TV REVIEW: The Rose of Tralee, RTÉ1, Monday, Tuesday; The Great British Waste Menu, BBC1, Wednesday; Jedward: Let Loose, UTV and TV3, Wednesday; This Is Me, RTÉ1, Friday
TYPICAL. Thirty-two women got all dressed up, stood on a stage in a big tent telling rambling stories about significant events in their lives (“and then I broke my coccyx”), even sang a song or danced a jig – and who was this year’s
Rose of Tralee
really all about? Dáithí Ó Sé, that’s who.
He danced, he sang and he milked his well-worn cute-culchie shtick for all it was worth. Pat Shortt should have blagged a seat to research his next over-the-top character on Killinaskully. All fine, of course, if you like that sort of thing.
As to the job itself, Ó Sé is not a natural interviewer – or maybe it’s just that he has no real experience as a tuxed-up MC, and this is, after all, a hugely hyped gig for a first-timer. He simply wasn’t good at putting the contestants at their ease; most looked wrong-footed and startled at his stop-start style of questioning and the awkward way he kept interrupting. For all the Kerryman’s supposed twinkly-eyed charm, there wasn’t much obvious rapport with most of the women – or with the audience. Maybe he was a riot in the tent in Tralee, but it didn’t come across on screen despite his frequent cringemaking “are ye havin’ fun?” and the “craic is mighty” yahooing.
The camera wisely stayed off the audience except for tight shots of the delighted mammies, because when it pulled back even a little, mostly what you could see were bored, glassy-eyed faces. All dressed up and nowhere to escape to.
Staying the pace was tough. On the first night I made it past the Rose whose party piece was making a sword out of a balloon; the Rose who said she was afraid of mayonnaise; Dáithí's dog-eared Christmas cracker jokes ("she's like the Olympic flame – she never goes out"); but I finally cracked and turned it off when, like a scene from Dr No,a man in a tux and an eyepatch arrived on stage with a birthday cake. Way too surreal.
The real winner of the competition was the marketing whizz from one of the sponsors, Newbridge: every Rose sported a large piece of the company’s very shiny jewellery. There was no escaping it. I wouldn’t have been surprised if one of them had arrived on stage with a canteen of cutlery arranged artfully around her neck.
There's no point in banging on about how anachronistic the whole lovely-girls fest is – Dáithí and co will undoubtedly be back next year to do it all over again, RTÉ is one of the sponsors and more than a million viewers tuned in at some point, so I know when I'm beaten – but in the TV review what really counts is what's on screen, and this year's Rose of Tralee, or what I saw of it, was simply boring.
TO WIN THE title of Rubbish Chef of the Year in The Great British Waste Menu, Richard Corrigan climbed into bins, foraged in pig food and asked farmers for their unwanted veg – not exactly how he usually goes about finding ingredients. The idea for the programme was to highlight the huge amounts of food wasted in the UK. Four top chefs – Corrigan, Angela Hartnett, Matt Tebbutt and Simon Rimmer – had to devise a menu from waste food, then serve it, first, to a panel of food writers and, second, at a banquet. The canapes were made from stuff found in the bins outside supermarkets – a bit out of date, a bit bruised; you get the idea.
The menu was as mouthwatering as the waste was eye-popping. Householders create waste by buying too much – but that's the least of it. The real problem starts much earlier in the food chain. As the chefs visited farms in search of the ingredients, it became clear that supermarkets are at the root of the problem – a more hard-hitting investigation into supermarket practices would be more useful. They demand that fruit and veg look perfect and conform to a particular size, shape and colour; any deviation and it's dumped or fed to the pigs. Tebbutt salvaged the lettuces he needed for his dish from a farm that ploughs 35,000 heads of them back into the soil every daybecause they're not quite perfect. Even thousands of eggs are dumped daily, because they are too small for the supermarkets. Other waste is prompted by taste or maybe fashion. Two chefs used offal, tongue, pigs' feet and heads. "If you're prepared to eat one part of an animal, you should be prepared to eat any bit of it," said Corrigan as he served up his ratatouille of pigs' trotters.
RTÉ'S DIVERSITY STRAND is a like a sensitivity training course – without being preachy or sensationalist. This Is Mefocuses on ordinary people living with a particular health or social challenge. The first programme in the new series, Me and My Tics, was an intimate look at the life of Pauline Hackett, a woman with Tourette's syndrome, and it gave a whole new insight into this distressing lifelong neurological condition. When she tells people about her diagnosis they find it hard to believe, because she doesn't swear or shout inappropriate comments. That's the commonly held understanding of the condition, but hers manifests itself as tics – sudden and quite violent-looking movements of the muscles in her face or her limbs.
She has learned to mostly suppress them in public, which requires an enormous amount of physical and emotional energy, and she’s tense all the time. As a child she was told by doctors who hadn’t a clue that she’d grow out of it.
In her own quiet way the 60-year-old Dubliner, who is a mother and grandmother, was extraordinary. She let the cameras into her life to make others aware of the condition because she herself was diagnosed only thanks to the media. Aged 50, and after half a century of brutal teasing, she heard a health programme on RTÉ radio where people with Tourette’s, including children, talked about their symptoms. It rang a bell. She made an appointment with the doctor she heard on the programme and was diagnosed within days. It was a relief, she said, to be told she had Tourette’s “and not just bad nerves”. The off-camera interviewer asked the standard question in these types of programme, and she answered with refreshing and unusual honesty. “Is there any upside to having Tourette’s? Would you get a grip?”
tvreview@irishtimes.com
Penthouse panto: Jedward invite us into the twin brother house
Whatever you think about John and Edward Grimes, the Dublin teenagers are not boring. Irritating, maybe, but only in the way a cute puppy peeing on the carpet is irritating: you know it can’t help it – and, anyway, you’ve brought it on yourself by inviting it in.
It's X Factortime – back with the first of the auditions last Saturday – and the show's publicity machine has cranked up to the max, with gossip hitting the tabloids (Louis Walsh thinks RTÉ should be sold off and shut down – that was last week's bit of anything-for-a-headline nonsense), the row about the use of Auto-Tune at the auditions and now Jedward: Let Loose, a series where the twins move out of home into a swanky Dublin penthouse. Every minute looked staged, of course; there's nothing real about this reality TV, but I suspect Jedward's fans, if they're allowed stay up to watch it, will lap it up.
On their first day the hyperactive duo discovered there was no water in the apartment. “Should we call a plummmerr?” says one in his singsong voice. “We’re up on the eighth floor, so it probably takes a while for, like, the water to, like, come up from the ground floorrrrr. We’ll wait,” advises his brother.
It’s some double act.
