No escape from reality

TV Review: Attempting a round-up of the TV year feels like the literary equivalent of herding several flocks of neurotically individualistic sheep into a rather tight pen, so inundated with choice are we in this bloated, digitalised era.

Yet, even as the BBC cuts a swathe through its staff, dynastic media families proliferate and LCD screens blandly reflect everything from Duran Duran biographies to the ultimate reality transgression, the bizarre Make Me a Muslim, there is still plenty of television that is worth crawling on to the couch for. You'll have to forgive me, though, if whichever televised delight beat your drum or rattled your cage didn't make it into the review. I'm sure more than one woolly blighter has skipped over the horizon of my memory.

Reality TV continued to sprawl all over the schedules this year; happily, however, Celebrity Big Brother finally appears to have eaten its own liver. After five tedious years of watching celebrity detritus dry and pumped-up, weeping wannabes in Gucci boots falling into kidney-shaped swimming pools, the programme is apparently being "rested". This is a reaction, no doubt, to Jade Goody - the English woman who thought East Anglia was a foreign country - and her cohorts bullying Shilpa Shetty, a story which saturated the media like acid rain at the beginning of the year, only eclipsed by Richard Hammond's return to Top Gear after defying death in a 300mph crash.

No sooner, though, do you cut the head off the beast of reality TV than 99 others replace it. Along with pedestrian old celebrity kangaroo-penis-eating in the Australian outback, courtesy of yet another round of I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! and endless lachrymose song-and-dance contests (Any Dream Will Do and X-Factor seemed to capture transient attention spans in this household), great blubbering stretches of reality TV were totally devoted to fat, or the lack of it. From cadaverous, virginal, anorexic identical twins (say that with a mouth full of sage stuffing) to hungry, irritable, size-zero celebrities with halitosis and limp hair, to roly-poly lady Sumos in the dohyo, size really did seem to matter, and lollipop ladies (actresses whose shiny heads are too big for their bodies) were to be found gambolling all over television sets.

MY FAVOURITE HOLLYWOOD playgrounds for these breathing Barbies were three hysterical American shows that were among many to swim over to this side of the pond. The L Word, which featured neurotic, dairy-free lesbians in Spandex, was good for a laugh, as was the outrageous Californication, starring David "I won't go down in history but I will go down on your sister" Duchovny as Hank, an out-of-work, stuffed-crotch scriptwriter hammering his thong up and down Hollywood Boulevard. Similar territory indeed to Entourage, a bright sitcom from HBO about the heady excesses of a bunch of mates living in La-La land, a show which may resonate for one or two of our home-grown celebrities who have found their fortunes in that sandy paradise.

Speaking of which, The Tudors was terrifically entertaining and featured a host of Irish actors, including a superb, pomegranate-munching Jonathan Rhys Meyers as a hot-blooded King Henry VIII, throwing young undressed actresses and their expensive tresses on to beds.

Such sport has seen the actor nominated for a Golden Globe award, where he will be joined on the podium by James Nesbitt. Nesbitt's best-actor nomination is for his role as the troubled, pneumatically libidinous doctor in Jekyll, a strained, somewhat overworked drama that insisted on surrounding this competent actor with pyrotechnics and a psychiatric nurse in a rah-rah skirt. Anyway, where were we? Yes, drama.

IRISH DRAMA, OR at least Irish involvement in drama, made for some of the best television of the year. Channel 4's Boy A, from the book of the same name by Jonathan Trigell, and with an austere, delicate screenplay by playwright Mark O'Rowe, was superbly directed by John Crowley. It featured intense, riveting performances from Andrew Garfield and the brilliant Peter Mullan. Another fecund partnership was writer Mark O'Halloran and director Lenny Abrahamson, who gave us the wry and soulful meditation, Prosperity.

In a lighter mode was TG4's electric The Running Mate, directed by Declan Recks and written by Marcus Fleming from an original idea by Conor McPherson. The Running Mate was a joyous satire, a political drama with balls and some great one-liners (cute-hoor councillor Counihan to minister he is blackmailing with a sexually-compromising home movie featuring the minister, two leggy east European prostitutes and an intimate encounter with a battery-operated phallus: "Show them that and I guarantee they'll stop calling you a racist").

My nomination for most pompous press release of the year was this: "Incredibly intertwined, somewhat damaged adult siblings embrace one another unconditionally while striving to reflect the perceived perfection of their role model parents." That tripe heralded the cloyingly awful Brothers and Sisters, another American family drama starring the wearingly weepy Sally Field and her thespian progeny, Calista Flockhart. Both actresses should come with a health warning: "These gallingly irritating women may make you barf over your three-piece suite." At least soggy Americans offer some dry amusement, which is more than can be said for television comedy, where still another year has gone by, a year full of satirical potential, without a muscular response from the national broadcaster.

The State of Us, written by Gerard Stembridge and performed by Risteard Cooper, failed to meet its potential given the talent on board, whether through lack of vision or lack of support, while the heartbreakingly awful The English Class, featuring William Morgan doing a rather nasty Ricky Gervais imitation all over a bunch of beleaguered foreign nationals, was so shockingly misguided that I thought it was a joke - which is what it was trying, and so desperately failing, to be.

ELSEWHERE ON THE home turf, while the controversial High Society and the ludicrous Web of Desire approached their brief like nervous turkeys, Prime Time Investigates continued with an unbroken run of quality investigative journalism, from nudging corrupt county councillors out from under their rocks to blowing the dust off this island's cocaine habit. Likewise, Hidden History offered numerous documentary insights into our sepia past.

Film-maker Alan Gilsenan produced The Hospice, a moving portrait of the dying, and was also responsible for one of my favourite films of the year, Paul Durcan: The Dark School, which was simply a conversation with the poet. Durcan recounted his early life and time spent incarcerated in psychiatric institutions at the behest of his father, and described his later life as poet and father himself: "The kitchen walls painted yellow, the typewriter on the table, the little person in a bath on the floor." In the same vein, Arts Lives, an inspirational strand, gave us a memorable portrait of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Taibhsí í mBéal na Gaoithe, an exploration of her own difficult past and a rumination on the dichotomous nature of parenthood and art (hey, I'm beginning to see a pattern in my choice of viewing): "letting the world seep through you as if you had no skin, then getting up to make the dinner."

AND FOOD! THAT was the other one - so much food! Nigella drizzled it over her chin and licked it off her fingers, Jamie politicised it, Ramsay cursed over it, and sweet little Raymond Blanc sprinkled Gallic all over it, while Kill It, Cook It, Eat It did exactly what it said on the tin, offering an abattoir audience blood-warm fillets still quivering on the plate.

Well, I'm heading south to walk a wintry beach and shake the greying plasma out from between my ears, but at this time of year when we approach our viewing as we might a mild but welcome sedative, and when even hoary old sitcoms twinkle through a prism of fairy lights, I wish you a happy and peaceful Christmas, and hope you all find a few seasonal movies to nap to.

Cheers.