TV REVIEW:ROUND ABOUT the time video cameras became affordable there was always the danger that when you went to friends' houses they'd whip out the holiday videos.
None of that handing snaps around any more; now you could see your friends in their summer clothes, looking hot and cross, gurning in front of the great sights of the world. So convinced were they of the entertainment value of their videos that they tended not to notice when you stopped with the “Oh, that looks fantastic” and began sticking pins in your eyes. And then the video thing ceased being a novelty, so no one did that any more until, somehow, TV stations started making travel programmes that are essentially holiday videos – and just about as interesting.
Three Men Go to Venice(BBC2, Tuesday) is the perfect example. It's the sixth series in which the comedians Griff Rhys Jones, Rory McGrath and Dara Ó Briain set out on what is optimistically described as a "comedy documentary", an adventure made up of taking in the sights, cracking jokes and getting on each other's nerves. They've moved beyond the British Isles for this series, but it's the same stuff really: jolly japes, taking part in local customs, trying on daft hats and conforming to their grumpy-old-men-on-holiday personas, with clever Rhys Jones keeping messers McGrath and Ó Briain in check. In this series they have a deadline: leaving Montenegro, they have to reach Venice in time to take part in a gondola race.
THERE'S THE DISTINCTfeeling that they are having a far better time making the programme than you could possibly have watching it – never a good thing – and Creedon's Retro Roadtrip(RTÉ1, Sunday) falls into the same trap. The idea for this four-part series, the big-ticket item in RTÉ's summer schedule, is that the radio presenter tries to re-create a family holiday from 1969 when his family, complete with 12 children, set off in their dad's Mercedes (there's posh, 42 years ago) for a caravanning holiday around Ireland.
Creedon has a vintage Merc and a caravan, though he doesn't appear to stay in the latter, which defeats the purpose a bit – well, that's if you can figure out what the purpose actually is. Creedon's Retro Roadtripis an uneasy mix of boring travel programme ("here we are on Swords main street"), Reeling in the Years(fantastic random old footage) and a biographical film about Creedon. There's no getting away from the fact that you have to be a big Creedon fan to love this programme: why else would you stay for such revelatory nuggets as "I remember Malahide and Donabate because I got sunburned there in 1969" or to find out that Creedon's mammy was a great believer in saltwater? Why else would you be glued to the screen while he shows and explains, in tedious detail, how he likes to eat an ice-cream cone?
And the tone, certainly in episode two, was downright weird: one minute he’s remembering holidays at Butlin’s and the lovely-ankles competition, accompanied by hilarious archive footage and old posters urging “Go gay at Butlin’s”; the next he’s at his sister’s grave talking to his nephew about terminal illness and death.
Creedon has an easy-going persona, but it’s hard to figure out who this rather expensive-looking holiday video is for – apart from his family, that is.
THE CREEDON PROGRAMMEclocked in at a feel-every-minute, whining-from-the-back-seat are-we-there-yet? hour, but The View Presents(RTÉ1, Tuesday) went by fast, thanks to Pat Shortt, the inspired and lateral choice of subject. Interviewing him, John Kelly had only a brief time to capture the career to date of an artist whom he acknowledged was difficult to categorise. In one clip we saw Shortt on The Late Late Showin a bad wig, singing his gimmicky and infuriatingly catchy breakfast-roll song, a soundtrack for the boom. This was quickly followed by another clip, this time of his achingly affecting performance as Josie, the mechanic in Garage, a movie that many people, in Kelly's words, regard as the best Irish film ever made. Then there are Shortt's stage shows with Jon Kenny (Shorrt was keen to give credit to his former partner) and his TV production work, including writing, acting in and producing sitcoms such as Killinaskully.
Kelly packed a lot into a little more than 35 minutes – it could have gone on for longer – though it was buried in the usual arts graveyard slot, which was a pity. Imagine what a brilliantly funny series Shortt would make if he was sent around Ireland in a Merc and a caravan, or even Venice in a gondola.
THE BAR ISpretty high, but even in crime dramas there's a point where things start going way over the top. In Luther(BBC1, Tuesday) they did so somewhere in the middle of the first series, and they are now heading for the bonkers region of unbelievability.
In that first series Lutherwas a beautifully shot, home-turf vehicle for Idris Elba, the big man from The Wirewhose immense TV presence, despite the daft plots, holds the whole thing together. By the end of the first season it had lost so many viewers it's a wonder it was recommissioned, but now it's back with a slightly different cast. The troubled maverick cop works in a new section called, unsubtly, the serious and serial unit, under a new boss played by a shifty-looking Dermot Crowley, who seems to be channelling an operative from a 1970s spy thriller.
A heavyweight cast again includes Paul McGann, who in series one was Luther’s ex-wife’s lover but who now appears to live in a conservatory and, for no discernible plot reason, is Luther’s confidant. Then there’s his pouty-lipped sometime stalker, played by Ruth Wilson, to whom he’s inextricably drawn, even though she’s escaped from a mental asylum where she was banged up for murdering her parents.
Luther is like a giant compared with his colleagues: he walks as if he just got off a horse, he is prone to rage, and when a baddie hammers a nail through his hand he calmly pulls it out and wraps it in loo roll. He’s that sort of guy.
It’s all filmed beautifully – London looks cool and dangerous – and is paced with exquisite timing and directed with a seriousness that belies how daft and heavy on the cliches it all is.
THE SCENES IN Lutherare scary, but to get your Elba fix (and who could blame you for wanting to?) watch the excellent The Big C(RTÉ2, Friday), where he's Laura Linney's love interest. This is definitely a better bet for a laugh, even though it's about a woman with cancer. Elba as a smooth-talking suitor is less likely to cause nightmares.
Get stuck into . . .
Todd Haynes directs the HBO remake of Mildred Pierce, the great three-hanky weepie, tonight on Sky Atlantic. Kate Winslet stars in a reprise of Joan Crawford's Oscar- winning role.
