Lives less ordinary

TVReview: Arts Lives, surely, is one of the sharpest knives in the State broadcaster's drawer, consistently delivering quality documentaries on Irish artists. And with the exquisitely shot John McGahern: A Private World picking up the Best Arts Documentary award at the Celtic Film Festival, one would love to see the strand travel to other networks.

Maintaining form this week, The Lives of Brian attempted, with gentle humour (which included Tom Hickey in top hat and tails exchanging molecules with a handsome bicycle) and the sympathetic remembrances of peers, to reveal the darkly complex nature of civil servant, author and Irish Times columnist Brian Ó Nualláin.

In his various guises - novelist Flann O'Brien, government employee Brian O'Nolan, and Myles na gCopaleen, author of the "insanely despotic" Cruiskeen Lawn column - Ó Nualláin remained elusive, his pseudonyms possibly indicative - the programme mooted - of a lack of identity as much as a search for identity. Writing in the shadow of Joyce, and in a foreign language (until the age of 12, Ó Nualláin, educated at home, spoke only Irish), he showed, as Anthony Cronin said, "a curious lack of resilience" about his work. What scant archive footage the programme could find revealed a garrulous yet private man, caught in the slipstream of an empty bottle of Power's and a Dublin literati that crowned him "patron saint of brilliant failures".

A rueful Eamon Morrissey, who went on so memorably to portray The Brother (from Cruiskeen Lawn), recalled "getting an awful going-over" as a young man when he had the temerity to compliment the author on At Swim-Two-Birds in Neary's pub on Dublin's Chatham Street. One reason for Ó Nualláin's vitriol was pointed out by Anthony Cronin: "He wrote his masterpiece [ At Swim-Two-Birds] at a very young age. He could neither advance nor retreat". Unable to face the rejection of his second novel, The Third Policeman, by his London publisher, Ó Nualláin despairingly invented a fantastical tale of the manuscript's disappearance. In reality, however, the "lost novel" remained in his home, a yellowing reminder of his perceived failure.

By the time success, cult status and recognition came to Ó Nualláin in the early 1960s, with the re-publication of At Swim-Two-Birds, it was almost too late. The steps of his "slow and malignant destiny" came to a halt on April Fool's Day 1966, when Ó Nualláin, still only in his 50s, died of cancer. The manuscript of The Third Policeman was found among his papers and its posthumous publication sealed his reputation as one of the great writers of the 20th century.

There was a lovely moment in this ultimately sad programme when comedian Tommy Tiernan, standing under a lonely tree, read aloud a surreal passage from Cruiskeen Lawn about a new kind of drink which caused instant misery when consumed but which led to the most wonderful, euphoric, life-enhancing "hang-under" the next morning. Tiernan, along with the rest of us, almost wept with laughter.

CONTINUING THE BLONDES-on-slabs tradition of UTV murder dramas, the frothy Murder City returned to our screens this week with a . . . dead blonde on the autopsy table. This one had been unceremoniously hurled off the top of a block of flats, and the tough-talking, soft-hearted, neatly coiffed cop, Susan Alembic (Amanda Donohoe), and her tousle-headed, macho sidekick, Luke Stone (Kris Marshall), got to investigate.

Unfortunately, it looked like the peroxide victim had caused a bit of collateral damage on the way down, landing bang on top of a nice young lad who was on the doorstep waving off his virginal girlfriend the night before their nuptials. We know she had been saving herself for marriage because she had just said "thank you for agreeing to us saving ourselves for marriage" to her fiancé in the car in a sweetly chaste way, ponytail bobbing, after they kissed goodnight. Can't say chastity got him very far - pling, he was as dead as a dodo two seconds later.

The investigation proceeded, and there was lots of jolly banter over the slab with the over-enthusiastic criminal profiler. Then Alembic was off to an upmarket dating agency, Club Libero (who writes this trash?), for the boredly married (or was that the marriedly bored?), in search of the killer.

Club Libero had nice wallpaper and hosted "parties" on weekdays from 7pm to 9pm ("click and a quickie and still get home to the wife and kids on the last train"). Commuter dating, I suppose. "We do the laconic sarcasm, mate, you do the answering," as Detective Stone said in his floppy way - not that laconic sarcasm seemed much in evidence in the first episode.

