TV REVIEW:ENOUGH WITH the cookery shows. We're full. Had enough. Couldn't manage another bite. But now, like an overenthusiastic host, RTÉ has landed yet another one on our screens. So, being polite (well, polite-ish), there's nothing for it but to stop staring glumly in its general direction and to pick at it.
In the latest chef vehicle, Paul Flynn: Irish Food(RTÉ1, Tuesday), one of our top cooks, who does his work at the Tannery restaurant in Co Waterford, is in front of the camera. The idea, he says, "is to make simple food with a modern twist", to start a "food revolution" and to show why "mashed potatoes is the ultimate comfort food" – all lines that get more outings in TV cookery programmes than a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil. And anyway, doesn't Jamie Oliver own that food-revolution thing?
The lines mentioned weren’t the only things in the programme that seemed a little too familiar to be still interesting. So we had Flynn looking uncomfortable, bundled up in his coat as he cooked in the open air on a two-ring stove, making mash (with a twist: add ham) at a market, handing around samples (“gorgeous” – well, what do you expect people to say?) and rustling up something with apples in the middle of an orchard.
Back in the kitchen Flynn was all serious efficiency, not quite getting that cookery programmes – unlike, say, cookery lessons – aren’t entirely about cooking. They also have to entertain and need to be presented by chefs with personalities as big and bold as any of the flavours they’re banging on about.
Trying (I’d guess) to give the programme a lift, or maybe to make it more substantial with a bit of easy-to-digest sociology, the kitchen scenes were intercut with archive footage – housewives in the 1970s discussing the price of spuds, families sitting down to dinner, that sort of thing – but these clips felt like stray ingredients best suited to another programme. Mind you, Flynn’s food did look amazing.
A NEW TWISTon an old idea is Fake or Fortune?(BBC1, Sunday), a mix of Antiques Roadshowand a posh detective show, in which Fiona Bruce and the suave art expert Philip Mould investigate the mysteries behind paintings. It has reached episode two and we've already learned that the behind-the-scenes machinations of the art world are as mired in skulduggery as the voting for Celebrities Go Wild.
This week the work of art came from a dump outside Youghal. Tony, a fisherman, found the small painting there 20 years ago and brought it home to Yorkshire. Five years ago he brought it to Antiques Roadshowand discovered from Mould (who doesn't get enough of a look-in in this series; it's all Bruce) that it's a lost work by Winslow Homer, one of the US's most important 19th-century artists, and that it could be worth more than €30,000. His feisty daughter Celina then took on the task of selling it through Sotheby's in New York.
Meanwhile, Mould found that the picture was commissioned in the mid-19th century by an old colonial family called Blake, who, after years in the tropics, retired to Myrtle Grove in Youghal. As the pre-auction excitement mounted in New York, Celina was told that the picture could be worth as much as €170,000. The documentary seemed set to follow the predictable poor-family-strikes-it-lucky arc, when out of the blue everything changed. The ownership of the picture was disputed when a descendant of the original owner came forward to claim it. This is common enough, apparently, in the art world’s upper reaches but not, according to a visibly surprised Mould, at the eleventh hour. The painting was withdrawn after the auction had started.
“I don’t know how someone can say ‘that’s ours’ when they never knew they had it,” said Celina, quite reasonably.
Filming took place over two years, showing an impressive level of investment in the project by the BBC, but in the end there was still no resolution about ownership, and neither side looks willing to back down.
The painting is locked away in Sotheby’s vaults until the issue can be resolved. The intense negotiations were captured on camera, making for a fascinating and intelligent insight into the commercial workings of the art world.
EARLY ONin Imagine: The Man Who Forgot to Read and Other Stories(BBC1, Tuesday), Alan Yentob showed the well-known neurologist Oliver Sacks some pictures and asked him to identify the people in them.
“A black woman. Young. Attractive. Must be Mrs Obama,” said Sacks with confidence. It was Oprah Winfrey.
He didn’t recognise Elvis either, but he got Queen Elizabeth and President Obama by, he said, intuition rather than knowledge. Nor did he recognise Yentob, though he had been interviewed by him three years ago. Sacks, who made the crossover from science to popular culture with his brilliantly readable books about the brain, is face blind. For some genetic reason the part of the brain that remembers faces (most of us can remember thousands) never developed, and Sacks can’t remember even his own. He told amusing stories of apologising to a large bearded man only to realise he was looking in a mirror. “I can take others for myself and myself for others,” he said.
This intriguing film counts as one of Yentob's arts documentaries because Sacks has a new book out. He wrote The Mind's Eyein response to his loss of sight in one eye (from cancer) and as an exploration of how the brain can adapt to and overcome disability.
Yentob also explored the 77-year-old neurologist’s life, including how he became interested in the brain. Sacks came from a British medical family, he said, and learned anatomy early at the dinner table. It was in the days, he added, when you would have calf brain for dinner, “and my mother, who was a surgeon, would point to a part of it and say, ‘That’s cerebellum. Try it’”.
Part of Sacks’s success is down to the fact that he can turn case notes into riveting literary stories. Yentob met some of the people mentioned in the new book. There was Howard, a Canadian crime novelist who suffered a stroke that left him unable to read, although he can write because reading and writing are controlled by different areas of the brain. There was also “Stereo Sue”, born with a turned eye that meant she saw the world in two dimensions. It wasn’t until she was nearly 50 that she began to see a 3D world. And, intriguingly, one of the US’s foremost contemporary painters, Chuck Close, suffers from prosopagnosia, or face blindness, which is ironic because he is famous for his huge hyperrealistic portraits. He couldn’t, he said, recognise himself. “Vision is so complicated,” said Sacks, “it takes half the brain to process what we see.”
AND FINALLY, at last I have a two-word response to friends who remind me that being a TV reviewer is the jammiest job in journalism: it's Chandler Burr. He's the perfume correspondent of the New York Times,who spends his days taking deliveries of new perfumes and giving his make-or-break opinions on them.
With 1,200 perfume launches a year he runs out of bits of his body to test them on, so we saw him spraying his knee and giving it a good sniff. In the intriguing and vastly entertaining Perfume(BBC Four, Tuesday), a three-part documentary on the perfume business, Burr pointed out that beneath the flimflam – and we saw a lot of that – it's a deadly serious and astonishingly lucrative business. "Perfume," he said "is the single best way of monetising celebrity."
Get stuck into . . .
The Killing(Thursday, Channel 4), an American remake of a cult Danish crime series , stars Mireille Enos (right) as Det Sarah Linden, starting a new life in California with her son. It's 13 episodes, so if it's good it'll keep us going through to autumn.
