WHO wants to be a millionaire? The ambitious performers portrayed in Sweet Dreams don't mind admitting that they do. A light-hearted, quirky look at dreams of fame and fortune, the series compares its subjects' high-flying fantasies with the more mundane realities of life near the bottom of the showbiz food-chain.
The quirky, upbeat tone is set in the opening programme, with the contrasting lives of Elvis impersonators Curtis King and Slick Summers King, from Belfast, is an office equipment service engineer who dons his wig, shades and sequinned jump-suit by night, arriving by stretch limo for his gigs. Summers, meanwhile, is filmed during the build-up to the peak of his career so far - a "major showcase" at the Red Cow Inn. It would be easy to ridicule the whole low-rent Elvismania scene, but the two subjects are too likeable and -enthusiastic about what they do to be made fun of.
Darragh Byrne and Adrian Lynch of independent production company Graph Films were also responsible for The Morrison Tapes, about emigration, and Hallelujah Love And Stuff on modern marriage. "But this is kind of different," says Byrne, who directed three of the four programmes in the series. "The other programmes centred around social issues like marriage or emigration, but this is much lighter - we saw it as an opportunity to make a more constructed, stylised kind of film.
Certainly, Sweet Dreams is unusually stylish for Irish television, right from the cheerfully surreal opening credits sequence. Most Irish factual series until recently have been trapped either in a drab "talking heads" model, or in a slightly cheesy, old-fashioned kind of light entertainment style. Sweet Dreams, by contrast, actually looks as if it's been made in the 1990s.
Byrne firmly believes it's crucial to allocate enough resources to achieve that look of visual sophistication. "If any of these stories had been shot on videotape, I don't think the subjects' dreams would have come in the same way. A documentary, it's forgotten how important the image is."
Lynch mentions that one journalist who had seen the preview tapes called to say" `it was great, just like something you'd find on Channel 4'. That being the pinnacle of achievement!" The series does, indeed, have some of the qualities associated with British documentary programmes, combining high production values with a knowing perspective on the whole tricky business of ambition versus reality. There's nothing snide going on, though.
The relationship between performers and camera is an amiable one - it's clear the subjects see the programme as an opportunity for self-promotion, and they're all determined to make the most of it. "That was a change for us after the previous programmes we'd made, where we'd had to spend a long time establishing a relationship of trust and confidence," says Byrne. "With this, they were all very keen to see themselves on screen."
In the second programme, stand-up comedian Eddie Bannon girds himself for his first big gig in London, while actress Deirdre O'Kane takes her first nervous steps on to the comedy scene with an appearance in Dublin's Comedy Cellar. Featured later in the series are Barbarella, an all-girl rock band from Dungarvan (average age 17), dead-set on world domination by the time they're 23. If there's any recurring theme running through all this, it's about the importance of the journey rather than the destination.
The enthusiasm and good humour of the protagonists is infectious: they all hugely enjoy performing in front of an audience, and if the odds on their dreams actually happening may not be much more than those of winning the Lotto, so what?
AT less than a half-hour long, each programme only skims the surface of what's going on, and there's little sign of the dark side that must be lurking in the background (there's surely something deeply weird about dressing up every night as Vegas-era Elvis, far example). Too often on RTE, "cheerful" means bland or tacky, but Sweet Dreams shows it doesn't necessarily have to be that way.