TV REVIEW: Highlights of the week's television programmes reviewed. This week, The Lyrics Board RTE1, Saturday At The End Of The Day RTE1,Monday Treasure Island RTE 1, Sunday Treasure Island Live, Tuesday V Graham Norton
On The Lyrics Board there is one scriptwriter, but there are three people to do Linda Martin's hair and make-up. The other six guests on the show must share two make-up people between them. They may be there to hold up either end of the moustache sported by team captain Jim "not that Jim Sheridan" Sheridan. Combined with a plectrum of a beard snagged on his lower lip, his facial hair is an outrageous display of achingly self-conscious cool. As if he grew the moustache but nobody noticed, and then decided to keep growing it until everybody noticed.
The return of The Lyrics Board is all about cosmetics. You may remember it in its original incarnation as a quiz show adaptation of the afternoon singalong at the retirement home. Its audience was made up of the stragglers from Live at Three. So were its guests. Its songs were classic hits and music-hall standards. It was half-an-hour long but gave you value for your licence fee by seeming to last for twice that. It was dropped a few years back, but the idea was sold to television stations across the world. The Lyrics Board was made in 19 countries. It is a fact which makes people instinctively shake their heads.
It is one that also seems to have gnawed away at the decision-making neurons of a commissioning editor, because last week RTÉ brought the show back. It has, though, undergone superficial surgery. The younger members of the audience have been pushed to the front row. The guests are a few spares Louis Walsh had hanging around the back. The songs are contemporary pop numbers. It is a full hour long now, carrying through on its commitment to waste as much of your time as possible.
There are tricks played with the applause. The audience looks happy enough and when a song is in full swing, it sways like cardboard waves on a panto stage. But when it goes to a break, the audience is heard cheering like they have never cheered before, even when they are visibly restraining themselves.
"The hottest, the coolest and the most successful singers in Ireland today," it says on the press release. The hottest, coolest, most successful singers in Ireland last week were a guy who didn't make it into Six and two girls from Bellefire. The latter have been well trained by Louis Walsh, obviously being nice to people on the way up now that they're being asked on those people's quiz shows. They sang with the carefree attitude of teens in their bedrooms, hitting the bum notes with a sigh, flattening the keys with a smile.
The other guest was Billy from Fair City, a man with the humility to know that he has a singing voice like a falling redwood, so that he spoke softly wherever singing could be avoided. Billy from Fair City has a real name, of course, but not even his fellow team members bothered to use it. They made jokes about how they had better do as he says. They laughed it up about how he was supposed to be dead. Stuart Dunne hasn't quite got to the point where every mention of the name Billy causes an involuntary twitch, but he will.
"Et tu, Brute," his dying Caesar will gasp on the Globe stage some years from now.
"It was Lorcan with a golf club, Billy," a voice will yell from the gods.
Linda Martin is the host. Her hairdresser has done a splendid job, the do seems freeze-framed in time. Her scriptwriter, however, has been intimidated by being so outnumbered. Her patter fizzes along like a fuse in the rain.
And The Lyrics Board is still an afternoon singalong at the retirement home, whether they're all wearing backwards baseball caps or not. It is an interpretation of youth that can only come from someone who has left youth years behind. But when it comes to cool, RTÉ is usually on a par with rapping bank managers of ads gone by. It is your dad with an earring. It is a bald guy with a pony-tail.
RTÉ's new sports quiz At The End Of The Day could do with someone cracking open a can of applause every now and again to help chase away the emptiness.
You can actually hear the dust rattling around the studio. There is the constant hiss of background noise. It suffers from the perennial Irish TV problem of not having a population big enough to supply an interested percentage as a studio audience. There are a few present, and they clap gamely, but when the reaction to a quip sounds the same whether it has fallen flat or raised the roof, then every moment's silence sounds like an eternity.
It is a sports quiz exhaustively modelled on A Question of Sport. It even includes identical rounds, but with different titles. The "Home and Away" round of the UK quiz is here called "Point or Goal". "What Happened Next?" is "A Game of 2 Halves". It is a bit like nailing a hand-painted sign over the golden arches. For sports fans, it is a more than passable way to pass 25 minutes, but for the trivia rather than the banter. Everyone looks as if they know exactly how the programme is supposed to be, but has no idea of how to make it happen.
WITH Treasure Island, RTÉ has proven itself far more sophisticated, but increasingly distasteful. It bought this format in from New Zealand television, and is mining every last cent from it. Three times a week, you can watch the same events from a different angle. Then you can pay the makers of the programme to accept your say on matters.
This week, Jack - a man so muscular he looks like he's swallowed a gladiator whole - was kicked off the island for buying marshmallows from a local.
After the programme, the viewer was invited to text a reply to a survey on whether he should have been ejected or not. At 60 cent per text, you too could have the satisfaction of knowing that a computer had logged your ineffectual opinion.
Judging by the calls they receive on Treasure Island Live, those who text will be the young girls who also call to ask questions of the newly evicted contestants. When I say newly evicted, of course, I mean in telly terms. In real terms, the whole lot of them have been back and watching their antics on the telly for some weeks now. The success of Treasure Island hinges on the contrived suspense that comes from pretending that this is not the case at all. On Sunday, one tabloid announced the news that Jack had been kicked off the island as if it was an unfolding event, rather than a well-timed PR release. There is a silent contract between makers, media and viewers to treat everything as present or future tense. Every week Brendan Courtney asks the contestants who they think will win the game, when, of course, the game ended weeks ago. The day one of the conspirators gets bored with the pretence the game will be up. Do you agree or disagree with this opinion? If you're not sure, then text SUCKR to the premium rate number that will appear after this review.
V Graham Norton reached the end of his run of weeknight shows in decent health, even if he was desperately gasping for air by the time he hit the line. There were moments this week when the whole show was only ever seconds away from thrumming its fingers, glancing at its watch and humming nervously as the clock ticked down. Singer Alison Moyet was Norton's guest on Wednesday night, and it was like watching two people stuck in a lift.
Norton, though, has finally cracked a nut that British television stations have been hammering away at for years. Executives have been throwing their most promising stars into the front line of late night five nights a week chat shows, only to watch them hacked down one by one. Norton's advantage was never to have looked across the Atlantic to The Tonight Show format.
Most previous attempts had aped that chat show right down to the night skyline backdrop and the host's comedy swigs from a coffee mug. Graham Norton instead turned his nightly show into an edited highlights version of his weekly one. The only comparisons that could be made were withhimself.
He passed the first test of the genre and turned the repetition of the jokes into a virtue. He capitalised on his post-Big Brother scheduling by becoming the show's prime commentator. The whole thing remains relentlessly, often tiresomely high camp, but Norton has confirmed a charm and intelligence that gets him through. It also provided us with possibly the year's most surreal television moment. Hollywood legend Dustin Hoffman's comedy sketch impersonation of Big Brother housemate Johnny was two worlds colliding. It said things about the nature of fame in the 21st century that only a thesis could get to the bottom of.
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