Oops, they did it again: a hint of deja vu in this comedy of errors

TV REVIEW:THE TWO-PART documentary Crisis: Inside the Cowen Government(RTÉ1, Monday) looked slick and promised much but told us little we didn't already know. The programme featured the usual roster of familiar faces, including David McWilliams, Shane Ross and Alan Ahearne – with stomach-churning performances from Mary Hanafin, Willie O'Dea and John Gormley, who have either no self-awareness or no shame.

Hanafin and O’Dea talked themselves up as people who could have steadied the hand of Brian Lenihan and Brian Cowen during the bank bailout talks and saved Ireland – if only they hadn’t been tucked up in bed in their jammies. Gormley talked about the government as though it were some difficult-to-fathom crowd he read about occasionally in the papers. Indeed, in this week’s second episode, when he talked about pulling the Green Party out of government, it was nearly a surprise, so successful had he been in making us think they weren’t even part of it.

Last week’s episode was mostly a not-so-subtle character assassination of Brian Cowen, with picture after picture of him looking bored or grumpy or swigging from a pint glass or bottle. “Maybe the drink helped and brought him back to a happier time,” said Mary O’Rourke, twisting the knife that little bit harder – though, as Cowen has now retired at 51 with a pension of more than €150,000 a year, which the rest of us will be working to pay for forever as well as ponying up for his government’s catastrophic mismanagement, it’s hard to feel sympathy. Lenihan was presented as a clever man talking his way into his finance brief but with only a tenuous understanding of it. The two Brians, the programme hammered home, were out of their depth.

Missing, though, were Mary Coughlan, Cowen’s right-hand woman, his Dáil bar buddies – his cocktail cabinet – and the other frontbenchers who could have given valuable insight. What we were reminded of is that hard-core Fianna Fáilers see everything through a party prism – or, as Matt Cooper said, their thinking is “what’s best for the country is what’s best for Fianna Fáil.” So, for Hanafin, Cowen’s attempt at a cabinet reshuffle in his last days in office was “his biggest error of judgment”. And Micheál Martin, speaking of the infamous “garglegate”, when Cowen sounded hungover in that Morning Ireland interview, admitted his he-was-hoarse defence of his leader hadn’t worked, and he should have “tried a different tack”.

In this week’s episode, the then Green Party minister Eamon Ryan compared the arrival of the troika with being dumped by a girlfriend. I don’t know, but I think a nation losing its sovereignty and being in hock for generations is a teeny bit more devastating than having nobody to go to the pictures with on a Saturday night. In the end Pat Leahy, who scripted the documentary, pointed out that our current predicament wasn’t all Cowen’s fault: the sparks for the meltdown were ignited during the previous decade by Bertie Ahern, and it “was ultimately down to the Fianna Fáil policy of short-term pursuit and maintenance of power”. But we knew that already.

THE MOST disconcerting thing about Life's Too Short(BBC1, Thursday) is not how short on laughs it isbut how weirdly like Ricky Gervais the star of this new mockumentary, Warwick Davis, is. He talks like him, at the same pace and in the same style. Close your eyes and it could be Gervais, a disconcerting Mini-Me; open them and Davis is a dwarf, easy fodder for gags not seen since the bad old days of British sitcom. He can't reach the doorbell; he falls out of his car – that sort of thing. At his Dwarfs for Hire agency Davis has a secretary, slightly weird-looking, a bit ditzy – or a version of Stephen Merchant, Gervais's writing partner. It's all a bit familiar.

Like Extras, Gervais's last hit series, this features internationally-known celebrities, cementing Gervais's own US stardom. So last week Liam Neeson, providing the only laughs in the episode, played a deeply humourless version of himself coming to Merchant and Gervais for tips on stand-up comedy. This week, with Johnny Depp, he hit A-list paydirt. Depp gives a funny turn as an unhinged superstar who blithely humiliates Davis. But his real function is to let Gervais throw it back at his critics in way that seems bitter and egomaniacal. Depp comes to Gervais's office for a showdown following last year's Golden Globes, in which Gervais famously insulted several stars, and reels off a series of anti-Gervais gags. "Why do people take an instant dislike to Ricky Gervais? Because it saves time." Or Gervais hates Twitter because "it has 139 characters more than he's ever come up with". Life's Too Shortfeels like it's written to show how Gervais towers over his critics, but it just makes him look small – and, as we've seen so much of it before in Extras, repetitive.

WHERE DO YOU think the smoothie TV presenter Craig Doyle lives? In one of those nice detached jobs that we see him in front of in just about every ad break? I only wonder because his new chatshow, The Social(RTÉ2, Tuesday), is set, according to the publicity, in "Craig's gaff", which looks like a furniture superstore off the M50 and features members of the public sitting on randomly placed couches or, in the case of one poor woman, wedged in a corner looking as though she had a giant standard lamp growing out of her head. For this week's opener, he had three guests, Lorraine Keane, Mairead Farrell and Dylan McGrath, to chat about the topics of the day as they appear in social media such as Twitter. ("Dad, if you're watching, it's what people are talking about on the computer.") The Afternoon Showseemed dangerously cutting-edge by comparison.

There was an old-style filmed item from the journalist Brian O’Connell about our excessive drinking that was so po-faced and superior you’d feel like grabbing a bottle of plonk and using your Fr Mathew temperance pin to gouge out the cork and neck the lot, just to spite him. There was also a discussion on an app for men to track their partners’ time of the month. “Periods. There, I’ve said it,” said Doyle, straight to camera, looking as mortified as a 13-year-old boy in the sanitary-products aisle of a pharmacy.

The guests were as game as anyone could be when trapped on the set of yet another dire RTÉ chatshow, though I couldn’t concentrate on a word McGrath said, because every time the cameras jerked in his direction I kept being distracted by Lamp Lady, visible just over his shoulder. At least she had a bit of light for the many times she looked at her watch.

tvreview@irishtimes.com

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