Testing times all round

TVReview: 'Thank God it's over." I like Miriam O'Callaghan, a capable, straightforward woman who'd mince a banana quicker than her words.

Her unmistakable relief when The Time of Our Lives? Test the Nation, a marathon quiz on the last two decades of Irish life, ground to a weary close was doubtless shared by anyone still clutching their interactive remote control at the end of three hours of catechising bank holiday tedium.

O'Callaghan co-hosted the event with the eminently professional and warm Ray D'Arcy, but even these two experienced presenters couldn't inflate the turgid studio format, which included studio contestants divided into a handful of groups, including "hairdressers", "estate agents" and "football fans", broadly representing a cross-section of the population who, along with the optimistically named "RTÉ All Stars", waded through 20 years of archive and answered such brainteasers as "Which washing detergent did actress Mary McEvoy advertise?".

A casual interloper viewing the programme would be forgiven for assuming that the nation in question amounted to little more than a muddy parish sports pitch merrily administered by Bono and Bosco, whose cultural life began and ended with Podge and Rodge. Blame the archivist, blame the sunshine, but the squeaky-clean monochrome nostalgia of the last 20 years, with its gubu baddies and RTÉ Inc goodies, felt appallingly parochial and deadeningly smug.

Still, it's entertainment, right? It's Ann Summers on O'Connell Street, it's Gerry "tiocfaidh Armani" Adams on The Late Late, it's Derek ("well boys oh boys") Davis stroking his "little alien", the microwave oven. It's "good girl, well done" Gaybo awarding the Housewife of the Year to the lady in the frock and her haiku about her daily grind.

It's Mgr Horan and the moving statuettes with perms and shoulder-pads and a return ticket to Medjugorje. It's slap-on-the-back, make-mine-a-pint, you-could-fry-an-egg-on-a-stone-here-if-you-had-an-egg time. Oh happy days.

In the end, when the statistics had been collated and the audience quietened with a cup of bromide, it turned out that the highest scoring average was achieved, figuratively, by a tea-drinking male in the county of Roscommon, who unlike 78 per cent of the population, got out of bed to go to Mass last Sunday morning. If you are that symbolic golden brain cell, congratulations, you can rest assured that the remainder of the not-so-clever nation are applauding you from their urban pits while sipping cappuccinos and flicking through Ikea catalogues.

GERRY ADAMS CULTIVATED the telly like an untidy beard this week. His was the face Ann McCabe, widow of Det Garda Jerry McCabe, finally confronted on St Patrick's Day this year in a crowded New York bar, where Adams was addressing a rapturous audience whose support for the president of Sinn Féin appeared unanimous. True Lives: Jerry McCabe - Murder on Main Street marked the 10th anniversary of McCabe's brutal death in June 1996, when he was gunned down during an IRA post office van robbery in Adare, Co Limerick.

Ann McCabe has been described as Banquo's ghost, the spectre that no one wants to see arriving at the table just as the political party is hotting up. Throughout the last decade she has ceaselessly attempted to have the facts of her husband's violent and untimely death acknowledged, while the terms of the Belfast Agreement were negotiated and we were all asked to move on and embrace the peace process. Murder on Main Street may be the last throw of Ann McCabe's dice, however; despite her courage and resilience, the campaign has obviously taken its toll on an ordinary woman who never envisaged that her beloved husband would be shot, let alone that she would have to take on the Herculean labour of keeping his killers in detention, all the while asking those she believes responsible for his death to condemn it.

"I condemn what I think is wrong," said Adams when faced by the dignified McCabe in the Bronx bar. "That won't bring your husband back." Adams's supporters, momentarily hushed by complexity, waited until he spoke of seeing the killers of his friends and family released under the terms of the agreement before they belted out another round of applause and Adams wished them a happy, holy and sober St Patrick's Day.

McCabe does not need to be told that her husband is not coming back. What drove this moving, earnest documentary was her aching interrogation of the facts of his death. "They stopped [ shooting] and then went back and started again," she repeated, as if attempting to exorcise the image from her mind.

This was not an equivocal examination of the pros and cons of prisoner release but a painful examination of the grief and politicisation of one woman.

"I will continue to bear public witness to the refusal to condemn," she said, as home movies of family parties, framed wedding photographs and the minutiae of the life of a man described by his family as "the love of our life" poignantly played out on the screen.

'IT'S NOT WHO you know, it's who you blow," said Denise, one of the four subjects of Britain's Biggest Spenders, an eye-opening, nausea-inducing documentary about excessive spending, dodgy eyelifts and wandering Botox. Denise, a sagacious divorcee, spends £10,000 (€14,500) a month on her "full-time occupation, pampering myself" (and even more money on ugly shoes and "moody" paintings for her many homes).

"I want never gets!" said Denise's mother to her avaricious little girl, who then grew up to prove just how wrong a crabby mother can be.

Another of the four, Scott, managed to part with around £7 million (€10.1 million) during the month the programme followed him around (mind you, he did buy Bulgaria and some "invincibility" injections). A property billionaire, Scott is a muscle-bound concoction of girly naivety and macho strutting, sporting a diamond-encrusted wristwatch with "No 1" writ large across its face in studded sapphires.

He brought us on a tour of his life: beds big enough for an entourage, villa in the hot spot, chrome-plated bachelor pad, Louis Vuitton leather football with matching accessories, nervy mates in baggy swimwear, lots of "birds" in G-strings and, of course, anti-ageing injections and yellowing year-round tan. Scott's, seemingly, is a life devoid of irony.

"The problem with this lift," he told us on the way up to his penthouse apartment, "is that it's too slow, gives the bird time to change her mind" (though one look at his over-indulged pecs, his surgically restricted eyebrows, his suspiciously enhanced lip line and blood-red satin pantaloons and you wouldn't get in the ruddy lift in the first place).

WELL, THE REMAKE of the satanic thriller, The Omen, has opened nationwide and presumably the world hasn't been overrun by beasties with half a telephone number under their hairlines. The Curse of The Omen is one of those documentaries you look at because you're too tired to stand up and turn off the telly, outlining as it did the extraordinary story of the bizarre events that took place during the making of the original film in 1976.

"It just got worse and worse - and worser," screamed some unflappable showbiz type as we heard spooky tales about "occultically menacing dogs" (one of whom bit a stuntman), murders of kamikaze crows flying into the engine of the production team's aircraft (causing an emergency landing on the runway), London hotel lobbies blowing up (at the height of the IRA campaign), a tiger chewing up an animal handler (tigers like eating people), and many other events that defied rational explanation! Then, just as one was reaching for the remote control, there was a truly nasty story about the production designer responsible for the beheading sequence in the film, who, some years later, was involved in a head-on collision while on a shoot in the Netherlands. His unfortunate passenger was sliced in half by the wheel and the designer was thrown from the car next to a signpost which told him he was 66.6 kilometres away from the town of . . . Ommen.

Bible sales quadrupled during the run of the original film, but I suspect this time we'll be yawning all the way to the gym. Oops, what's that plant pot doing hurtling towards my craniu . . .