Born with the gift of the gob

TV REVIEW: When Harvey Met BobRTÉ1, Wednesday; The ApprenticeTV3, Monday; Single FatherBBC1, Sunday; Hardy BucksRTÉ2, Tuesday

FOR A WHILE there everyone was doing Bob Geldof, from impressionists on the telly to the blokes in the corner of your local pub. All you needed was a Dart accent (the Blackrock stop), a slightly-too-small denim jacket, tousled hair and the expression "Give us yer fookin' money. These children are storving." If that played on Domhnaill Gleeson's mind when he took on the role of Geldof in the BBC-RTÉ co-production When Harvey Met Bob it didn't show. He turned in an astonishingly powerful performance, presenting the Live Aid creator as at times vulnerable, always driven, as persuasive as a loaded Kalashnikov and so deeply annoying that you wonder how he didn't spend all his time avoiding being punched.

The story behind the feature-length drama is more than 25 years old and well known. Geldof, then a rock'n'roller with a seriously flagging career, saw a report about the famine in Africa and was so moved that he persuaded the top bands of the time to come together to record a charity single. Do They Know It's Christmas?brought in £6 million. A visit in early 1985 to Ethiopia convinced him that the song wasn't enough, so he imagined two fundraising concerts happening simultaneously in the US and UK, starring the biggest names in music, with Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney topping the bills. Except that when he went to the promoter Harvey Goldsmith for help it became clear that he was imagining much of it; with only weeks to go no one had signed up for the gigs.

The film followed the tension between blagging Bob and my-word-is-my-bond businessman Harvey (Ian Hart) as they put together the biggest rock event ever. The final scenes of the concert, with footage of the crowd from that sunny day in July, would have melted the hardest heart. It was a superb drama. Nicholas Renton, its director, didn’t lay on the retro stuff with a trowel, but there was no doubt that in many respects the recent past was a long time ago: no computers anywhere, and the only phones were the ones that plugged into the wall. And even though you knew the ending, Joe Dunlop’s clever script made it a surprise when you got there.

In dramatic terms it was Bob’s story – I somehow doubt Harvey was as passive a pussycat as he is shown here – but paring it down to just Bob and Harvey must trick with the historical truth. Wasn’t Midge Ure heavily involved? And what about Paula Yates? We saw only the back of her head in a couple of shots. Aside from Antonia Campbell-Hughes as Marsha Hunt, Bob’s young PA, everyone else was peripheral – and allowing such shockingly poor impersonations of Paul McCartney and Billy Connolly onscreen pretty much suggested that the director wasn’t too interested in anyone outside the core trio.

A COUPLE OF READERS e-mailed to say they'd noticed I hadn't reviewed The Apprenticeon TV3. They said it's too boring to bother with this year and suggested waiting for the later stages, when some personalities begin to emerge and it heats up a bit. And then I heard the announcer on Monday say that the boardroom eviction was the most shocking ever (or some such sensationalist guff), and stupidly I was reeled in.

The best way to pass the time until the boardroom bit at the end is to play count the sponsors. This week the task for the two teams was to sell a brand of power tool in a well-known chain of hardware stores. I could tell you the brand names, but that would only encourage them.

One contestant, Panos, declared, “I have a fear of jigsaws,” which isn’t something you hear every day. “Does that extend to all power tools?” asked his team-mate, all pretend concern. Several of the contestants used the F-word (unbleeped by TV3) with a force and regularity you wouldn’t find in a gangland drama.

The winning team had a meal cooked for them in a vast shop (another sponsor) that, as far as I could make out, sold storage boxes, and the winners sat crowded around a tiny table in one of the aisles under ghastly fluorescent lights, eating prawns. Let’s hope the long list of sponsors doesn’t include an abattoir, or who knows what delights the winning team will have waiting for them next week.

The boardroom is where all the action was promised, and there were the judges: Jackie Lavin, looking fabulous, all blond hair and startling blue eye shadow, channelling Agnetha from Abba; a very grumpy Bill Cullen, who arrives in the boardroom though a swishing sliding door that looks about as authentic as the ones on the starship Enterprise; and Brian “Bill’s right hand man” Purcell, who doesn’t really make much of an impact. This is Jackie ’n’ Bill’s gig.

Some of Bill’s trademark gnomic sayings didn’t quite work this week. “You don’t make sales in the long grass,” he snarled at one of the contestants, possibly forgetting that one of the power tools was a strimmer. The shock turned out to be that the losing team leader, a baby-faced chap called Ciaran, whose hair was moulded into a peaked quiff that made him look distractingly like Tin Tin, had promised the public one prize (yep, power tools) but then pawned us off with another, a football jersey (with, unsurprisingly, a sponsor’s name emblazoned across the front). Bill lambasted him, telling him that, as his representative out in the world, he was sullying his long-established name – “don’t even try to bullshit me” – and then fired him. Not so shocking after all.

WHEREAS IN REAL life a dad pushing a pram in the park will get smiles from every woman he passes, and in the supermarket have more helpers than Santa, a mother in the same situation is completely invisible to the opposite sex. And so it follows that a father of four who is suddenly widowed is somehow more romantic, even more tragic, and full of dramatic possibilities, than a woman in the same situation. So get out your hankies for Single Father.

This excellent four-part drama, starring David Tennant, kicked off on Sunday. (There’s something to watch at 9pm on Sunday on every station: how rare is that?) It opened with the usual organised chaos of family life: kids rowing, wife Rita sorting it, dad Dave (Tennant) stressed, everyone rushing about. And because we know the title we have a pretty good idea what’s going to happen when kind, pretty Rita gets up on her bike to cycle through the streets of Glasgow to an exam. The scene of the accident was stomach-churningly well done and shown twice to good effect (though, as she was being catapulted through the air, she mouthed “I love you” – sweet and corny, but I suspect in the same situation I might have sounded a bit more like one of Bill Cullen’s potty-mouthed apprentices).

In Mike Ford's drama, trendy Dave (he's a photographer, rides a motorbike) isn't helpless – as a modern dad he's as good at the cooking and cleaning as anyone – but he finds it more difficult dealing with his stroppy (what else?) teenage stepdaughter. (Teenage girls should form a union and complain about rampant negative stereotyping.) It's the emotional stuff that trips him up: the delayed grief kicks in only months after Rita's death. Mind you, that doesn't stop him snogging her best friend (the brilliant Suranne Jones). One to record: it clashes with Downton Abbey, which started on a high and is getting better every week.

tvreview@irishtimes.com

Hardy har har: Small-town knuckleheads 

If you’re old enough to remember Live Aid, or if you’re a woman who finds casual and persistent misogyny offensive, or maybe if you’re a townie and not a culchie, the chances of your cracking up with laughter at the Hardy Bucks is on the slim side (or shlim side, as the yahoos in the fictional village of Castletown might say).

The new three-part series is a spin-off from the successful web version – the number of hits for the 10 episodes made for RTÉ are phenomenal, so it undeniably touched a nerve, and for that alone it was worth having a look. Set in a small village in the west of Ireland (Galway is talked of as if it's New York), it follows in mockumentary form the lives of a group of twentysomething lads who spend their time drinking, fighting, smoking dope, watching porn, generally messing around in their own going-nowhere way or, as Eddie (Martin Maloney), the main character, puts it, "sitting around monging out watching shite like The Panel."

I didn’t get it, couldn’t find the comedy – but then it’s not made for me.