TV REVIEW: The Ship, BBC2, Tuesday: Curb Your Enthusiasm, TG4, Tuesday: Cutting Edge: Did Barry George Kill Jill Dando? Channel 4, Monday 24 BBC2, Saturday.
Idea for a BBC historical adventure series: take a group of volunteers - bored middle-managers, thrill-seeking IT drop-outs, etc - and follow them as they recreate the day-to-day living of a soldier during Cromwellian times. It could open with the group meeting up and marching on horseback through the centre of Drogheda (NB: run this by the guys in insurance first). The Ship is a programme so concerned with historical accuracy that it immediately mimicked its chosen period's lack of sensitivity. It has taken an exact replica of James Cook's Endeavour, crewed it with pampered 21st-century dwellers and sent it on a 3,500-mile leg of the original voyage from newly-discovered Australia.
Its first mission was to anchor off Mission Bay, a spot where Cook once landed. He had been commanded by the Admiralty to find the "elusive southern continent", and further instructed to seek the native's consent to claim the land for Britain. When his boarding party arrived, they found themselves obstructed by two spear-wielding Aborigines. Attempts at communication proving somewhat frustrating, Cook levelled a gun at one of them and shot him.
We come in peace. Shoot to kill.
In a cave wall in the forest behind the beach, we were shown drawings which may be the earliest Aboriginal record of the Endeavour's arrival. The three-mast ship scratched into the stone clearly mirrored the ship once again looming four miles out. The local Aboriginal population was clearly not impressed with the modern-day TV experiment, and made its protests through language bluer than the reef waters. The ship in The Ship, though, does have a token representation of Maori and Aboriginal people, and the Aboriginal flag was raised before it set sail with the programme-makers' assuaged guilt stiff in the breeze.
For all the series' attempts at accuracy, fact sometimes walked the plank. After Cook's crew had finished its original mission at Tahiti, they sailed on through the southern seas in search of land. "After discovering nothing but two small islands and a great ocean, Cook continued on," we were informed. Those "two small islands" were New Zealand, and while Cook was the first to circumnavigate it, he was not the one to discover it. That honour fell to Abel Tasman, who was given all the proof he needed when several of his crew were eaten by Maoris. Tasman spotted Australia too, but failed to realise that the point of land in the distance was the tip of a very large continent indeed. Now, history knows him chiefly as an explorer who specialised in discovering small islands to serve as the butt of Australian jokes.
Anyway, back to mock-reality. The Ship is the latest series to busy itself with bringing history to life through the medium of pampered 21st-century dwellers. It wishes to do so "using, as far as we can, 18th-century methods". There are several obvious concessions to modernity. Toilets flush; masts are laced with safety harnesses; several of the crew wear bikinis. However, once the vessel sets sail, and the historical guilt disintegrates in the wind, it will all probably prove quite enjoyable. These series usually are.
There are a lot of them, though, and they are becoming so grand in their ambition, that volunteers may prove finite. Many may end up repeating the experience ("I've done the first World War and the Ice Age, and I'm lined up to be a pilgrim on the Mayflower"; "I'm in 1980s House next week, and I'm to be tried as a witch the week after"). It will be a nightmare for hypnotists.
They dub some programmes for TG4, but they haven't tried it with Curb Your Enthusiasm. They should. To translate Larry David's panoply of New York-Jewish neuroses into Connemara Irish would be to create a cultural mutant so freakish it could initiate a whole new genre of comedy.
David co-created Seinfeld, a sitcom of true genius fashioned by the duelling of two men's neuroses. In that series, Gerry Seinfeld played himself, while David became the character George Costanza, as played by Jason Alexander. In Curb Your Enthusiasm, David plays himself writing a series for Jason Alexander, who can't get a gig because everyone wants him to play George who, of course, was really David. The comedy is dredged from the floor of David's ego.
