Tallaghtvision reality show really makes a spectacle of itself

TV REVIEW:THE HIT US REALITY series Jersey Shorewashed up in south Dublin in its Irish version, Tallafornia, and, to ride the wave of X Factor-final viewers, TV3 showed a trailer on Sunday – the series starts next month.

It’s your typical all-about-sex (but we had better pretend it’s not) reality-TV formula. Seven uninhibited orange- coloured young people are put living together, their antics are screened and the twist is – well, actually, there isn’t a twist unless you count the fact that the house is in Tallaght and they say “fook” a lot. One girl called another a “filtee whoo-er”, which sounded faintly quaint in these times of hos and bitches.

The four gym-bunny boys look like greased-up Ken dolls, and they spent a lot of time admiring each other’s abs. The three girls are all cleavage, shiny slap and cheap-looking clothes.

Their first getting-to-know-you session was in a hot tub in the garden. “Suck my toe and you better enjoy it,” dared the bloke with bad highlights. Before you could say, “Get a bit of self-respect, woman, and go home,” she had his big toe in her gob.

“Who do you think is the hottest girl?” “We know who you think it is: you banged her last night,” went the boys’ chat over the breakfast table the following day. The boys went to the gym to admire each other a bit more, and the girls, like good little housewives, did the shopping at Tesco. You could waste a lot of time ruminating on how wrong this trashy, cheap (on so many levels) series is. It’s Tallaght I feel sorry for.

WHILE OUR JANET in The X Factorwas getting all the attention, 17-year-old James McCullough from Derry was fighting it out in another big TV competition, and he was considerably more cheerful about it. He made the final of Young Apprentice(BBC2, Monday), up against posh Zara, a frighteningly self-assured 16-year-old. As Alan Sugar made no bones as far back as week one about not particularly liking the dishevelled, mouthy Derry lad, just getting to the final was an achievement in itself.

He’s a budding economist – he scored the highest grade in economics in his GCSEs in Northern Ireland. She’s, according to herself, “quite a Renaissance person” and a film-maker. The task was to create an online game. “I was in the computer business when apple and blackberry were things you put in pies,” said Sugar.

To make up the teams, the previous contestants were brought back; professional game developers were on hand to create the game. James came up with Crazy Cabinet,in which you pretend to be the prime minister. "You want to be the prime minister?" sneered Sugar. "You can laugh: he might be first minister in Belfast," chipped in Sugar's sidekick Nick Chapman, not very helpfully.

His game was creative; hers, involving a pig in trouble, was ordinary. “What would you do with the £25,000 prize?” asked Sugar. And after perky Zara had chirped on about investing in camera equipment, so she could make more money, James sealed his fate by saying he would use it to go on to study economics.

“Have you ever had a part-time job, like just for walking-around money?” asked Sugar. “No,” the budding economist told one of the mouthiest graduates of the university of life. He was fired.

'TIS THE SEASON for specials, so it was inevitable that Channel 4 would have a version of one of its most successful documentary series: My Big Fat Gypsy Christmas(Tuesday). By now, I think, we've all got the core message: Travellers spend small fortunes on blingtastic weddings; teen brides compete to wear the biggest dress – this week's were the size and weight of Volkswagen Beetles – communions are dress rehearsals for weddings; and, although they're kitted out like pole dancers, teenage Traveller girls live like nuns.

And no one mentions anything as grubby as money – or why it’s still part of any culture for teenage girls to marry. The weddings were in Rathkeale, in Co Limerick. In one, 18-year-old Charlene arrived at the church in a dress that needed a mile of fabric, although what she really needed was a coat, as her husband-to-be was an hour late, leaving her frozen outside the church as she waited for him to drift in from the pub.

We caught up with 17-year-old Irish Traveller Josie and her English Traveller husband, Swanley, from a previous Big Fatdocumentary. This time last year, she said, they hadn't even met, and here she was, married and five months pregnant. But there was something unsettlingly smug about the voiceover, as if there has been a shift in the series, not simply showing the Swarovski crystals and acres of tulle but inviting us to ridicule them. Ridicule is not the response this spectacle needs.

VANESSA ENGLE'S excellent three-part series Money(BBC2, Tuesday) ended with a clever idea and a smart example of observational documentary-making. Forty thousand pounds – about €48,000 – is the average British household income if two adults are working, so she found a diverse range of families who live on that, to talk about what they do with it and whether it's enough – for some it was – or too little. The stories chipped away at one of the last great taboos – talking about what you earn and how you spend it – and it quietly explored how the choices people make with their money reveal so much about their characters.

MEANWHILE, IN Money, Money, Money (RTÉ2, Thursday), the comedian Keith Farnan aimed “to explore in a fresh and unique way the catastrophic impact of the financial crisis in Ireland”. This mishmash of a programme included Fintan O’Toole, Shane Ross and David McWilliams (who was filmed surrounded by bales of fabric: are the McWilliamses taking in sewing? Has it really come to that?), plus news and current-affairs clips from 2008 on, interspersed with Farnan’s stand-up routine, which for a new comedian was full of old jokes.

There’s a definition that comedy equals tragedy plus time. We’re still too close to the financial disaster to find humour in Bertie Ahern’s famous suicide speech or in the financial regulator Patrick Neary reassuring us, in that patronising way he had, that the banks were fully capitalised. It’s still not funny. And it may never be.

tvreview@irishtimes.com

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Kirstie’s Home for Christmas (Wednesday, Channel 4) Watch Kirstie Allsopp bossily faff around making jewel-encrusted crackers – and you’ll quickly remember why you never bother.