TV REVIEW:
School RunTV3, Sunday
Jamie's American Road TripChannel 4, Tuesday
The Choir: Unsung TownBBC2 Tuesday
Hidden History: If Lynch Had InvadedRTÉ1, Tuesday
FOR MANY of us, September means a return to routine, a time for sparkling knee-socks, crisp copy books and a satchel full of resolutions (get them to the school gate on time, teach them to sneeze into their elbows). For a lucky few, it can mean cheap flights to exotic child-free holidays; for the rest, it generally means better television filtering into our increasingly chilly homesteads.
TV3, having heralded its new autumn schedule with its resolution to increase its output of home-grown programming, kicked off the new term with novelist Anna McPartlin's play, School Run. A timely offering that one could watch while trying to get the damn adhesive plastic covering on to one's offspring's sinisterly jolly-looking textbooks (oh look, sin é Sam agus Holly at the tattoo parlour!), School Runannounced itself as "a comedy about the parents and pupils of a southside gaelscoil struggling to mount a school nativity play". With its original, if not altogether scintillating, premise, this frenetic 90-minute comedy drama was populated by a strong cast of talented Irish actors, including Barry McGovern, Conor Mullen and the effortlessly beautiful Carrie Crowley. While School Rundeserves an A for effort, being well-intentioned and well-shot, and having bags of energy and some provocative lines ("They don't really do marquees on the northside, do they?"), somehow this affable tale fell between two desks, ultimately being neither especially comedic nor interestingly dramatic.
Irritatingly narrated by an over-elocuted pre-teen, the play was, however, persuasively chock-a-block with larger-than-life characters, suggestive of a spanking new Ireland. And while School Runmay have failed to convince dramatically, in an odd kind of way it stood as an absurd testimony to these right-on rainy Noughties here on Éireann's moist isle. Giddily absurd and entirely weightless, the plot revolved around attempts to keep open the cash-strapped gaelscoil, which appeared to exist solely in order to educate about six funkily dressed children in designer dungarees and juicily cool knee-socks. The parents attending the school seemed to outnumber the pupils, and the school building, literally falling around the ensemble's heads, served as a playground for the childlike passions of the adults.
Among the numerous grown-ups decorating the set for the nativity play (and costuming the various deities that the school’s ethos demanded) were two gay fathers, one dangerously obsessive mother (skirting the edge of sanity for reasons unexplained), an anglophile lesbian, and a couple of ubiquitous blondes who looked so alike it was difficult to tell them apart. It was also difficult to determine which blonde was coming out on top in the story: one had an eating disorder, a bad dose of husband paranoia and a worrying pair of unidentified lacy green knickers in her possession, while the other lived in a big redbrick house and fancied the eco-cotton pants off her young son’s chiselled teacher (a chap devoid of irony who said stuff like “shit happens and then you die – all you can do in the meantime is love each other”). This latter blonde also had a husband in the Peace Corps, who eventually beat up the school inspector, shouting “you’re all a lot of new-age bleedin’ poofters” (and, contrary to long-held beliefs and a tendency to swing with the underdog, I have to admit that by this point in the drama I was rooting for the bloke in the fatigues).
All was resolved, however, when a local garage donated a shiny new BMW to the school raffle, thus providing the institution with the cash injection it desperately needed to stay afloat (love to know just which side of the boom was spinning when that particular sequence was scripted). Oh, and at the school panto, the school inspector, who had been on the brink of closing the whole sorry party down, got to sit beside our own Linda Martin, who had been seconded from her erstwhile celebrity life to pick out the winning raffle ticket.
We may have been tripping the nativity light fantastic and chillaxing with a clutch of cool, native-tongued southsiders in their Birkenstocks and Beemers, but when it comes to the crunch, and a writer is looking for an ending, it’s always useful to fall back on parochial old sensibilities.
