How Do You Want Me? - BBC 2, Tuesday
Premier Passions - BBC 1, Tuesday
Omnibus - BBC 1, Sunday
True Lives - RTE 1, Monday
Patriot's Fate - BBC 1, Wednesday
`In suburbia nobody can hear you scream," Ian Lyons tells his new, rural in-laws. They look at him with hangdog faces. With suburban houses so close together, they argue, surely six or seven or maybe even 11 people would hear you scream. "It's a play on `in space nobody can hear you scream'," explains Ian, the resignation in his mumble stifling his own urge to scream at their irony-deficient, yokel literality. Oh well, space is so vast and "it's a vacuum" so it's different, says one, as the others nod agreement.
The oddly-titled How Do You Want Me?, written by Simon Nye of Men Behaving Badly infamy, features Irish stand-up comedian Dylan Moran as former London comedy store manager Ian Lyons. Charlotte Four Weddings And A Funeral Coleman is his wife, Lisa. Tired of the city, she has persuaded Ian to move with her to her home village in Sussex, despite his reservations about green wellies and in-breeding. The opening episode in this six-part sitcom shows Ian's fears to be deficient. Living in his in-laws' idyll is not just boring, it's dark and dangerous because the obnoxious family he has married into hates him.
They hate him so much that they have cut him out of the wedding photographs. His father-in-law (Frank Finlay) is a well-to-do turkey farmer, a local bully, prattishly sure of his patriarchy and his place within the community. As half-hour television comedy dramas go, this one is so dark that it's excellent - a comedy of despair rightly cropped of canned laughter. Unlike so many British sitcoms, which are cheesy, melodramatic and hysterical (or American ones, which, despite superb one-liners, are often odiously cutesy and moralising) this one is not castrated. In recent years, only Alan Partridge has been comparably original.
Shuffling, mumbling and seemingly burdened by his own droll wit, Moran acts just like he delivers stand-up gags. Yet, there are not many jokes - at least not many standard, punchlined jokes - on offer. Instead, the humour flows in a steady undercurrent, eroding the despotism and smugness, which pass for solid citizenship among the parochial prigs. As a comedy predicated upon the tensions between urban and rural perspectives, How Do You Want Me? shows life down on the farm to be, not idyllic, but bigoted, boorish and bilious.
The local librarian, Ian is told by Lisa, will have noted, Stasi-like, the books he has borrowed. The village's head honchos will be informed. At a bash to celebrate the opening of his father-in-law's new, high-tech turkey shed, Ian finds himself having conversations about "skimmed milk, abortion, Muslims and Paddy Ashdown". After he has told a rude joke, Ian is beaten up by Lisa's thuggish brother, Dean. "Look, look, it's a family thing. I had to do it. You humiliated my mother and father," says the thick.
And so it goes as Ian becomes increasingly isolated. Though it might not sound funny, it is. Unlike sitcoms (perhaps this one, strictly speaking, is more "comedy drama" than sitcom) in which all the cast strive to be funny, the humour here is in the tension. The characters do not laugh very often. But viewers do, savouring the inexorable slide towards embarrassments and conflict. It's almost embarrassing watching because the humour here is deliciously nasty - undiluted schadenfreude as the prats (and their victim) get their comeuppances.
Traditionally, British sitcoms have set up corny class clashes, not urbanrural ones. There's a clarion irony in the fact that RTE's Upwardly Mobile has attempted castrated, class-clash comedy while another Irish comedian is the star of a gritty, British urban/rural sitcom.
Following the success of Father Ted (see panel), it looks like we've lost another first-rate, Irish stand-up comedian to the British sitcom industry. That's not funny at all, especially given RTE's comedy record.
Yet more reaction to Rupert Murdoch's running off with the football: Premier Passions is the latest soccer docu-soap on terrestrial telly. A five-parter, it follows the fortunes of Sunderland through the 1996-1997 season, when the club was in the Premiership, about to be floated on the stock exchange and building a splendid new, 42,000-seater stadium. Of course, we know that Sunderland - along with Middlesborough and Nottingham Forest - were relegated last year. But an inside look at just how the season ended in tears is fascinating.
This one ought to appeal even to sad people who would watch a car being raffled on Kenny Live sooner than switch on Match Of The Day. Manager Peter Reid is the star. He swears as though he were doing a Sesame Street special on the letter `F'. After a home defeat by Wimbledon, Reid gave his measured assessment of his team's performance: "It was fookin' men against fookin' boys all over the fookin' park. Weak as fookin' piss, we were, fookin' weak as fookin' piss." Well, look, it's better than Jimmy `Fookin' Hill, isn't it?
Certainly, for work rate with the `F' word, Reid eclipses even Graham Taylor. As managerspeak goes, clearly Reid ought to be competing for a place in Europe and not stuck in third place in the First Division. But there were deeper revelations in Premier Passions. As the stadium rises, the team begins to plummet. Yet fans queue to pay £25 each to have their names inscribed on bricks at the portentously named Stadium of Light. At £25 a brick, it should have been called the Stadium of Loot. It does, though, capture the quasi-religious fervour of fans and the exploitation of them by fast-buck "saviours".
