From Klingon to the cúpla focal, the words speak for themselves

TV REVIEW:TRICKY BUSINESS, language. This week the paint company Crown got into trouble with the Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland for using the word "feck" in an ad on the side of a bus. In its defence, the ad agency made the point that the authority had no problem with "feckin'" when it appeared in a mobile-phone ad, and in the UK "feck the bees" was permitted in a cider ad.

That’s a row about

one

word – and, as Stephen Fry pointed out in

Fry’s Planet Word

(BBC2, Sunday), in the UN headquarters in New York on any given day delegates from the 194 member states speak hundreds of the globe’s 6,000 languages. For translation purposes there are six working languages in the UN, but even at that there are still a lot of misunderstood words to fall out about. Though, as Fry suggested in his five-part series about language (the first part explored its origins), if we all spoke the same language there’s no guarantee we’d understand each other, and the world would be a duller place.

Fry's Planet Wordis one of these panoramic, no-obvious-expense-spared series that the BBC does so well: one minute Fry is in Germany, talking about the Grimm brothers' theory of a proto-European language, the next he's in the US at a college for the deaf, exploring how sign language differs from country to country. (In the US the sign for Hitler is miming a moustache; in Germany it's a moustache and a sneaky hand-salute; Madonna, though, is universally a pair of enormous, pointy breasts, which is bit mean.)

Fry is a rare presenter, able to balance the academic and the entertaining – and a good thing too because five hours of linguistics sounds more like the makings of a dry radio programme and not the fascinating TV series it is. In one scene he’s watching an adorable toddler babbling her first words; in another he’s sitting across from the psycholinguist Steven Pinker, a pickled human brain floating in a jar in front of them, as Pinker explains the intricacies of human language development. It is thought we first developed language so we could communicate while hunting, and then took to chatting around the campfire, although no one really has figured out whether speaking is nature or nurture. If nobody taught babies to speak, would they bother?

This week Fry spoke Klingon, the language beloved and actually spoken by Star Trekobsessives. Earlier this year Fry was in Galway and took a cameo role in Ros na Rún, trotting out the cúpla focal with equal enthusiasm. His entertaining Connemara adventure is in next week's programme.

THE FILMMAKER Bob Quinn's Connemara adventure began the early 1970s, when the one-time RTÉ director moved there and began making documentaries and films. In a tribute to the man, who is now 75, TG4 is showing a 13-week season of his work, beginning, in Bob Quinn@75(TG4, Tuesday), with his first Connemara film, the fascinating black-and-white Fág an Bealach, about the summer Gaeltacht courses for teenagers in Ros Muc.

In the unfortunately stilted introduction to the series, Quinn told Theo Dorgan it cost £350 and took six months to make. Using an observational style, Fág an Bealachcaptured the strange military ethos of the summer language school: the teenagers lined up, marched like cadets and saluted the Tricolour, and one word of English would get you sent home. But it also captured the fun to be had in the Gaeltacht.

In terms of style it was of its time. Made now, it would surely have gotten closer to its subject and at least would have featured personal interviews with the participants and the sergeant major-style teacher. Quinn’s voice-over suited an anthropological documentary, as though the viewers at the time were seeing this carry-on in Connemara for the first time and found it deeply foreign.

While the introduction did give some background and context, there was room for more, especially as this is being packaged as a series.

IT'S ALL CHANGE again at Crimecall(RTÉ1, Tuesday), a series that has had more presenters than Corrie's Gail Platt has had husbands. Gráinne Seoige and Philip Boucher-Hayes have replaced last season's duo of Anne Cassin and Con Murphy, who always seemed to be doing a fine job in a show that's not about the presenters – they're really only there to help the Garda with its inquiries.

Whether it is needed it or not, Crimecall's star wattage has been upped with the arrival of Seoige. In her dressed-up sleeveless gúna and with Boucher-Hayes stuffed into his shirt and tie they had the look of a couple on their way to a wedding; being seasoned pros, however, they handled the live show with effortless ease, and the set, which has been known to wobble in the past, looks slicker.

Crimecallis still all about crime and what the Garda wants highlighted. The re-enactments are well filmed and acted, though this week's one about an attack on a young woman in Clondalkin was perhaps a little too graphic. We were told that the girl had been assaulted just metres from her house, and the film retraced her night out and captured her walking home alone – but was it entirely necessary to show a young girl lying on the ground, a man trying to choke her? Perhaps the attack was in reality more violent and the programmemakers held back, but I still don't think we needed to see it to get the point.

PERFORMANCE OF the week was Ruth Negga's in Shirley(BBC2, Thursday). In the course of the atmospheric drama she transformed herself into the chart-topping diva Shirley Bassey, complete with the singer's trademark over-the-top mannerisms. The script had to pack a lot in: the speed of her success, from an impoverished teenager in Tiger Bay in Wales ("What's caviar, mam? When I'm famous that's all I'm going to eat") to becoming one of the UK's biggest singing stars; her marriage to a gay man; and her fear that the tabloids would discover she had a child when she was teenager.

There were many scenes that could have done with more explanation and depth in what felt like a compressed hour of drama. A great performance let down by a sketchy and at times cliched script.

tvreview@irishtimes.com

Get stuck into...

Hidden(BBC1, Thursday), a four-part conspiracy thriller written by Ronan Bennett and starring Philip Glenister as a small-time solicitor forced to reveal his murky past.