Heading back to boot camp

TV REVIEW:  Use It or Lose ItRTÉ1, Sunday Last Choir StandingBBC1, Saturday Stocking the ShelvesRTÉ1, Wednesday Canterbury's LawTV3, Tuesday

FORMER IRISH international Niall Quinn, the bloke with the squeaky-clean hair and the bubbly wife who did a few passably enthusiastic washing-powder commercials, and who also bought into Sunderland FC (Quinn, that is, not the wife), was back on the box this week. Use It or Lose It is a new series from RTÉ which, with breathtaking originality, dusts off former sports stars, now grown flabby with under-use, and challenges them to make a one-off comeback. This tundra of television tedium is the kind of programming that gets slipped under the carpet of July, in the hope that we're too busy applying the after-sun lotion to notice.

The festivities began with Quinner returning to his former club, Manortown United, in west Dublin, where, 25 years ago, he lit up the shorn pitch with his ball skills. Anyway, a quarter of a century later, and Quinn and his team-mates, all now in their 40s, had six weeks to tighten their beer guts and marble their pecs before taking on the current crop of Manortown boys in a challenge match (or, alternatively, with the fortysomethings' combined weight of 150 stone, the veterans could have just sat on the opposition).

Carrying the extra pounds with nonchalant ease, the lads turned up for training, an exercise relieved by snaps of the old footballing days before high-maintenance Wags, Russian oligarchs and perfume endorsements, when they all had hair and zest and, presumably, dreams of running on to the pitch in the Ireland kit and owning their very own Premier League club.

Guided by Dr Cian O'Neill and nutritionist Noreen Roche, the team managed a game of two halves without keeling over, dropping dead with dehydration or vomiting, this despite Quinn almost scuppering the regime by bringing the lads to Sunderland for a gawk and a few jollies.

"That's what life's all about, being competitive and having fun while you're doing it!" said Quinn from the bland depths of his pretty Sunderland footballer's kitchen. (Have you noticed that sports stars are invariably interviewed in their kitchens, perching over their gleaming island units with their sleeves rolled up, grinning like benign princes over a supplicant dominion? They ain't fooling me with their virgin Pyrex.)

Quinn's hearty, boyish enthusiasm for sport is to be admired, of course, venerated probably, an inspiration to those of us who just love driving their children around for hours in a state of Saturday morning bewilderment, looking for little pitches on huge estates, squeezed between other people's rainy back-gardens and an electricity pylon, to stand shivering through a one-all draw (which, no surprises, was the Manortown-on-Manortown score). Trust me, I am that soldier.

THE GOOD CLEAN fun didn't stop there this week. Last Choir Standing, BBC's big new reality sing-off, warmed up with choirs from around Britain attempting to wow the Saturday night TV audience who will eventually choose their favourite.

Choirs may not seem like the sexiest of sweetmeats to be chewed over by the ubiquitous TV judging panel and the telephone-voting public.

However, since the moving and hugely successful BBC ventures, Choir and Boys Don't Sing, which saw London Symphony Orchestra choirmaster Gareth Malone fashion choral ensembles out of a sheaf of phobic, inert youth, the utopian ideal of people coming together under a high C seems to have percolated through to the variety department.

As one has come to expect from the slot, this is highly entertaining, emotionally manipulative TV, and while the choirs that have made it through so far may not have been the most decorous or musical, they're the ones most likely to sustain a TV audience.

Having dispensed with lots of snug ladies from places like Basingstoke, all kitted out in tartan bolero jackets and hell-bent on washing that man right out of their hair (or some equally tooth-watering mantra), the show is now set up for the battle of the minority brands.

Among the finalists, there's an inclusive community choir from Belfast, a gay men's ensemble from Brighton (who most entertainingly sang Gimme Gimme Gimme a Man After Midnight) and a bunch of animated black kids called Dreemz who, against the odds, are "going to show the world". It's great, but any choirmistress who thought her bunch of songsters could get through on their three-part harmonies should have woken up and smelt the ratings. This is an elongated feel-good fairytale, and Last Choir Standing was never going to crown a well-heeled Cinderella shod in support tights and Scholl sandals.

"SEVEN SHILLINGS and sixpence for bed and breakfast in the Skibbereen Hotel, one and tuppence for a gallon of petrol." Inspired by her father, retired commercial traveller Tom Gately, film-maker Anne Gately's nostalgic Stocking the Shelves was one of those bittersweet, carefully crafted documentaries that turn up from time to time on the national broadcaster, gracefully spilling memories of times past.

Tom Gately, along with some of his former colleagues, spoke with clarity and sadness about the "intimacy and friendliness" that existed between the commercial traveller (who, with his car and expense account, was a man not to be sniffed at) and his clients, small tradesmen up and down the country, their names painted over the door, the pub to the back, the shop to the front, establishments that were a "vital area of social interaction".

Gately junior spoke to an elegant man who had spent his working life with Sunbeam, selling "combinations" to chilly nuns and sturdy housewives, and spliced the documentary with charming archive from the 1940s and 1950s, in one instance showing window displays of smiling dollies embracing tins of baking powder and saluting tins of Andrews Liver Salts.

With its seductive combination of personal history and poetic black-and-white footage, this was a paean to the days before the monolithic supermarkets came along and ate up the grocery trade, slowly killing off a whole way of life.

WAY, WAY IN the distant TV past when ER was the hottest operation on the block, when, perched between endless emotional puberty and mature political awareness, George Clooney became the most fancied man on television, his character, Dr Doug Ross, had a complicated relationship with a raven-haired, occasionally suicidal nurse called Carol Hathaway, played by Juliana Margulies, who could never decide whether she wanted to sleep with him or not (such wanton vacillation making her pretty unique among her gender).

Anyway, anyway, anyway, Margulies, a moody actress who exudes a kind of scratchy egocentricity, is now fronting her very own drama series, Canterbury's Law, imported for our delectation by the ever-hopeful TV3, in which she plays a fearless Rhode Island defence lawyer.

If ER was the television equivalent of the neuroscience laboratory, Canterbury's Law is lurking somewhere around the sluice room, with a script that sounds as if it's been disgorged from the appendix bucket.

"I could love the person on the stand, and still rip their throat out," claimed Margulies with laughable Shakespearean intensity and all the plausibility of Paddington Bear wielding a scalpel.

Episode one saw "murder-is-my-metier" Margulies - and her ankles, of which there were a confusing, almost indecent number of shots - cheat on her lumber-shirted husband (a bearded Aidan Quinn, who looked like he might benefit from joining his namesake, Niall, on the training circuit) before shouting at her cowering staff and getting herself punched in the kisser by an angry witness.

But she won her case, goddamnit - justice was served, and it was time to go home and stare moodily at the empty child's swing in her yard, and embrace a couple of mouldering teddies in an empty nursery.

Ahh, we conclude, here is an angry woman, mired in personal grief, dragged down by her lumpen spouse, disappointed by her snivelling lover with the eye-lift, choked by her empty, childless nest, but constantly on the march for "exculpatory evidence" in her spindle heels, because that's the fearless defender of humanity's misfits that she is! Excuse me while I retch.

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