Harbour Nights (RTE 1, Thursday)
Fair City (RTE 1, Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday)
Leargas (RTE 1, Tuesday)
Clocking Off (BBC 1, Sunday)
`We have ghosts and a dog," says Catherine Sommerville-Large, who is trying to get a dilapidated hotel up and running again. She seems commendably if extravagantly cheerful about her prospects and has renamed the former Oulart Hotel, the Stopford House Hotel. It's not, however, fears of ghosts or dogs which are upsetting other local business people. Sommerville-Large has accepted a booking for a 21st birthday party from Travellers. "She's encouraging the wrong type of business for the area," says publican Alan Switzer.
What exactly constitutes the right type of business for Co Wexford's Courtown Harbour depends, of course, on your perspective. Harbour Nights, an eight-episode RTE docusoap, began this week and there's an equally intense conflict of opinion over an estate of 1,200 new properties as there is over Travellers. The Tiger, it appears, has stretched its claws out to this traditional seaside resort, surrounding it with tax-break holiday homes. Local feelings, whatever about local temperatures, seem guaranteed to provide some summer sizzle.
This opening episode was predictably - and, in fairness, properly - most concerned with introducing the principals. Along with Sommerville-Large and Switzer, we met Daphne O'Donoghue, a manager of one of the controversial new holiday estates. A terrier of confidence and ambition, O'Donoghue is so chuffed with being known as "the slave-driver" that she prompted some of her co-workers to reveal this. Given her personality and pivotal job, she could yet emerge as the most memorable character of this docusoap, but it's hard to see a queue forming to be bossed by her.
Then there was caravanner Kathleen Murray, a 72-year-old grandmother from Raheny. She has holidayed in Courtown in almost all of the last 25 summers. When she's not belting out karaoke numbers, she can sometimes be found careering wildly on a rope swing or, best of all and almost too good to be true, knitting her own toilet-roll covers. Splendid, eh? Clearly among the favourites to be the character of the series, Murray will nonetheless face opposition from 21-year-old beachguard Joyce Murray, the inevitable Baywatch babe of the piece.
Chef Darragh Hughes, the main man in attempts to shift Courtown cuisine from bunburgers to pasta; Kerry-born lawman, Sergeant Mick O'Connor; grocer, postmaster and "community activist" Declan Dunbar and "healing priest" Father Paddy Norton are among the other principals. It all seems quite affectionate, with the lilting south-eastern accents making it a kind of Glenroe-on-Sea. And then, of course, there's the undeniable fact that Harbour Nights itself will act as PR for Courtown. It won't do for the place what Ballykissangel has done for Avoca up the road, but it's still valuable publicity all the same.
The opening episode had a sort of home-movie quality - or lack of quality - and it was impossible to know if this was deliberately arty or just cheapo. Perhaps it was both. Given the preponderance of paddling families and sand castle-building toddlers in home movies anyway, the jerky, amateurish feel does add a kind of timeless authenticity. This, of course, may work well as a novelty but may grate over eight episodes. We'll see.
Mind you, it's not just Courtown (or any other Irish seaside resort) which seems, albeit nostalgically, faded and jaded. So too does the docusoap genre, exploited in Britain throughout the 1990s for its cost-effectiveness in delivering sizeable audiences. As with regular fictional soap, it can be possible for the real-life documentary variety to engage with issues through their effects on character.
In that sense, the way Niamh Walsh's direction of Harbour Nights deals with the big picture - the holiday homes; the Travellers; the local tensions - will determine its real worth. Failure to establish unifying contexts could reduce it to being a series of individual home videos incidentally related by time and place. Like place names on seaside rock, themes in strong docusoaps run through the core from top to bottom.
Back in Dublin, Fair City's middle-aged love triangle of Harry, Dolores and Shelley was promoted as a menacing morality play. "Every sin has a price," boomed a teaser for the following evening's episode, immediately after a hell-hath-no-fury Shelley had spilled the beans to Dolores. Since it was Dolores's discovery of Harry's cross and chain in Shelley's flat which had prompted the showdown between the two women, religious imagery as well as religious idioms intensified the moralising. Cracker in Carrickstown?
Really, Harry should have been burned at the stake, the dirty fudger. Shelley too, the hussey. Along with the Celine Dion-assisted death of Helen and the bottle of whiskey while driving-assisted death of the mad, stalker doctor, the climax of this love triangle yarn has been a Fair City "event". Fair enough - all soaps, desperately locked as they are in ratings wars, periodically pile on the melodramatics. But there remains a variable mixture of fine and ropey performances in the series. Compared to most of the Aussie soaps, Fair City is King Lear but compared to, say, Coronation Street, its uneven-ness too often makes it little better than Home and Away. It's the details which tell, and individual performances aside, it's the details which establish mood as believable or not.
