The producers of Love in the Country (RTÉ One, Monday) consistently manage to find a type of Irishman that I thought no longer existed. I believed they were gone from this isle, like elk and shame, but this show keeps pulling them out of the bag.
I’m talking, of course, of taciturn country men, men of few words, not because they spent a semester at the Marcel Marceau school of mime or because they’ve decided it’s time to listen but because of sweet Irish introversion of a kind that’s almost exotic. They’re not giving anything away – their emotions, their inner life, what they did at the weekend.
Where do they find these tongue-tied old-school Irish hunks? It is quite possible they had to reverse engineer them from the Hollywood-corrupted DNA of Paul Mescal, much like sci-fi geneticists are trying to get mammoths out of elephants. How do they convince them to take part? These are men who I assumed, until now, simply evaporated when someone pointed a camera at them.
Here they somehow survive the filming process, stuffed into fancy shirts and jackets to which they are allergic and displaying the sort of blushing Irish complexion that blends with the wallpaper (in post-production they have to ramp up the contrast), a colouring evolved by our people as camouflage in case we accidentally end up going to a party.
Doctor Odyssey’s core message: just imagine Pacey from Dawson’s Creek holding you tight and saying, ‘Shhh, it’s okay’
Rivals: The thrusting bum is intercut with spurting soap and overflowing champagne. We are in safe, if filthy, hands
The 2 Johnnies – what you get if you feed Ant and Dec a Tayto sandwich after midnight – are taunting us now
Patrick Freyne: Where does Love in the Country find its taciturn Irishmen? I thought they had gone from this isle, like elk and shame
Their answer to every question – What’s the price of silage? Why is there something instead of nothing? Would you like a pint? Did your father ever tell you he loved you? – is some variation of “Ah sure, you know yourself”. Can you imagine how the British security forces coped with these men in times gone by?
They make me feel national pride, standing there in a row, awaiting the judgment of a rural woman who knows how to balance the books, looking much like their forefathers did on the steps of the GPO in 1916.
“For what did you fight, brave patriots?”
“Ah sure, you know yourself.”
Love in the Country is an Irish version of an international franchise called The Farmer Wants a Wife in which rural sorts choose a selection of people to speed-date before bringing a smaller selection back to their farms to test their love with free labour. It has an animated logo that features a little tractor puffing out little love hearts instead of carbon dioxide, and it features Anna Geary, who is an excellent presenter.
She is funny and kind and in her element. She’s able to make even most timid participant comfortable, and when she says, “I’m travelling across Ireland on a mission to help six rural romantics to find the partner of their dreams,” I honestly believe she’d be doing it even if RTÉ weren’t filming.
Love in the Country is, by the way, a much better name than The Farmer Wants a Wife, which is terrifying. If I heard that sentence in the real world I’d be frightened that “the farmer” was planning to take me to his compound (and in the American iteration that’s probably what happens). Luckily, Ireland is a 21st-century state where as well as “farmers” and “wives” you can have “she-farmers” (aka “farmers”) and “he-wives” (or, if you insist, “husbands”).
And taciturn Irishmen are not put off by strong women. Although the most taciturn man on this episode does say of one participant: “Very nice. Plenty of talk.” Which I think you’ll agree is a damning indictment by the standard of his people. I’d never recover if a taciturn Irishman said “plenty of talk” about me.
Our first love-seeking countrywoman is Danielle, a pleasantly capable and work-obsessed vet whose suitors must pass “the daddy test” (not a test accredited by any university). Lest we be in any doubt that she is a vet, we see her stick her whole arm up the bum of a cow. (Though now I type this up, I realise this isn’t, strictly speaking, proof.)
Danielle is wooed by, among others, a salesman called Liam, who brings her flowers. “It was either flowers or macaroons, so I went for flowers,” he says, which raises so many questions about why he thinks these are the only two options. Later he is thrilled to be one of the men chosen to go to her land in Laois. “I’ve never been there, so it’s like going on holidays,” he says, in the process betraying his woeful ignorance of Laois.
Another of Danielle’s suitors is Fred, who is a graphic designer. “Okay,” Danielle says suspiciously on hearing his profession. And the nation blesses themselves, because they’re sure this is going to be another tragic tale of a country woman lured into ruin by a feckless graphic designer. (There are definitely folk songs about this.)
There’s also Ger, a love-seeking farmer from west Co Cork, who by the end of this episode chooses three of his suitresses to bring back to work his farm. When Geary asks him what he would consider a sign of success, he says: “If all three want to stay with me.” Polygamy is hovering around the edges of this show, and eventually it will emerge from the subtext into the text. Contemporary agronomics probably requires a throuple. Look, they can do what they like. Everyone on this show is lovely.
Over on Big Brother (Virgin Media Two) we get the usual brightly coloured clown folk screaming about every fluctuating emotion as though it were news from the front. Compared to the understated, underdressed Irishfolk of Love in the Country, the garish Big Brother housemates resemble Teletubbies as they yell their feelings, family secrets and credit-card numbers. Homo realitus is a different species entirely from the Culchicus broadcasticus of Love in the Country.
In the first episode of Big Brother the housemates were separated into two categories of human in classic Stanford-prison-experiment style. In Monday’s episode the less-privileged group is subjected to cruel and unusual punishment in the form of a housemate called Lily, who is driving them all slowly mad.
When they get some terrible food to eat, for example, she sticks a huge lump of unidentified goo into her head and, as she’s chewing, asks, “Has it got meat in it?”
“Are you vegetarian, babe?” someone asks.
She shakes her head and lets it just fall out of her mouth. “I don’t like eating anything that hasn’t got meat in it.”
Come 4am, Lily is just standing on a chair and screaming. A housemate named Sarah, who can’t stop crying, says in the Big Brother confessional: “Surely you can’t be like this all the time, running around screaming? How can you get your work done or live your life? But maybe I’m a massive ballbag and that is how people live.”
Not all people, Sarah! Come check out Love in the Country. Do they run around screaming? Sure, you know yourself.