The device of interviewing supporters in their places of work - a pub, a fish shop, a decorator in a new house - with Sunderland scarves draped across their necks, works surprisingly well. The levels of their emotional dependence on the team's results are alarming - pathologically passionate in some cases. The relatives of dead fans, who had their ashes scattered across Roker Park, wonder how they can be incorporated in the Stadium of Loot. As yet another fly-on-the-boot sports programme, this one shows 1990s English football to be a bizarre mix of emotion and money.
The fans pay for emotion and the bigwigs, cold and calculating, get their thrills from profits and profile, not from performances on the pitch. As this opening episode ended, Sunderland seemed safe in mid-table. But the downbeat tone of Gina Our Friends In The North McKee's commentary lets you know that Peter "Fookin" Reid is only warming-up for the coming swearathon. "Cheer up Peter Reid," opposition fans sang last season. So he should - even if Sunderland miss out on promotion this year, he's gonna be, like Dylan Moran, a fookin' TV star.
Film and theatre director Jim Sheridan was the subject of this week's Omnibus. Neil Jordan, Daniel Day-Lewis, Brenda Fricker, Peter Sheridan, Terry George and Michael Sheridan were among those interviewed to round out his profile. Curiously, Noel Pearson, with whom Jim's name was once inseparably linked, did not feature. Showbiz divorces can be notoriously messy, of course. But it was strange that Pearson was not interviewed. Perhaps he was asked and declined.
With a driving Thin Lizzy guitar riff playing over 1970s footage of the Project theatre, the Dublin of the period was evoked. Jim spoke about the restrictions of the time, which was, perhaps, fair enough, although surely there are still a few of us around who can remember some, eh, lively evenings during that decade. There's more money around now, of course, but there's arguably more moderation too. Certainly, there's less to kick against nowadays and you'd have to wonder if the aims and hopes of the dead generations are fulfilled by Dublin glorying in calling itself "the nightclub capital of Europe".
Anyway, back to Jim. Finding Dublin excessively restrictive, he headed off to New York in the 1980s. We saw him walking on Sandymount Strand, then in Times Square. He spoke about his relationship with his own father and about such characters as The Bull McCabe (The Field) and Guiseppe Conlon (In The Name Of The Father). His technique of using deep, internalised feelings to animate characters outside of his own direct experience has obvious risks. But he seems to be a master at achieving the desired dramatic balance.
Jim Sheridan was the subject of Omnibus because his latest film, The Boxer, opens in Britain next month. Barry McGuigan, who coached Daniel DayLewis for the eponymous role, said that the actor was now so accomplished that he could "box professionally" - and he didn't mean box oranges. "The trouble about making films about the Troubles," said Jim, "is that politics is not the be-all and end-all of it . . . there are deeper things at play."
Clearly, this is true. But in a week in which Spotlight critiqued Resurrection Man, identifiably based upon The Shankill Butcher murders of the 1970s, it seems that films - like journalism - about the Troubles cannot but be contentious. Given that, Jim Sheridan's In The Name Of The Father, Some Mother's Son and The Boxer were always going to provoke rows. Neil Jordan, who also has portrayed the North on the big screen, empathised with Jim. As profiles go, this one was generally adulatory - engaging if suspiciously PRish at times. Pity that Pearson didn't show.
Back on RTE, True Lives screened The Killing Films Of The Third Reich. Whatever about charges of propaganda relating to films focusing on the North, this showed how thoroughly vile media manipulation can actually be. Concentrating on films commissioned by Josef Goebbels, the steady growth in their sophistication was alarming. A favourite technique in "explaining" why disabled and mentally ill people should be slaughtered was to use a professorial "expert".
Nowadays, such bespectacled, labcoated "experts" are used to flog detergent and reading glasses in TV advertising. There's even that pompous, guttural geek for "Research International". Nazi propaganda was startlingly successful in Germany but not internationally. Still, looking at TV ads today, you can see many of the same techniques, albeit modified, still in use. The great trick, of course, is to get contemporary audiences to believe that they are so sophisticated that they laugh at the crudeness of the old ways. Dear me!
Finally, Patriot's Fate. The second and concluding part of Brian Keenan's fine documentary about 1798 became quite a poetic (if sometimes dubiously verbose) lament on why the rising failed to unite Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter. Made for BBC Northern Ireland, the two hours concentrated on the Presbyterian insurrection in Ulster. You've got to hope that unionists watched it and indeed, a panel discussion of Keenan's film, among Northern politicians of all hues, could be fascinating. Then again, the trouble with films about the North's Troubles - even the Troubles of two centuries ago - is that too many people have their minds made up before they watch them. With viewers like that, who needs propaganda?