In the end, of course, the virginal ponytail turned out to be a sex abuse victim of the Club Libero owner, with the murdered blonde apparently little more than a weapon aimed at the interfering fiancé. Along the way, Alembic had almost hit the sack with the chief suspect, who in fact was a jolly nice bloke with a flat in Belgravia and parts in lots of other UTV dramas. If you have absolutely nothing better to do, the members of the "Serious Crime Division" will be getting their acrylic fingernails dirty for the next three weeks or so. It's not as mind-numbingly awful as some of the gore and yore UTV throws out of its abattoir, but a gentle avoidance is recommended.

ON TUESDAY NIGHT BBC news reported that this year alone more than 1,000 illegal immigrants from Africa have drowned off the Atlantic coast, attempting to reach the Spanish Canary Islands and a gateway out of poverty to Europe. Stowed on rusting hulks and then put to sea in overcrowded and piteously inadequate craft, one in five who attempt this hazardous journey dies. One in five.

Hearing this desperately sad statistic somehow makes the current television fad of salivating over celebrity "cribs" and lifestyles all the more excruciating. Simon Cowell is pretty small potatoes compared to some of the more odious examples of this genre, but there was something so deeply unimaginative about The Fabulous Life Of . . . Simon Cowell that it really stuck in the craw. The mega-rich music producer and Pop Idol demon has made so much money nurturing pop tarts (sorry, stars) and reducing tuneless wannabes to tears that he doesn't quite know what to do with it. So stimulating did one American couple from Oklahoma find his invective that they offered him $100,000 (€81,200) to hurl abuse at them while they had sex - "that was absolutely bloody awful". Fortunately, he didn't need the dosh.

Cowell is plucked, dyed, waxed, manicured and pedicured, he owns more Armani than Armani and enough black Spandex-like turtlenecks to clothe an army of over-indulged abdomens. And his anti-ageing cream sets him back £100 (€143) a tube.

"He loves cars!" the programme informed us (you don't say!) and, scattering Aston Martins in his wake, he is also apparently "very popular with the ladies and the ladies love him".

"When you see a beautiful girl you want to look at it," Cowell confided. Really, he did say "it". It. Oh God.

Fab Life acts as a kind of visual vomitarium, the lifestyle excesses enough to send you screaming to the local monastery.

Anyway, Cowell ended up happily trotting off on holiday with both his current and his former girlfriend, who held hands with each other and clinked their bling while Simon bared his pearly whites. Of course Cowell isn't the only rich celebrity to indulge his hedonism and his gut in a poolside villa, but his seemingly flaccid acceptance of privilege made for one of the most depressing bits of dross I've seen in a while.

SPEAKING OF UNTRAMMELLED hedonism, I got a new telly. It's terribly sophisticated and a little bit moody and makes everything else in the house look like a badly dressed mother-in-law. But for what it did for David Attenborough's Planet Earth, it can be forgiven.

The visually stunning series came to an end this week, the final episode looking at the planet's deserts - arid, seemingly motionless, but teeming with life. Attenborough's team kicked up the sand from the Gobi to the Sahara and from Arizona to Australia to reveal tenacious, belligerent, insistent plant and animal life. Under the relentless sun they uncovered multicoloured flat lizards scuttling over the sand like moving mosaics and enormous cacti that can store five tonnes of water in their prickled skins, their tops garlanded in pink and white bloom, standing foursquare in the sand like gigantic expectant brides.

The crew managed to film nocturnal foxes, duelling ibex, baking kangaroos and swarming locusts; they lured introverted wild desert camels into the spotlight and followed flustered onyx embroidering the sand with their delicate hoof-prints as they fled famished lions. And, most movingly, we were shown resilient, dogged Namibian elephants traversing the great plains of sand in search of food, their wrinkled historic hides like some ancient indecipherable map.

If you missed this truly wonderful programme it is repeated tonight on BBC2 at 6.05pm. Another series of Planet Earth is scheduled for the autumn.