A leader with that certain je ne sais quoi - no, not you, Enda

TV REVIEW:The French became suspicious of Sarkozy's display of wealth and alarmed by the Rolex and the rich friends

HIS ELECTION speech was all about change. His first plan was to reduce the huge deficit and slim down the public service. He headed for Washington DC to make friends with Obama, and he was way better looking than the previous guy. And there, as shown by Nicolas Sarkozy: President Bling-Bling? (BBC2, Monday), the similarities between the Taoiseach and the French president end. Oh, and Fionnuala is unlikely to do a Carla Bruni on it and to go on telly strumming a guitar and singing about class-A drugs, causing uproar and a diplomatic incident so that Enda has to apologise to the president of Colombia.

The documentary, charting the French president's slide in popularity, was a mix of Panorama-style political profiling and Hello!magazine-style gossip, and that's what made it so watchable. Shortly after his election the love affair between Sarkozy and his people cooled quickly and visibly: there were huge street protests when he tried to push through his labour reforms, which included raising the retirement age to 62, and the French, who at first thought he was glamorous like a movie star, became suspicious of his personal display of wealth and alarmed by the sharp suits, the Rolex and the millionaire friends. One of his first acts in government was to double his salary, to €230,000, at a time when he was preaching austerity, closing hospitals and slashing public spending.

Worryingly for all of Europe, Sarkozy’s popularity at home got a fillip when he ordered the deportation of Romanian immigrants, and when he promised to tackle violence and poverty in the predominantly black ghettos around Paris the residents perceived it as part of a broader anti-immigration policy. Those actions can be explained, according to his detractors, not by deep-seated policy issues but by the popularity of his competition, the right-wing leader Marine Le Pen, who is now ahead of him in the polls and so is a significant threat for next year’s presidential election.

And there’s the soap opera of his marriage to Bruni. “It’s serious,” he told 500 of the world’s press during his first major press conferences in a country where the president was expected to keep his romantic liaisons, either official or unofficial, under wraps. It was “like a schoolboy telling his mama about his girlfriend”, sniffed one journalist. Four years on from his election many of his reforms have ground to a halt.

As Emily Maitlis, the programme's reporter, said, using a canny French phrase, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. More colourful than most leader profiles.

Ó THOLG GO TOLG (TG4, Thursday) is a clever idea for a cheap-as-chips holiday show about budget holidays, and it works because its 24-year-old presenter, Áine Goggins, is so relaxed and professional on screen and has such a good rapport with her camerawoman, Maeve Hackett. It’s like watching a holiday video of a couple of easy-going, giddy and very telegenic young ones.

If you can translate the title you get the gist: the pair are off on a three-month couch-surfing tour of Europe, staying in complete strangers’ homes for free, usually sleeping on the sofa. It’s all arranged on couch-surfing websites.

Compared with the line-up for future episodes, in which they bunk up with a transsexual in Dresden and a porn star in Madrid, the first programme was comparatively tame. First they stayed with a family outside Amsterdam and were given a guided tour of the city – that’s why this a good alternative travel show: there’s a sense of getting an insider’s view – and Goggins does her bit for cultural relations by teaching the children hurling. This is a young woman who travels with a squeeze box and can play a jig at any time. Then they moved on to a vast squat – more like a mini- village – in Groningen, to stay with 22-year-old Ozella. Great fun.

TREVOR EVE is back as Det Peter Boyd in a new series of the procedural crime drama Waking the Dead (BBC1, Sunday). It’s the ninth and final series, and they’ve ratcheted up the gore. This week’s episode opened with the incinerated body of a victim on a slab in a morgue, with flashbacks to a bloke lying dead on a path with his eyes gouged out. The glamorous pathologist (aren’t they always?) pointed out that the charred victim also had her eyes gouged out. With a biro. On a Sunday night. After tea. It’s hard going – though perhaps there has to be shock and awe to distract the large and faithful viewership from how unlike herself Sue Johnston, who plays Boyd’s sidekick, the psychological profiler Dr Grave Foley, looks. It’s so remarkable that you want her to be in every scene, just so you can examine her peculiarly smooth face – very distracting.

The script, about a child who was abducted from a care home 25 years earlier, was flabby, with too many loose ends coming together for no apparent reason. And Det Boyd’s hunches are a bit too clever to make for a tense thriller.

HELP IS AT HAND for students preparing for oral French tests from a most unlikely TV source: a cookery show. In Raymond Blanc's Kitchen Secrets (BBC2, Monday), it can be impossible to figure out if the Oxfordshire-based chef is speaking French or English – which is a good trick and, once mastered, sure to baffle any examiner. Blanc goes in for a great deal of voila! and Gallic shrugging, and it's that rare sort of cookery programme that, as one complicated recipe follows another, you can watch safe in the knowledge that you'll never get it together to try any of them.

And you won’t feel the least bit guilty. For a start no one has a team of commis chefs who lurk around the kitchen ready to jump into action when the right size pan has to be found. And then there’s the business of trying to figure out what he’s talking about, while being vastly entertained by it all.

This week it was all about offal – so more blood that Waking the Dead. One recipe required that the meat be put in "a Muslim clod and then hair dry" (that's muslin cloth and air dried), and the refined terrine – basically a jelly loaf with bits of meat and veg trapped in it – had "to be placed in a quiet place that is very cold". That turned out to be the fridge.

What not to miss next week:Vacation, Vacation, Vacation (Channel 4, Wednesday) More proof that the property market has gone bust: Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer are getting as far away from it as possible and reinventing themselves as travel presenters, with only a minor change to the programme title.

tvreview@irishtimes.com