TV Review Shane HegertyReviewed this week: The Panel Network 2, Monday, Second Generation Channel 4, Sunday and Monday, Strumpet City RTÉ1, Sunday and For Better Or Worse? RTÉ1, Tuesday
The Panel is a topical comedy discussion show following on from a pilot aired earlier this year. "I did a pilot once," remarked host Dara O'Briain. "Does he write? Does he call?"
There are four panellists and a selection of passing guests. The Pavlovian response to this sort of thing popping up on RTÉ is to brace yourself for the worst as the intro music rolls and the student audience whoops. Colin Murphy was a panellist this week and his last job, X-it File, is a piquant reminder of how the brightest minds can come together to create the dimmest satire.
The Panel quickly proved itself unworthy of the prejudice. It does not market itself as high-spec satire but is instead a mildly aggressive battle to get in the one-liners before someone else does. That weeds out the weak.
Comedian Jimeoin and the Sunday Tribune's Fiona Looney were confident old-stagers, but comedian Tara Flynn gradually slunk into silence.
Brian Kennedy was a guest, possibly so that he could complete the set, as there is little on which he has not appeared as a guest. You may have spotted him tucking in to chicken and ham at your wedding.
On a day when his popularity rating was found to have dropped, Pat Rabbitte was thrown a chance to dazzle the nation, but he didn't even extend his hands to grab it. He confirmed once again how gaining the leadership of a political party may top up your status only as it drains your charisma. He did, at least, have one good line, answering a question on whether the Yanks find his name ridiculous by letting us know that there is an Australian reporter on TV3 who always refers to him as "Pet Rabbitte".
O'Briain and the four panellists sit comfortably at one table, but when a guest comes on they must push up in the bed. Rabbitte and Looney sat together and when they addressed each other they looked uncomfortably close, like two strangers made intimate in the squeeze of a rush-hour train.
As is the current fashion, The Panel is filmed live at Dublin's Helix theatre, which is a big selling-point but this week was as big a drawback. The show was poorly directed, missing jokes and reactions or both. Some editing would do wonders for its pace. It is an hour long, but its legs were wobbly by the halfway point.
Yet, The Panel will not be handing out nails for comedians' coffins, as has been the tradition of these things, and in O'Briain it has an excellent host. He has spent a couple of years swimming in the great ocean that is the BBC and returns to the RTÉ pond with, if not quite a swagger, then a very assured slouch. The wit comes easily, his jokes not scrolling on an autocue but stacking up in a holding pattern in his mind, ready to land at the right moment. When he first began to show promise at RTÉ, he was given the job of presenting A Family Affair, a quiz show in which the great climax came with the pushing of an envelope through a paper shredder disguised as a giant robot. They should be thankful he didn't burn his passport on the way out of the country.
Is there is something in the small print of every contract for British-Asian drama that insists it must star Om Puri? There he is again, this time in Second Generation, reprising his standard part as the immigrant father, stubborn against the dilution of his family's Indian heritage.
The drama began with him in a coma and his family preparing to turn off the life-support machine, but as soon as we learned that his daughter was ignorant of her heritage and living with a white boy, we knew that patriarchal indignation would shock him back to consciousness. The plot centred on his daughter, Heere (Bend It Like Beckham's Parminder Nagra), reuniting with her family and culture at the same time as engaging in an intense affair with childhood sweetheart Sam, a DJ and music promoter.
He was played by Christopher Simpson, last seen in the adaptation of White Teeth and the new pin-up boy of the genre, even if the fact that he was born in Dublin to an Irish father and Greek Rwandan mother tends to somewhat muddy the melting-pot.
Around these, two generations of their respective families fragmented under the weight of various secrets as it all built up to one big one. It was humourless stuff, sodden with self-importance. If either Nagra or Simpson had dared break out of their pouts and into a smile the contrast might have been enough to leave the viewer blind. For two such attractive people they made a deeply unattractive couple.
Each episode was 90 minutes long and it looked like the corners of the scripts had been stretched to reach all the way to the edges. With much of it set in the music underground it was propelled by dance beats, but they couldn't force the ponderous plot development. For instance, when Sam's dad lost his job, dignity and family in one evening, he was shown watching an old home video as the music closed in ominously. The scene changed. It returned to him; still watching the video, the music reaching deeper. It went away again, but he was still there when it came back. Look, we all know he's going to kill himself. Get on with it. Here, I'll get the chair if you get the rope.
The second episode improved things somewhat as the various plotlines tumbled to a conclusion. But it only showed that a genre that so recently seemed novel has moved from innovative to mediocre, which says something either about the steady integration of Asian culture into the British mainstream or the partial disintegration of Channel 4's judgment.
Of course, it's easy to lob criticism at British drama, in which a single season can contain more programmes and more quality than a decade of Irish productions. It says something when RTÉ promotes Strumpet City as it would a new production. The adaptation of James Plunkett's novel, though, is still marvellous after 23 years. The digitally remastered print has buffed up bright and crisp. And to once again see David Kelly's extraordinary performance as Rashers Tierney is to find relief in realising that its reputation has not been embellished by memory. Strumpet City has always been seen as the point at which RTÉ realised that it could make drama at the highest level; it is fascinating to discover that it has hardly been equalled since.
For Better Or Worse? might have made decent television if it had been nearly as dedicated to the people featured as it was to its own vanity. It was so over-stylised and over-wrought that it briefly flickered into unintended comedy before your brain told you it was never going to work out and that it was time to seek a quick separation via the remote control.
It treated its subjects not as people with stories to tell but as playthings. The couples squeezed the details of their relationship into the slivers between the programme's extended attempts to thicken the atmosphere.
It had them stand statue-still while the lens orbited them, passed over their heads, swung by their cheeks. They stood rigid in the living-room or at a window. Because they had first met there, one couple stood in front of a bright light in a scout den as the camera slid by. Others were asked to engage in soft-focus reconstructions of their meetings and partings.
Interviews and scenes kept dissolving into slow motion. The programme had taken the darkest moments of these people's lives and reinterpreted them in the style of a 1980s pop video.
It was so delighted with its music selection that it charged through the tunes like an impatient DJ. Jeff Buckley, Radiohead and Massive Attack were here, of course. Jack L sang "Cos I won't be home tonight/ No, I won't be sleeping by your side/ But no goodbyes . . ." Bonnie Tyler sang Total Eclipse of the Heart. They should release the soundtrack; all the things the courts have barred you from saying to your ex, on one great CD.
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