It is not Seinfeld. The style is hand-held and without a laughter track, and it is often ragged and flimsy. The acting is questionable and the direction clumsy. But it does sometimes look like the raw stone from which the Seinfeld diamond might have been fashioned. It aims at exposing every neurotic impulse and mining it for humour. Each week, there is a plot of sorts, in which coincidences abound and nobody wins. This week, we got a complicated set-up involving golf clothes, how to talk to the wheelchair-bound, the social contract implicit in the phrase "trick or treat" - and Wagner.
A fellow Jew accosts David for whistling the music of the German composer. "Do you know what you are," he yelled. "You are a self-loathing Jew." "I do hate myself," retorts David, "but it has nothing to do with me being Jewish." The episode ends with David waking his accuser in the early hours by bringing an orchestra to his front lawn and personally conducting a rousing recital of a Wagner overture. "No hugs, no learning" went the motto in the Seinfeld office. They should chisel it on Larry David's grave stone.
IF YOU were going to finger someone for a celebrity murder in which little progress had been made in a year and the public pressure for a result was unbearable, Barry George would be just the man. A mentally retarded fantasist with an interest in guns, he had a previous conviction for attempted rape and rolls of undeveloped photographs of women walking the street littered his house. He lived half a mile from Jill Dando. Did Barry George Kill Jill Dando? claimed that all that was needed was more evidence.
Although a British court recently upheld George's conviction, ruling that the evidence against him was compelling, the programme suggested the evidence was stretched very thinly indeed over the case.
The documentary highlighted perceived inconsistencies in the case, particularly the following. Questionable forensic analysis was accepted by the court. The professional nature of the killing did not indicate a suspect with severe epilepsy and an intellectual ability that placed him in Britain's lowest 1 per cent. The central witness testimony came from a woman who had seen the suspect for six seconds, 18 months before being asked to identify him. If you were to collate the reports of the 16 witnesses, the killer could be described as an olive- or white-skinned man, with black short or long wavy or curly hair. He is between 5 feet 8 inches and 6 feet in height and on the day of the killing was wearing a coat or suit, and was sporting a Trilby hat. Or not.
It was a documentary that lacked balance, but then balance has hardly been a motif of the case. The alternative theory - that Dando was killed by a Serbian assassin - does not play too well on the front page of the Sun. George is not a man the media is interested in standing up for. The replay of Trevor McDonald on the night he read the news of George's conviction for Dando's murder was instructive. He appeared to editorialise with every inflection. When he described George, this 40-year-old gun-fanatic loner obsessed with female celebrities, he seemed to do so with the disgust of a man taking a bite of raw meat.
In 24, it turned out that Nina was the mole all along. It was her scheming away on the inside, as Kiefer Sutherland's Agent Jack Bauer chased around LA trying to foil the most complicated assassination attempt in history, rescue his daughter from the hands of no-good punk kids hired by Serbian terrorists and save his marriage. All in only 24 hours, of course. If you weren't watching 24, by the way, now is not a good time to try and pick things up.
It was a denouement that made pretty much no sense whatsoever, which had you furrowing the brow to the point of scarring. Why, then, had Victor ordered Jack to shoot her? Why did she tell Teri Bauer that Alan York wasn't the real Alan York? This was a series, though, happy to employ a little amnesia if it helped the action along. Literally, in the case of Teri (Jack's pregnant wife), who lost her memory midway through and lost her life right at the end. She was executed by Nina in the one twist that did work. No neat ending, few answers. Only an announcement that it wasn't the Drazens she was really working for, before she was bundled into a car so she could sign the contracts for series two.
"That's crazy!" protested Palmer's wife, Sherry, at another lurch of the plot in the final episode. That it took her over 23 hours to notice shows that she really should have been paying more attention. The concept was brilliant, and the split screen, the ticking clock and the real-time tricks often sublime, but the whole success of 24 was that it was preposterous. It was fuelled by the outlandish. It was propelled by an acknowledgement that if five minutes went by without a twist, then it had failed in its mission. And if you want twists, then logic becomes an inconvenience. It could only end with more questions than answers. The longest day in Jack Bauer's life is over. Can't wait for tomorrow.
tvreview@irish-times.ie