Serving up another course

TV REVIEW:  HeatRTÉ1, Sunday One Thing To Do Before You DieRTÉ1, Thursday What in the World?RTÉ1, Thursday BonekickersBBC1, Tuesday

AS THOSE BULBOUS rainclouds tentatively lifted their heavy mauve and blue skirts this week, like a bunch of chubby, reluctant virgins at the seaside, the national broadcaster also came out from behind the clouds and offered a couple of interesting home-grown programmes to while away the putative summer nights. Among these was the snappily named Heat, another cookery programme to feed our seemingly voracious appetite for culinary challenges.

Each week, Heat sees two amateur chefs pitted against each other for one night only as they take on the mantle of head chef in Dublin restaurant Ely HQ. Each of the amateurs is under the tutelage of a professional, either Kevin Thornton or Kevin Dundon, and the restaurant is split in half for the evening, offering two menus, one from each competitor.

Cookery programmes make good television because they are all about status and power: the master chef is invariably a brooding psychopath, while the poor panic-struck proletarians who aspire to impress the boss with their hand-made sausages are the nudes behind the shower curtain.

The opening salvo in this game of three courses saw recruitment executive Alan, a friendly, confident bloke with a positive attitude, crumble like a roux in Thornton's kitchen ("He told me not to be an arsehole," said incredulous Al). Alan's menu, like that of his rival, Dorcas, a Dublin mother of three, was to have an Irish theme, so, sticking to his brief, Alan served up his mammy's coddle and some delicately arranged pigeon.

One of Alan's diners claimed, with markedly intense sincerity, that "I was blown away by the pigeon", which, when you think about it, is no mean feat. Regardless, Dundon's protégé Dorcas won out on the night, scoring points for profitability, if not necessarily authenticity, because customers chose her stuffed ravioli (a great favourite up and down the rainy boreens) over little bits of white sausage floating in a watery broth. The Lisbon Treaty may have raised our nationalist hackles, but it's done nothing to dampen our European palates, the recession-be-damned diners voting with their pedicured toes for the more international menu.

RTÉ'S REALITY-INFUSED scheduling continued with the second programme in the frothy series, One Thing To Do Before You Die (a moniker possibly not to be taken too literally if approached to participate in the series). This week's story featured two hale and hearty Kerry women, both called Eileen and both flushed with youthful enthusiasm, who had won a radio competition for tickets to Electric Picnic, an annual three-day music festival which takes place in Stradbally, Co Laois. The Eileens — one aged 65, the other 70, whose combined offspring and grandchildren total happily ran to dozens — duly packed up their dancing shoes and headed off, camera in tow, to join the 30,000 or so ravers pitching their tents in the gently undulating Laois mud.

The ladies had a blast.

"I'm ecstatic!" proclaimed one electric Eileen.

"I'm looking for a man — from the knees down, for dancing only!" said the other.

After a burlesque ball, reflexology, a marriage proposal, a "silent rave" (the participants donned great big yellow headphones), a few heart-to-hearts with round-eyed girls with skinny plaits and skinnier legs who said "you're, like, really amazing" a lot, and three long nights under canvas, the undaunted Eileens returned to Killorglin for a nice cup of tea.

"Everyone was so courteous," they concluded, which was, quite genuinely, heartwarming.

I take my sodden hat off to them. I'd rather eat a bevy of flowery-Wellingtoned 18-year-olds than pitch up next to them for 72 hours ("My dear, the noise, and the people!", as a world war was once described by a reluctant participant). Anyway, the point is that One Thing To Do Before You Die may well be vaguely entertaining and undemanding television, but since when did we get so excited about people in their 60s attending rock concerts that we have to make sentimental jelly-roll documentaries about them - look at The Rolling Stones, for Christ's sake. Admittedly, I haven't been to a festival of musical entertainments since around 1979, but I'm sure the place was crawling with skinny, grey-haired macrobiotics with ponytails and stonewashed denims, blokes who, despite their advancing years and creeping arthritis, were keeping the flame alive in soggy tents full of giggling girls with perms and promises.

NEW OFFERINGS ASIDE, RTÉ also screened the last episode of Peadar King's terrific and moving series What in the World? with a report from the islands of Tuvalu in the South Pacific. King's unobtrusive presence allowed the islanders, who are living on the ever-shrinking atolls just half a metre above sea level, to demonstrate their unique culture and lifestyle and to make a moving plea to the rest of the world for assistance to save their homeland and way of life.

With a population of just 10,000, Tuvalu was described by one resident as "a beautiful culture, with no crime or danger". Sadly, on Funafuti, the main island and capital, men and women are already being forced by economic and environmental circumstances to leave their home to work as fruit-pickers in New Zealand. They are leaving behind a gentle life, which for innumerable generations has been rooted in fishing, farming, and collecting shells from the coconut tree-lined beaches to make jewellery. Tuvalu's carbon emissions are negligible, its contribution to climate change insignificant, and yet this tiny but culturally rich population is paying the ultimate price for the rest of the world's behaviour.

Many scientists seem to believe that the sinking of Tuvalu is inevitable. Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth claimed that the islands had already been depopulated, but their Bible-educated inhabitants have in fact chosen to hang on to the promise of God that "never again shall there be a flood to cover the earth". Well, maybe not of God's making.

With this chain of sobering and affecting films, King's contribution to our understanding of global economic inequality has been significant. Anyway, back to the baloney. Aside from the Electric Picnic, rattling old skeletons was also at the heart of Bonekickers, a new series from the BBC about a bunch of temperamentally unstable archaeologists whose modus operandi is about as scientific as Postman Pat's delivery route. The series, which comes complete with its own website (hours of fun), is a little like Lovejoy meets Doctor Who, having about it that strangely hypnotic whiff of play-acting amateurishness and cocky lunacy that keeps you sitting there in jaded disbelief, despite the fact that you actually know you are watching a load of old tripe.

Julie Graham plays Prof Gillian Magwilde, the no-nonsense, not-a-lot-of-charisma boss of a kind of archaeological A-Team. Firmly propped up in her excavations by some ugly trousers and the respect of her peers, she spent the first episode of the drama searching rural England for the true cross on which Jesus was crucified (don't ask how she knew, but suddenly she was in possession of a lump of cedar wood that had been "bled into by skin lacerated with a metal nail!" - hey, I'm convinced).

Aided by Prof Gregory "Dolly" Parton (Hugh Bonneville camping it up in an Indiana Jones hat and enjoying phrases like "antiquities with titties"), Magwilde's historic quest was spliced not only with deeply silly dialogue, but also featured Paul Nicholls from EastEnders as a New Age crusader wearing a Knights Templar T-shirt who, in a frenzy of religious hatred, chopped the head off a soft-spoken Muslim with an awfully big souvenir sword. If it had been played out on the mean streets of London, Bonekickers might have stood a chance, but as the series is set in the decorous city of Bath, Nicholls merely looked like some bloke dashing around the cobbled streets in search of his team-building convention.

After much dusting of fresh clay and the fitting together of skeletons with the ease of a Montessori jigsaw, the bonekickers finished their first episode together by destroying a cellar full of Roman crosses and accidentally burning to death a couple of religious fanatics with their gung-ho archaeological pyrotechnics. Oh well, not to worry.

"Please, please, please, for the love of Jehovah, can we go to the pub?" said Gregory "Dolly" Parton to his spluttering and sooty band. Jumping Jerusalem, Dolly, I couldn't have said it better myself.