paint your house.
The Weakest Link, not to be confused with the West-Link (a tollbridge that exacerbates Dublin's traffic congestion) is a general knowledge quiz. On the programme I saw, two contestants died of fright and another was literally scared stiff and had to be put down by a vet. I'm not normally opposed to contestants dying on game shows, but I think three deaths in one programme is a bit much. In its entire run, only two people died on Quicksilver, and both casualties were a result of technical problems, not Bunny Carr's aggressive questioning.
We live in cruel, cruel times.