An unholy affair

Half the country is writing film scripts at the moment

Half the country is writing film scripts at the moment. Have you noticed? So many earnest young men clutching treatments are traipsing over and back to the Irish Film Board's home in Galway that you could wonder if it risks becoming a FAS for the middle classes, ensuring that Robbie or Patrick or Cian can dabble with something culturally worthwhile, without ever damaging the unemployment figures.

But are they any good? It's only when you see the work of topnotch writers such as Roddy Doyle, or Conor McPherson, or indeed Neil Jordan, that you realise how very far below par some standards within the Irish film and TV industry can be pitched. Doyle's new work Hell For Leather, the inaugural drama in the latest `Two Lives' series, is a fine example of how good writing rises above even the strictest budget restraints, and makes for very watchable telly.

Gemma Craven and Barbara Brennan enter a messy kitchen - tea bags like turds in the sink, the Infant of Prague on a crammed shelf right beside the Vick. They've just met at a priest's funeral, and realised they have something in common. Both loved him, both bedded him. Each needs to understand why he betrayed her with another woman.

"Maybe he thought that if he got off with more than one woman, they'd make him a bishop," says Craven. Brennan plays it deadpan. "He was never ambitious in that way," she decides.

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The hook is, of course, all those scandals about clerical affairs from Father Michael Cleary to Bishop Casey, but the script keeps its eye on the women themselves, and on how their vulnerability encouraged a priest to prey on them. Brennan's character didn't realise the man was a priest until about 30 seconds before the fatal act - a moment when, by the way, Father Brendan was wont to deliver a memorable catchphrase, which you can only share by watching it. THE women realise they are two of a type - it wasn't personal, in other words. And, with most Irish women trained to regard priests as authority figures, it's easy enough to see why they might have felt it churlish to refuse his particular kind of pastoral care - one says she actually found herself uttering the words "Thank you very much for calling, Father" after their first bonk.

Craven's working-class-deserted-wife-character had him every Thursday morning, in between sodality and his weekly golf. Brennan's single-career-woman-of-a-certain-age was presentable enough to be his partner at Bruce Springsteen concerts and the odd dinner in town. But once Brucie left his wife, Father Brendan boycotted his music, as he did the Chinese take-away, Craven confides, because it really wasn't seemly for a priest to be seen there.

Brendan was a hypocrite, but that's not the point. The real issue is who he loved best - if indeed he really loved either of them - and why he could engage in so extensive a series of betrayals. It's a sign of the times that their revelations really don't shock, and probably are not meant to. As a tale of two hearts, the drama is predictable enough in its move from anger through grief and finally to shared confidences and dirty stories as the women bond, but beautifully paced. Doyle always writes women well, and Craven and Brennan play his lines wonderfully, under first-class direction from the increasingly-impressive Kieron J. Walsh.

What makes Doyle such a class act on screen is his exceptional ear for dialogue, and his real humanity. We saw it in the mould-breaking Family, and in the Barrytown trilogy directed variously by Alan Parker and Stephen Frears. Here, the form offers incredibly tight challenges to him, and to Walsh - not least that of keeping the viewer engaged on a same-set piece where the real drama plays in sub-text.

Is that all the drama we can expect on RTE? Labouring the point yet again risks invoking years of argument, but surely public service broadcasting can stretch to something more than soaps, detective thrillers and low-budget series like this. Sure, financial modesty is a founding premise of the `Two Lives' series - its success is that it rises above the constraints. Certainly, we've been bored into submission by years of hearing RTE explain why drama series can't be produced because of the high costs, but sometimes you wonder if it's actually a fear of failure, a real sense of not knowing how to manage talent, and a reluctance to take the kind of risks that good human drama must entail.

Hell for Leather, Two Lives International, is on RTE 1 on Thursday at 10.10 p.m.