The pursuit of happiness

TV ReviewShhh, please, I'm trying to radiate a bit of joy into the universe. I'm planting my two feet on the floor and thanking the benevolent universe for my, em, for my . . . two feet, planted on the floor (which I've neglected to Hoover). I am a little ball of joy, a spectrum of ecstasy, attracting happiness to myself like a nectar-heavy bud ensnares a bee, and any moment now this generous cosmos is going to provide me with an abundance of riches and everything else I want.

A reassuringly glum Alan Yentob guided viewers with inky grace this week through Imagine . . . The Secret of Life, an amusing and provocative documentary which inventively explored the billion-dollar self-help industry. Self-help manuals such as Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, The Secretand Screwing It and Doing It(to name but a few) are rolling off the shelves like plump little Buddhas, providing, according to some theorists, templates to replace the religious view of redemption. In this manic era, which demands that we be happy, upbeat, fit, young, thin, rich, endlessly marriageable and employable, with inner strength, outer beauty and no split ends, it's no wonder, the pundits argued, that people look for a quick-fix menu to achieve the unachievable.

Yentob, exhausted by the industry's relentless demand for positivity (the theme of most self-help manuals is pretty much "smile and the world smiles with you") and having attended some scarily affirmative rallies and drunk the snake oil of happy-clappy self-determination (sorry, slipped out of neutral there), cautiously deepened his search to include psychoanalytical tomes, cognitive behavioural books and, finally, a meditative walk with a bunch of French Buddhists.

Unravelling a scroll given to him by a whispering monk (which read "I have arrived, I am home"), Yentob, leaning over his balcony and surveying the luminous depths of the London night sky, concluded that there was more to self-help than he had previously thought. There was something convincing, even a little alluring, about the honesty of his engagement with what felt like a personal quest - after all, if even morose old Yentob is considering making "gratitude lists" every morning, I may need to rethink my views (though, really, I would sooner eat the droppings of a Mongolian goat and its friendly vegetarian goatherd than join the rush to the self-help shelf).

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. "The whole cosmos is supporting me as I eat my bread . . . the whole cosmos is supporting me as . . ."

TEETH-CHATTERING RATHER than earth-shattering, the fifth Irish Film and Television Awards, an annual event designed to celebrate outstanding achievement on the box and the big screen, appeared, from my armchair anyway, to be a somewhat tense and vaguely confusing affair. Amid the bustiers and sequins, the Gucci shirts and goosepimples, the chummy camaraderie and the occasionally parsimonious applause, one did feel, however, that a genuine attempt was being made to recognise how far the industry has progressed in this country since the days when the entire population were special extras on Braveheart.

Ryan Tubridy, with a spine so ramrod stiff he looked at times like a goofy mannequin, presented the show from the Gaiety stage. Temporarily abandoned by his perky confidence, Tubridy got proceedings off to a fitful start, not helped by a cliched and achingly stale script and patronising asides. "I saw at least six women jump up to catch that," he simpered falteringly after a tetchy Jonathan Rhys Meyers blew a kiss at the stony and firmly seated audience.

Tubridy's unease was perhaps indicative of an event that seemed to have trouble settling into its skin: nominees in several categories, especially film, seemed to defy the most basic criterion, Irishness (bar perhaps a couple of scenes filmed in a field behind Ardmore Studios), and there were glaring omissions, such as the Oscar-nominated Irish film, Once, the exclusion of which, due to some fidgety timing, undermined entirely, one felt, the point of the night.

Indicative of the show's febrile excitement about fading American celebrity, however, we got . . . Bo Derek! Sans plaits, context or those irritating little clackety-clack hair beads that used to adorn her scalp, Bo dutifully ripped open her allotted envelope and, later, did some pretty why-am-I-here clapping back in the auditorium when Mel Gibson picked up his lifetime-making-movies-my-mother's-from-Longford award. "A man among men", according to Robert Downey Jr (who wasn't there, but helpfully provided a link on VTR), Gibson attempted to thank his stiffening audience with a cúpla focal. "Could you feel me up, Margaret?" was his side-splittingly humorous phonetic attempt at "go raibh míle maith agat". Catchy, eh?

Meanwhile, writer Mark O'Halloran (whose prodigious output last year straddled both film and television, including the award-winning Garageand the moving Prosperity) didn't make it on to the televised part of the awards at all, strangely ending up (along with most of the "craft" categories - oh, that old stuff) edited out on the cutting-room floor.

It would be something worth celebrating if we had the courage to recognise Irish talent without the approbation of rusting Hollywood personalities, mediocre ringmasters and a vaguely apologetic atmosphere asking are we really there yet.

'HOW DO YOU eat an elephant? One bite at a time." So said Cork man Sean Coleman, describing how he approached the herculean task of battling an asbestos-related lung cancer that has no known cure. Me and the Big Cis an interesting, often moving series of short, observational documentaries from TV3, which follows 12 patients and their families through various stages of cancer treatment.

One person in three, this week's programme told us, will have to face this still-terrifying, occasionally devastating, but increasingly curable disease. The strength of Me and the Big C, a series whose non-sensationalist approach is gratifying, lies in its ability to demystify the disease and to look at treatment from the point of view of the individuals who are facing into surgery, chemo and radiation therapy.

The stories featured in the films are, by and large, positive and affirming: fitness instructor Kate McNamara, a precise, controlled and beautiful woman, successfully negotiates seven months of treatment for ovarian cancer ("with loss of hair comes loss of privacy", her oncologist intriguingly tells her); 12-year-old Matthew Power goes home free of medication having had a "treacherous battle" with leukaemia; while elephant-eater Sean Coleman, offered a brief reprieve, prepares again for battle. Interior designer Breda O'Donoghue was not so fortunate: after a brief and intense illness, she died with dignity and peace and "care fit for a queen" in a quiet district hospital in Carrick-on-Suir.

Leaving aside the politics of our blighted health service and focusing solely on people, the stories featured offer hope for recovery, dignity and understanding. Almost all of the survivors sent back the same message, a message which, perhaps unsurprisingly, rang out loud and clear from Alan Yentob's research in The Secret of Life: live in the here and now, live not in the grainy past or the fathomless future but in the present.

JUST TIME TO alert you to The Last Enemy, a new BBC drama which is probably terribly good but is unfortunately made up of elements that bludgeon my psyche into tiny pieces of blurry gristle. It is (I think) about surveillance and the war on terror and DNA databases, and killer viruses, and it contains a lot of maths (I'm struggling here).

Anyway, episode one: the British government, gamely represented by Irish actress Eva Birthistle (she's minister of technical thingies), has unveiled a shiny new computer, and the brother of a bearded bloke who was assassinated in Pakistan knows how to work it. The brother is now sleeping with his elfin sister-in-law (afore the corpse was even cold, though as the bearded bloke was assassinated by a landmine explosion I don't suppose there was much corpse at any temperature). It's really very impressive: there's some awfully fast typing, reams of CCTV footage, and intelligent people in white coats having their brains splattered all over laboratory floors.

"Total information awareness" is the phrase that keeps dropping from the anguished lips of the mechanically intense characters. Total bleedin' incomprehension if you ask me, mate.