YOU MAY SHUDDERat the thought of Christmas stockings, let alone nativity plays (given that we are still wringing out the sodden summer), but I'd hazard a guess that many of us will be unwrapping Jamie Oliver's new recipe collection, Jamie's America, for tips on what to do with the leftover turkey later this year. The Essex boy is back on the box again, this time wiv a pukka new culinary series to accompany his latest publication.
The shake-a-bit-of-cumin-in-your-burger boy has grown up to become a little puffy around the edges of his formerly enthusiastic and open face, but, having invigorated the British school dinner and trained lost youths in the art of culinary survival, Oliver has now turned his attention to investigating the taste of the US, beginning his Stateside odyssey in Los Angeles, home to barrios, poverty, a pervasive gangland culture and a flair for Mexican cooking. Jamie’s attempts at a bit of bonhomie with the barrio boys over the enchiladas and chilli sauce lacked conviction and seemed less appealingly guileless than in his previous television incarnations. In fact, Jamie seemed a little tired, overwhelmed perhaps by the breadth of his undertaking, and even a tad anxious to get home to his children and pregnant wife.
Part travelogue, part road movie, Jamie's American Road Tripfeels like little more than an extended advertisement for the cookbook. As he foraged in pungent Mexican markets for coriander, or chewed on a stem of mesqual (a cactus fungus which made him feel "a little bit trippy"), one could almost see the battalions of PAs and executive producers and researchers and tortilla-tasters who were propping up the television enterprise, and lapping at his talent and originality like a chorus of the bland.
Still, Jamie is producing watchable winter fodder and maybe the series, like a wheel of ripening Stilton, will improve with age.
I ADOREDthe first two series of BBC's The Choir,gently insightful fly-on-the-wall productions, the second of which saw the angelically innocent-looking choir director, Gareth Malone (with his holey jumper and talent for enthusing young people), bring a choir of initially recalcitrant children from Leicester's Lancaster School to London's Albert Hall, where their performance rocked the rafters. Malone, who subsequently received thousands of letters requesting his assistance to get communities and schools to sing, chose to locate his new series, The Choir: Unsung Town, in a deprived council estate in South Oxhey, on the outskirts of London. Once described as "the promised land of Cockney utopia", the area certainly looked like a community that could do with having its spirits lifted.
Initially, this four-part foray into the world of community choirs seems less appealing than the previous emotional rollercoaster of getting tough kids to jettison their hoodies and open their larynxes, but it is still worthy of attention.
“Community singing is a passion,” said the pertly diminutive Malone, observing the 200 or so souls who turned up for his latest choir’s first session.
There is something life-affirming about people wanting to sing. Even if Malone has become a minor television celebrity in his proselytising musical quest, and even if the thought of a couple of hundred Cockneys belting out a string of Bee Gees hits leaves you gasping for your ear-plugs, this is still a gratifyingly human story and one worth noting.
Ifs, buts and maybes Pondering pointlessly on a history that never happened
Barely time to explore the conundrum of what-ifs presented by Keelin Shanley and Tom Clonan in the
Hidden Historydocumentary,
If Lynch Had Invaded. Underscored by alarmingly intense music and busy with artily zooming camera angles (which attacked the assembled punditry from all points but seemed to favour focusing on their teeth), the film attempted to explore the possible consequences if Lynch had, in August 1969, dispatched our ever-so-small and embarrassingly ill-equipped Army over the Border into Newry to attack British forces there.
Many, many earlobes and sets of gnashers later, along with numerous portentous shots of Shanley's lovely blue eyes, and the conclusion was drawn that had Lynch allowed himself to be persuaded by more belligerent voices in the cabinet to send troops across the border (bearing in mind, as was suggested, that he'd have had to borrow a few buses to get the troops to the Border in the first place), it would have been a bloodbath. "Wounded, captured, killed and slaughtered" was the prediction of one of the many military men plucked out of the toy box for their opinion in this playfully absurd (and perhaps somewhat pointless) faux-history.
