On the road to nowhere

TV REVIEW: Wired,UTV, Monday, Stephen Fry in America,BBC1, Sunday, Cracking Up,BBC2, Sunday, Cogar: Mo Chuisle, Scéal Frank Ryan,TG4, Sunday

TIMING IS EVERYTHING really, isn't it? I remember a couple of years ago going to Disneyland Paris to review a movie about an inauspicious chicken, on whose deep-fried, bony little shoulders Disney was staking the might of its hitherto uninspiring computer-generated future. Unfortunately, not only did the shivering chicken's launch coincide with a rather hysterical media obsession with bird flu, but a couple of miles beyond the manicured perimeter of the Disneyland Hotel (where the journalists were being plied with foie-gras and enthusiastic ice-skaters), impoverished Parisian suburbs were ablaze with riots, due to Mickey Mouse employment prospects and living conditions.

Equally inopportunely, on Monday this week, as the financial market began to lift its bruised and unshaven face from the desk and sniff a thaw in fiscal relations, UTV offered up Wired, the first of a farcical three-part drama about high finance in the dangerous world of corporate banking in London. Having endured episode one, I would quite honestly rather eat the stuffing from the grim interior of my shabby armchair than endure the rest.

Now, as I've said in this column before, my grasp of economics is tenuous: I'm numerically illiterate, my decimal points bounce around like malevolent tennis balls, and I find it hard to take noughts seriously. However, I do understand that there is a global financial crisis, that developers are no longer drinking Bolly out of their hard hats, that the Irish exchequer is now going to be funded by weeping emigrants handing over their extra tenners at the boarding gates, and that all of us have to, y'know, shoulder the burden of the country's economic downturn, and so on. Ergo, I suspect this is not a good moment to attempt to elicit sympathy or interest in the plight of the money men. However, at the risk of boring you all the way to the small ads, let me try to deconstruct the drama.

Account manager Louise (Jodie Whittaker), who previously had her fingers in the till, is now a shiny-haired good girl working in the head office of an international bank with a zinging acronym. She gets blackmailed by a jumped-up little mummy's boy called Phillip (Laurence Fox), who is in cahoots with a bunch of menacingly serene Asians, all set to defraud a wealthy Scottish businessman with some dark secrets under his sporran. Yadda yadda. Anyway, luckily for Louise, as she jumps out of the window of the ladies' room of Phillip's trendy bar (fleeing for her previously unremarkable life), she falls straight into the manly arms of an actor called Toby Stephens, a kind of B-team Hugh Grant (I suspect they share a hairdresser). Stephens plays, rather unconvincingly, a plummy police detective who will undoubtedly sort out the whole sorry mess just as soon as he's finished with the hairdryer.

The problem with the drama, aside from being as glitteringly memorable as a chicken dipper, is that nobody is going to be rooting for the detective and the blonde to retrieve the bank's damn cash. "Wired shows the potential for the criminal underworld to get their hands on our money," says the ITV publicity. Really? Someone should tell the "criminal underworld" to get in line.

GIVEN THE MOODS of the moment - anger, despair and resignation - it was perhaps appropriate that there were a couple of articulate depressives at the helm of this TV week.

Last year, Stephen Fry came out, so to speak, about being a depressive. In a television series that lifted the lid on his condition, he drove home the point that mental illness is as commonplace in our society as bad backs, blocked sinuses and peeing when you sneeze. He also talked about a related manic workaholism, which might explain his propensity for continually popping up in front of a camera.

Stephen Fry in Americais yet another vehicle for his prodigious energy, one which sees him motor around all 50 of the United States in a London taxi. A genial road movie, the series suffers from a lack of context, and there is a sense that a far more interesting bunch of programmes might have been possible. I dunno, maybe everyone is sick to the teeth of the US election, of clapperboard houses

gathering dust and tottering old ladies calling Barack Obama an A-rab, but with just two weeks to go in the most compelling American presidential campaign of recent times, one tunes into Fry's odyssey to get a sense of how Uncle Sam is looking after two long rounds in the ring with the Bush dynasty.