The ongoing Mags Kelly v Dermot Fahy conflict over a proposal to close a local library is fine - as an idea. But there's an unconvincing, mildly pantomime quality to the exchanges between the two, which demeans the issue. Darker, more spare scripting, even if it seems slightly against established character types, is required. Perhaps, though, like Coronation Street, which has more but still not quite enough ventilation, the soap's primary weakness is the hermetically sealed claustrophobia of its communality. There have been a few attempts (the runaway teenager, for instance) but not enough to evoke the context of a large city.
Of course soap sells community or, more accurately, nostalgic notions of bygone community. That, to an audience atomised principally by television, is the great irony of its appeal. But too often Carrickstown is like Castaway 2000 - an island of marooned characters with only the most tenuous relationship to wider contexts. Striking the balance between cosy communality and meaningful interaction with the wider world is not easy for soap. But, just as Harbour Nights ought to be more than the sum of its individual characters, so too Fair City.
Anyway, back to the love triangle. It is a rule in soap that betrayals will always be exposed. Naturally the tension generated along the way acts as an emotional hook on viewers. But when resolution is so predictable it is a weakness as well as a dramatic promise kept. Of course, many soap plotlines are dictated by the contracts and availabilities of the characters, but that's another day's story. Given the barrage of criticism (some fair, some not) directed at RTE at present, the organisation does need a successful, anchor soap opera. Fair City's current performance is, overall, just a shade above fair. But it really needs more city to give it a better framework.
Uncommonly for a socialist, Joe Higgins's lefty convictions began not in a city but on the family farm in Kerry. Leargas posed the question "Is Joe Higgins the last socialist in Ireland?", the answer to which is, of course, simply "no". Still, with the left routed and in disarray, the ideology of the expelled former Labour Party militant Higgins - or, at any rate, his public declaration of it - seems unique in the current Dail. Reporter Brian Pairceir put the usual, anti-socialism argument to his subject.
Have not socialist countries seen comparable and even worse levels of corruption than capitalist ones? There's never been a socialist country, only Stalinist ones, said Higgins. It was a fair enough answer, except that it didn't explain how similar outcomes could necessarily be avoided in the future. Higgins recalled the "meitheal" of old, in which farming communities would come together to work communally. It was, he said, a form of rudimentary socialism and that is true.
But it was never the full story of rural life either. No less and perhaps more than in the city, the awful reality is that country people become conservative when they believe they have something to conserve. Such an argument could, of course, even be extended to Joe Higgins, who, having taken to heart the more sophisticated, though as yet never proven-to-be-sustainable morality of the left, remains keen to hang on to it. Whether or not he is heroic or simply obstinate depends on your perspective.
For what it's worth, I'd plump for qualified heroic. Though he has clearly stuck to his guns, there may be trace elements of the messianic in his stance. Perhaps he believes that people failed socialism more than socialism failed people. If he does, he's probably right. But the suppression of individual instincts required to make it work may well be beyond all but a few - at least until a far greater range of human needs are universally met; and perhaps forever. Whether Joe Higgins is a dinosaur or a person from the future is impossible to say. But he certainly makes his contribution and deserved this profile.
Finally, Clocking Off, the BBC's latest drama series. Set in a Manchester textile factory, a traditional scene for many legendary socialism v capitalism battles, it's a six-episode series. Written by Paul Abbott, each episode is really a self-contained play as, soap-like, characters can be little more than wallpaper one week and principals the next. The opener featured John Simm as a young husband and father sauntering back into his house as though he hadn't been missing and presumed dead for the previous 13 months.
As the mystery deepens (Simm can't remember where he's been and has a fresh surgical scar he can't explain) it seems like a bizarre case of Coronation Street meets The Twilight Zone. Gradually, however, the riddle unravels. It's a tale of bigamy and amnesia. Simm has walked out on his wife and son and married another woman with whom he has fathered a daughter. The second wife's brother finds out about the bigamy and beats the crap out of Simm, causing a bout of amnesia. When he discharges himself from hospital, our hero goes home - but to his original set-up.
Certainly, it demanded a considerable suspension of disbelief. But there was a pace and intensity to it which generally over-rode the bizarreness of the plot. Tomorrow night, Sarah Lancashire, forever Raquel from Coronation Street, stars with Christopher Eccleston. Again the plot will centre around a strange family set-up. Whether or not such a theme, along with the shared characters, will genuinely unite the individual plays into a coherent series is another matter.