Shoot to thrill
Eastenders TV3, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday
Crossroads RTE1, all week
True Lives: Fashion Victim RTE1, Monday
The Human Face BBC1, Wednesday
Cogar: Teacsai TG4, Sunday
They used to have great dramatic pauses in Acorn Antiques. Victoria Wood's mock soap heaved with dramatic moments, in which Miss Babbs would stand perfectly still, her eyes darting with suspicion, and Mrs Overall would usually walk in holding a tray rattling with tea-cups, realise it was a dramatic pause, and halt in mid-hobble to join in. If you were to have taken all the dramatic pauses out of this week's Eastenders, you would have been left with about half a minute's dialogue. This was a week for dramatic pauses. A dramatic thing had happened, and that meant mentioning it every few minutes, just to get the point home.
"What's happened?" somebody would ask.
"Phil's been shot," somebody would reply.
Cue dramatic pause so long you start fiddling with the volume control to make sure the telly's not on the blink.
Phil has indeed been shot, in the back by a gun that poked out of a bit of shrubbery. As dramatic twists go, having a major character getting wacked by a bush is a pretty new way to go, although maybe it's not entirely surprising. Dirty Den, if you can recall, was shot dead by a gun aimed from a field of daffodils.
Phil is a man filled so full of rage, hate, malice and arrogance that it's pushed all the hair out of his bony head, and left him with so many enemies that even the bust in the Queen Vic is looking guilty this week. The field has been narrowed down to five suspects - dirty Dan, leaky Lisa, maudlin Mark, sleazy Steve and, er, Ian Beale - all of whom have been systematically insulted, beaten up, dumped, ripped-off and generally abused by Phil in recent weeks in order to hammer home some motives.
It's all been done with bullet firmly lodged in cheek, fully aware that this is the oldest soap opera plot in the book, and I'm sure we can expect at least one wrongful arrest before Phil is up and about and looking for revenge in the bottom of his vodka bottle. For the record, my bet's on Dan, although Phil's mum Peggy, played by Barbara Windsor, returned from her holidays without the hairstyle that used to be piled on top of her head like a wavering bonfire. Have you ever seen that wig and the killer shrub in the same room together at the same time? Stranger things have happened.
David Hunter - the owner of the Crossroads Motel - was shot long a time ago, the set shaking as he hit the floor. Crossroads hasn't been on the air for many years now, but it was a cult classic, filled with wobbly scenery, wooden acting and cardboard sets, people obviously reading their lines as they delivered them, characters who went to the toilet not to return for two years, hilarious plotlines and some very, very bad hair.
Actually, I was a little too young to remember Crossroads at its cheap and successful peak, but I know all these things thanks to the countless number of 1980s nostalgia nights that have infested the telly since the first dawn of 1990. Crossroads returned this week, minus the motel and Benny and little Scottish chef from the Great Escape, and replaced them all with a four-star hotel and a lot of good-looking teenagers. At least the writing and acting are on the same level, deliberate or otherwise.
It was bound to happen, when so much nostalgia would finally lead somebody to go and drag the past in to the present. Only modern, and young, and without the cardboard sets and bad hair. On a tidal wave of wistfulness, they brought back Parkinson as well, and he turned out to be a lot less God-like and a little more of a luvvie than we thought. Be careful what long-forgotten TV shows you reminisce about in the pub tonight, they just might come true.
A friend of Versace talked about the late fashion designer in True Lives: Fash- ion Victim. "Michelangelo, Vermeer, Matisse, Bach, Picasso, Elvis, The Beatles and Sir Elton. And Versace. He was a genius." You may feel the need to take the pruning shears to that sentence. Maybe Versace was a genius, maybe he was just a vulgar egotistical fashion designer utterly convinced of his own importance because he had surrounded himself with acolytes only too willing to indulge him. I can't pretend to know much about these things. I would, though, question the assertion that his death - shot twice by multiple killer Andrew Cunanan - was "the ultimate celebrity death" in this media age.
Mark Chapman didn't exactly pick John Lennon out at random. John Hinkley shot Ronald Reagan so that he could get Jodie Foster to notice him. Jill Dando's death had a meaning to the British - and I suppose to some of the Irish - public in a way that Versace's did not have in the US.
Fashion Victim was heartless, bland, confused. There were strange jabs at his sister, Donatella, who took over the business after the killing, some muddy conspiracy theories, lots of people in orange-tinted sunglasses and silly hats talking about how "fashion designers are not supposed to get murdered". It wanted to look disdainful of the Versace excess, the $200,000 diamonds, palatial homes, the carpeting of an entire Miami City block for the opening of a store. He boasted that he could spend $2 million in two hours. Boyfriend Antonio D'Amacio revised that figure. "Gianni could spend $10 million in two hours." But the viewers couldn't help but be entranced - Fashion Victim was "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" with a nasty ending.
Cunanan's own story was only touched upon. He partied a bit, spent a night hanging out with Versace, took some drugs, went mad, killed four people in variously horrific ways, evaded the police, went after Versace to make himself famous, then shot himself, blah, blah, blah. "Gianni Versace was the Lotto," said one cop. "Cunanan won the Lotto." If only things were that simple.
Prof Paul Ekman reckons that in only 30 minutes he can teach anybody how to spot a liar from the way he looks. "When I teach policemen, it's the thing they like the most," he told John Cleese in The Human Face. Apparently it's all in micro-expressions, little tell-tale signs that we don't really mean what we say we mean, based on studies in which subjects watched a film of horrific surgery but tried to persuade an observer that they were actually watching a cute nature scene. The eyebrows give a lot away, and if you see them furrowed into narrow lines and pushed up, it means don't buy that used car. The camera zoomed in on the forehead of Bill Clinton as he gave his infamous "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" speech. The eyebrows were pointed so far up they may have been trying to escape.
Cleese travelled to Japan, where there are classes that teach businessmen how to smile in a Western fashion. Smiling increases business by up to 50 per cent, they say, which makes me wish I'd looked a little happier in my byline photo. In India, they have over 600 laughter clubs, catering for everybody from the elderly to the rapists and murders of a Bombay prison. Even if you don't mean it, it doesn't matter. Faking laughter releases the same number of happy chemicals as laughing for real, which must be the best news the sardonic among you will have heard all year.
So what if Cleese is no scientist, and he employed Liz Hurley as his assistant to bring some sex in to it. The Human Face is a fun mixture of sketches, pop science and travelogue. Of course, you can't see my face, so I could be lying.
You had to feel for Adrian. In Cogar: Teacsai, Adrian suffered from that affliction which follows many a night-shift cabby. Everywhere he and his colleagues went in Dublin they were followed by the score from Taxi Driver, and the streets passed by in a neon haze. But not only that, as he drove the mean streets, past the prostitutes, the junkies, the thieves, the homeless, the drunk, where someday a real rain's gonna come and wipe the scum off the streets, Adrian's thoughts drifted to home.
"Often when I'm in traffic, I think about rain, and the sea. I think about how it looks in winter, when the sea crashes up over the cliffs at Dun Aonghus." Things are different now. "The worst thing is when people get sick or they pee in the car. It's usually women who do the latter. Men will ask to stop and get out, but women will just go where they are." Not so far from the waves after all, then.
