Telly Bingo Network 2, Friday
Leargas
RTE 1, Tuesday
Telly Bingo, Network 2's Friday night telly bingo offering, is very entertaining indeed. It's . . . uh . . . no. I'm sorry . . . no. After last week's extremely unprofessional Fantasy TV Review column, when I made the cardinal error of allowing my private life to interfere with my ability to produce this column, I apologised both to my editor, Deirdre Falvey, and to my many readers, for allowing my usually high standards to drop alarmingly. Now, to my great shame, I find myself repeating the error. Sadly, I have to report that my private life took another turn for the worse last Monday, when my ex-partner, the nationalist poet, Orla Ni Suibh, with whom readers of this column will by now be only too familiar, instigated divorce proceedings against me. This in itself does not worry me, as we were never actually married.
However, it indicates to me that Orla's always fragile mind is now very seriously unbalanced, and I believe my life to be in grave danger. She has recently been misusing her regular film review column in a Sunday newspaper to reveal details of our life together in our flat in Howth, which has caused me more than a little embarrassment. It seems to me to be another sign of her parlous mental state that she is misappropriating her weekly allocated space in that newspaper - which is meant to be a film review column for goodness sake! - to describe intimate aspects of her life with me.
Last week, she made a thinly veiled attack on my good name in her review of the highly regarded Chinese kung-fu film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I say "thinly veiled", but in fact my name was mentioned 36 times. I was variously described as "power mad", "pro-Unionist", "reactionary", "sex-crazed" (this, I admit, is an accurate representation), "anti-feminist", "volatile", "wretched", "bitter at not doing an actual - as opposed to `fantasy' - TV review column in The Irish Times", "cynical" and "a pro-agreement c**t". (This agreement refers to an arrangement reached between myself and Orla, in 1995, whereby she would agree to sleep with me once a month, not the Northern Ireland peace agreement of 1997.) All this would be distressing enough, but last week a friend of mine spotted Orla drinking with known paramilitaries in a Republican club in west Belfast. Last week, I mentioned Orla's links with dissident Republican groups, but as my friend assured me that the men she was seen drinking with were pro-Agreement (this agreement refers to the Northern Ireland peace agreement of 1997, not the agreement reached between Orla and myself made in 1995), I can only presume that she is "sounding out" both sets of Republicans in the North as to the advisability of taking action against me.
IT would be a grim irony indeed if the Republican "family" was again reunited for the single purpose of doing away with your Fantasy TV reviewer. Within weeks, if this crazy woman fails to return to her senses, I could find myself in the same position as Erskine Childers Senior in 1922: scrambling around the country from safe house to safe house, carrying only a typewriter, a pistol, and a hot water bottle.
The only difference, of course, is that Childers was churning out Republican propaganda, and I am reviewing TV shows such as Telly Bingo. Nevertheless, it's hard to come up with insightful, thought-provoking work when one is constantly "on the run".
Erskine Childers's son, Erskine junior, eventually became President for a short period, before dying in his office in 1973 after allegedly attempting to inhale a bag of crisps through his nose. A fascinating edition of Leargas revealed the fact that in all probability Childers had been asleep for some years before that, but as the presidential duties in those pre-Mary Robinson/McAleese days were relatively light, nobody had really noticed. In fact, Prof Luignan Quinn-Rhapsody of UCD proposed the interesting theory that Childers had been asleep during his entire time in public life, both as president and as a Fianna Fail TD, a feat previously only achieved by Sean T. O Ceallaigh.
Next week's programme in the series, When Men Were Presidents, should be equally informative and nostalgic.
Arthur Mathews is co-author of Father Ted. His comic novel, Well-Remembered Days, will be published by Macmillan next month.