TV REVIEW: Can Fat Teens Hunt?TV3, Tuesday, Make Me a ChristianChannel 4, Sunday, MaestroBBC2, Tuesday, Omagh: The Legacy/Omagh: The Legacy - Ten YearsOn BBC1, Wednesday and Thursday
IT'S KIND OF disorientating saying goodbye to a ball of shocking pink Andalusian sun, as it rolls to sleep between the black mountains of the Alpujarras and the Sierra Nevada, only to be hurled on to a drenched Dublin airport runway, before wading along the M50, carrying the only available taxi in the city on one's sunburnt shoulders. But that's what you get for having the temerity to holiday in a country where you can put your togs on without getting frostbite.
Still, got home, found the cat (wet and mewling), looked through the TV schedules and discovered, to my astonishment, that RTÉ is still under the impression that this is summertime, and that we are all too busy flaking around the barbecue to notice the scraps being served up on the goggle box. There was a mild temptation to sit up all night and tune into the Olympics, if only to witness the oarsmen sweat, but with computer-generated pyrotechnics standing in for fireworks and a tuneful, over-toothy little girl being shunted aside in favour of a miniature mimetic ponytailed diva (thus establishing the level of good clean sportsmanship we can expect at the Games), the spectacle seemed just too tricksy and hysterical for my post-holiday mood.
I swear I didn't watch Can Fat Teens Hunt? Like I'm going to hit the TV3 button in the hope of catching some fleshy, phlegmatic teenagers rolling around on their rattan mats in the Borneo jungle, squashing the frogs and paralysing the mozzies? What, you think another hit of fat porn is gonna wean me back to the schedules? Don't be ridiculous.
All right, technically I did watch Can Fat Teens Hunt? - but purely, you understand, for anthropological research. I've long felt that the best thing to do with a bunch of lonely, inert teens, who could make wigwams out of their elbow flesh, was to have them dehydrate in the Borneo jungle, vomit up a couple of hairy grubs, ignite their premature gallstones and have them rant at each other about their bowel habits. The poor children. What in the name of God would induce you to send your overweight child into the ruddy rainforest to participate in a televised cholesterol fest? If you don't eat up your tapioca root, you're going to get type 2 diabetes, you naughty girl! Tell it to the chins, lady, the face ain't listening.
ANYWAY, WITH THE current economic climate fostering a nouveau thriftiness (one adopted with alarming gusto by skinny celebs who claim to be dusting off their grannies' sewing machines to whip up a sexy little sackcloth-n-Marlboro-ash number to wear to the premiere), it's no surprise that Channel 4 has embraced the trend for temperance, with Make Me a Christian, a three-part reality romp around the garden of moderation.
The programme's rather startling premise - that it can turn your average hedonistic yob into a God-fearing vessel of decency in just three weeks - is a little difficult to take seriously, however, given that the majority of the participants appear to have been hand-picked for their tedious self-destructive behaviour, endless swarming tattoos and unyielding self-absorption, while the team of God docs, calmly determined to shine the light, look like the cast of The New Avengers. The wannabe (and don't-wannabe) volunteers in Make Me a Christian are hearing the Word from the evangelical Rev George Hargreaves and his team of "mentors", including a rather blonde Anglican vicar called Joanna, who for the opening episode was clad in opaque tights, knee-high leather biker boots and a dog collar worn like a gothic choker around her fragile neck. Hargreaves's mission is to stop the rot he witnesses in his pastoral work in Leeds, from where most of the volunteers hail: binge-drinking, promiscuity, shopaholism and, in the case of one over-stressed middle-class family, the pitiful ennui of death by television.
