TV Review: Blonde to plumber: "You want to stop by later tonight and take a look at my pipes?" Get yourself a head full of highlights, some adhesive lip gloss, stick your chest out, repeat this line in front of the mirror and, hey presto, you too can be a desperate housewife!
Desperate Housewives, the much-hyped American drama, straddled our TV sets this week and began closing its well-toned thighs on a new-year audience.
Wisteria Drive is a "pearls and spatulas" suburb, home to a sheaf of implausibly beautiful rich white women in varying degrees of emotional disintegration. A kind of Prozac-ated Stepford with warts and a G-spot. The story begins when one of the housewives, Mary Ellis, the programme's narrator, puts a gun to her shiny, expensively coiffured head and shoots herself. Then, from Mary Ellis's celestial vantage-point, we follow the lives of her friends. It's formulaic certainly, but slick and funny.
At one point, one of the friends, Bree - auburn-haired housewife and prisoner of her own perfection (that's despite being named after a soft cheese) - is slumming it in a surf 'n' turf restaurant with her long-suffering family. Bree's husband: "I want a divorce." Bree: "I will not discuss the dissolution of my marriage in a place where the restrooms are named 'Chicks and Dudes'."
Episode one opened a Pandora's box of suicide, blackmail, arson, infidelity, avarice and home baking, which promises to simmer away nicely for the next few months.
Arts Lives: Under a Coloured Cap was a sympathetic, often moving profile of playwright Sean O'Casey, written and narrated by his daughter, Shivaun O'Casey. Using selected passages from his extensive autobiography, clips from his plays and an intimate, unobtrusively filmed conversation with her mother, Eileen, and brother, Breon, Shivaun and producer Mary-Beth Yarrow told the extraordinary, often romantic story of an internationally renowned playwright and icon of Irish literature who, at the age of 13, could barely read or write. It was his brother, a prop master in the old Theatre Royal, who introduced O'Casey to theatre and the written word, first bringing him in to see productions of Shakespeare, then bringing home the texts which were the building blocks of his literacy.
Born a Protestant, one of 13 children, eight of whom died of diphtheria in infancy, his family lived on one of the "cancerous streets" of Dublin's north side among the "Catholic poor". O'Casey was in his 40s and working as a labourer, with three rejection letters from the Abbey Theatre - the "jewel in the slum", where he couldn't afford a ticket to Synge's controversial The Playboy of the Western World - when The Shadow of a Gunman was finally accepted by Yeats and Lady Gregory. Within three years he had written Shadow, Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars; each play, as Seamus Heaney said, a hymn of "sorrow and outrage".
The beauty of this reflective documentary lay in Shivaun O'Casey's gentle reconstruction of her father's life. Her mother Eileen described with amusement her own mother's attitude to Eileen's wedding day in Chelsea - so disappointed was she that her young and beautiful daughter, 20 years O'Casey's junior, was eschewing several good prospects to marry this Irishman that she dressed herself for the occasion from head to toe in widow's weeds. "God knows where she got them," Eileen laughed. She went on to describe taking tea that afternoon with the painter, Augustus John, who presented the couple with his portrait of O'Casey as a wedding present.
Through endless financial insecurities, Yeats's rejection of The Silver Tassie, her husband's disillusionment with the Abbey, and even a visit from Alfred Hitchcock, who talked of them making a movie together ("we waited for four weeks for his letter to arrive, then we gave up"), Eileen O'Casey came across as a uniquely warm, intelligent and devoted woman.
In a most moving piece of archive footage, Sean O'Casey responded to the devastating death of their son, Niall, at the age of 21, from leukaemia: "Death cut down the vigorous sapling and left the gnarled old tree standing, left the gnarled old withering tree standing. The broken cry of Eileen will ever be an echo in this house." Sean O'Casey died holding Eileen's hand in the back of an ambulance. He had "a lovely death", she recalled. "I was holding his hand, I didn't even realise he had gone."
O'Casey's lament for his beautiful young son was a stark reminder of the devastation that we continued to witness all this week on the news coverage of the tsunami and the ever-increasing death toll it left in its wake. One startling image from scores upon scores of eloquent testimonies to the disaster was of an elephant in Thailand hauling a car and its deceased driver from a muddy lake of debris - a gentler reminder of nature's power and our own fragility.
"All it takes is for some farmer to realise there's more money in showbands than in silage and up goes another ballroom." RTÉ continued to hit the ground running at the start of 2005 with Showbands, a two-part drama set in the midlands in 1965, centring on the Golden Ballroom, its out-of-luck proprietor, Tony Golden (an excellent Liam Cunningham), and his great white hope, Denise (Kerry Katona), a Liverpool-born pub cleaner who dreams of becoming a showband singer. Showbands was witty, atmospheric and superbly acted and continues RTE's surprising new habit of producing quality home drama.
"You got to walk the line," Cunningham says to the trepidatious Denise, about to embark on her singing career. "You got to think what the average punter wants: a drink, a dance, a ride, and home to the mammy. Remember, his ideal woman wears a mini-skirt and a pioneer pin." There was a feeling of the American midwest about the languidly paced drama - you almost expected to hear the crickets and see the heat shimmering as a moustachioed Don Wycherly, playing the manager and maybe boyfriend of the ladies' favourite star, Ricky Duvall, drove along in his Vauxhall with the ornamental ox-horns tied to the fender.
With the serene, chain-smoking parish priest collecting the ballroom's takings at the door, the diner with its slatted blinds and ice-cream sundaes (complete with miniature paper parasols), Showbands felt a little idealised, almost rosily nostalgic, but hell, spit on me, Ricky.
Having being warmed by these seasonal RTÉ delicacies, Celebrity Fit Club was as welcome as an ice-cold acid bath. Fat celebrities - and I use the term advisedly (celebrities, that is) - dragging their Lycra-clad bottoms around a sports arena was enough to put you off your dinner.
That they got publicly weighed in a mock-gothic chamber, got a pep talk from a dubiously "fit" Anne Widdecombe and were interviewed by a malicious Dale Winton (who I swear was wearing a girdle) was enough to send you screaming around the block for some levity.
The participants lined up for this, the latest reality makeover, include a statuesque Julie Goodyear who, mystifyingly, has started speaking like a reverend mother I once knew - very chillingly and without moving any facial muscles - and Andy Fordham, one-time world darts champion, who struggles to walk across the set and certainly can't tie his own shoelaces, and who weighed in at a staggering 32 stone.
I really hope Celebrity Fit Club has paid its insurance premiums. This is reality TV without a parachute - they couldn't find one big enough. Fordham's target weight loss for this week is 5lb, which doubtless he could manage if he cuts out one of the 25 bottles of beer he drinks each day. The celebs' personal trainer, a serving US Army marine, gets to kick some ass next week. Maybe he should get them to do the hucklebuck.