What one gets, though, is a travelogue tenuously linked by the revelation that, 40 years ago, had his father not turned down a teaching job at Princeton University, Fry could have been Steve the all-American boy rather than Stephen the gracious Englishman in crumpled corduroy.

The first episode featured New England: lobster-ing in Maine, deer-hunting in the Adirondacks, witch-hunting in Salem, intellectualising in Boston, croupier-ing in Atlantic City and shooting the breeze in the South Bronx. In Rhode Island, Fry spoke with a throaty old doyenne of the Newport set who had attended the marriage of Jackie Bouvier and John F Kennedy. She described the congregation on the Kennedy side as tasteless, vulgar and over-dressed, but admitted that she found JFK's father, Joe Kennedy, rather attractive despite his murky business dealings and unsavoury political manoeuvres.

"I'm the exact opposite," offered the depressive Fry. "Very nice, but unattractive."

ALISTAIR CAMPBELL, Tony Blair's former press secretary and a man who came to epitomise the slick New Labour brand, presented a fascinating personal account of his mental breakdown and depression in Cracking Up, and detailed how, 20 years on from complete collapse, he has managed to accommodate his condition within his public and private life.

In 1986, Campbell was a successful young journalist on London's Fleet Street, and in those newspaper days of yore when they had to scrape you off the floor to fire you, he was downing around 16 pints and a bottle of Scotch a day, and happily insisting he didn't have a drink problem. Obsessive about his work, under pressure and drinking himself to death, he finally cracked while on the road with Neil Kinnock, ending up naked in a Scottish police cell (where, when a policeman asked him if he'd like something to drink, he requested "a bottle of your finest Champagne please").

Cracking Up was not spectacular television, and Campbell could just as well have told his story on the radio, but it was a powerful, honest piece of journalism. His public life is well recorded, his salvaged career resulting in him becoming a seminal political force in the 1990s; while, on a personal level, his partner stayed with him throughout his prolonged bouts of depression, and they now have three children. It was Campbell's description of having felt simultaneously "dead and alive", and his recognition that his condition will be with him for life, juxtaposed with his clarity, efficacy and tenacity, that made for such insightful viewing.

Hey, depression is the new black; soon you won't be anybody without a breakdown under your belt.

ONE MAN WHO seemed to avoid the bite of the black dog, and to circumnavigate the schisms of the creative life, was Waterford tenor Frank Ryan. A butcher, a farmer, a father, and a man whose magnificent voice was compared to John McCormack's, Ryan, who sang throughout the 1940s and 1950s in Cork, Dublin and London, even had the confidence to hire Carnegie Hall for a recital (because "you're nobody if you haven't played Carnegie Hall"). Film-maker RoseAnn Foley used previously unavailable recordings of Ryan in Cogar: Mo Chuisle, Scéal Frank Ryan, her evocative account of this forgotten singer's unique life.

Singer Veronica Dunne, commenting on the tremendous physical energy Ryan used to ignite his voice, recalled appearing on stage with him in Killarney after he had cycled all the way from Waterford for the recital. His sons, elderly men now, bursting with humorous pride, told presenter and Irish Times journalist Catherine Foley (the film-maker's sister) how one day their father would be away in Dublin singing for de Valera, the next making cocks of hay in the field, and recalled how the Americans would congregate in Ryan's butcher's shop to smoke their cigars and discuss his concerts.

"Have you any more of those notes?" asked a grande dame of opera when Ryan hit a high one in rehearsal for The Magic Flute. "Yerragh, girl I have a bundle of them," he replied.

Here was a man whose talent was as natural and effortless as his life, for whom neurosis was probably as alien as a Pot Noodle.

Well, I dunno-o-o-o, maybe so-o-o-o.