This pretty God squad may have to do more than exchange thrift-store crucifixes for fruity condoms if they are to shake some faith into the apathetic participants ("I don't think a dead man on a cross is a pretty thing to put in our house," said one). It seems, too, that the devil has been busy making work for idle hands: among the would-be Christians are a lap-dance manageress (mired in personal debt but with a penchant for designer shoes and New Age witchery, who, to be fair, was, by the end of episode one, weeping repentantly all over her boob-job), a lesbian kick-boxer (who grimly handed over photographs of her suspender-clad lovers in return for a pin-up of Pope Benedict - way to go!), and a spectacularly unprepossessing bloke who has somehow managed to sleep with 150 women in the last year or so.
"Basic Instruction Before Leaving Earth" is how Hargreaves likes to describe his Bible - after this little outing, one suspects he might need a new acronym.
MENTORS WERE THE buzzword of the TV week, as the BBC also joined in the reality bobsleigh with Maestro, an oddly enjoyable celebrity parlour game which sees 10 personalities (although some qualify more readily than others for that moniker) battle for the baton over a six-week period as they compete to conduct the BBC Concert Orchestra at this year's Proms in the Park, (oh, what larks, Pip).
Each celeb - we are talking here about such luminaries as David Soul, Alex James and Jane "my-mother-was-an-oboist" Asher - is nursemaided through the process by a musical mentor and judged by a panel of heavy-duty musos (the kind with stand-up hair and eyebrows you could camp in).
At the end of each session with the sanguine orchestra, the contenders get to recount their experiences to Clive Anderson, the programme's presenter, a man who has built an entire TV career on an air of bemusement and detached drollery. Actually, the whole thing is quite a laugh, and worth watching for Goldie alone, who, like some exotic triffid, eats up the willing orchestra with the sheer force of his musicality and his fab gold-plated teeth.
THE ONLY TELEVISION that demanded to be seen in the midst of the deluge was a pair of documentaries about the Omagh bombing, which, on a Saturday afternoon 10 years ago this month, shattered the market town, killing 29 people and unborn twins, and injuring more than 300, many of them children.
Ian Webster's original documentary, Omagh: The Legacy, was first aired just one year after the Real IRA car bomb, an event described as the single worst terrorist incident of the Troubles. His follow-up piece, Omagh: The Legacy: Ten Years On, revisited two children caught up in the devastation, now in their 20s and late teens, who were the main subjects of the first film.
Stephen Coyle was nine at the time of the explosion. With his shoulder blown away, and haemorrhaging from internal injuries, he was not expected to live, and ultimately endured almost a dozen bouts of surgery to keep him alive. Musical and pretty, young Claire Gallagher crawled from the wreckage of her shopping trip with a piece of shrapnel from the exploding car lodged in her face. "The contents of her eye were lost," the ophthalmic surgeon quietly explained to Webster. Claire was just 15, and, despite a series of complex surgical procedures, has never regained any sight.
The first documentary was built on vivid amateur footage from the scene, which depicted scenes of despair and shock, and video from the local hospital, whose casualty area resembled an abattoir. It was interspersed with moving interviews with Stephen, Claire and their families, was deeply affecting.
Claire, despite waves of public support and a St Patrick's Day invitation from Bill Clinton to play piano at the White House, battled paralysing depression, while Stephen ruminated from his hospital bed on how close he had come to death. "My mammy telled me not to leave her," he told Webster, struggling for breath to fill his lungs.
It was then, and still is, appallingly painful to watch these children's attempts to rebuild their lives, with Liam Neeson's tender voice-over and Van Morrison's soulful music simply underscoring the barbarity of the event.
Ten years on, however, Stephen Coyle is a Spandexed racing cyclist and has plans to train as a pilot, while Claire Gallagher works for the Royal National Institute of Blind People and has just married. Both spoke of a personal determination and focus borne of Omagh.
There are no happy endings though, only stoicism, grief, resignation and anger. As the mother of James Barker, who was just 12 when he was murdered, said through her furious tears: "Thirty-one people died - for what?" For what indeed? The gruesome sting in the tail of this tragedy, as these sombre films quietly served to remind us, is that 10 years on, no one has yet been brought to justice for these murders.
tvreview@irish-times.ie
