Looking After Jo Jo - BBC 2, Monday
Inside Story - BBC 1, Tuesday
Face To Face - BBC 2, Monday
RTE 1, Monday to Thursday
Network 2, Wednesday
You can blame or thank Trainspotting for the way Jocks are replacing frocks in television drama. Choose cops, choose docs, choose frocks - or forget it - was, until recently, pretty much the rule in the 1990s. But now Jock opera is in vogue.
In recent weeks, we've seen the comic Love Bites trilogy and a coming-of-age retro drama on Edinburgh razor gangs. This week, a new four-parter, Looking After Jo Jo, began. Written by Frank Deasy and starring Robert Carlyle, celluloid's current Jock of all Jocks (il Jocko di tutti Jocki), it has menacing promise.
Set in an early 1980s Edinburgh of desolate concrete vistas, crying babies, blade-wielding thugs and impenetrable dialects, Carlyle is John Joe McCann (the Jo Jo of the title). In Trainspotting, Carlyle played Begbie, a psychotic thug. As Jo Jo, he retains much of that smug, psychotic menace but he is also shown as wistful (when thinking in flashbacks about his dead, loving, if alcoholic, father) and even tender (when he gets the hots for Lorraine, a wannabe Marilyn Monroe lookalike).
We know it's the early 1980s - 1982, to be precise - because Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands/Malvinas War are raging on TV and Alex Higgins is winning the world snooker championship. On walls, we see "Coal Not Dole" and Bananarama (remember them?) posters. In the background we hear The Jam, The Clash, Blondie and Bucks Fizz. It is a bleak, pre-devolutionary, pre-Tartan Tiger world which shows a Scottish urban underclass going down the toilet as Thatcherism begins to throttle the poor.
Much worse is to come however, for the action is set right on the eve of the mass arrival of heroin and Aids to Scottish council estates. Monday's opening episode was, naturally, a scene-setter, establishing the extended family of characters in this fragmenting, dole-dependent community. Twentysomething Jo Jo leads a young "team" of burglars. They break in to jewellery shops, cigarette warehouses - anywhere they can, really. But Jo Jo's malign uncle, Charlie (Ewan Stewart), is the run-down estate's top criminal and he intends to keep it that way.
"I can supply violence by the vanload," says Charlie and you wouldn't doubt him. He knows that Jo Jo, whose loot he fences, is a rising crime star - a possible rival. So, Charlie sets him up and grasses to police as Jo Jo is doing his thing in a jeweller's. Earlier, we saw what happened to Wee Eddie, a member of Jo Jo's team who, when picked up by detectives and viciously strip-searched over a cigarette warehouse break-in, turned tout. Unfortunately for Wee Eddie, his conversation with the coppers was overheard on a police scanner reverentially mounted atop the television in Jo Jo's flat.
"Ye cannae have grasses," says Jo Jo, and everybody else on the estate supports this cornerstone tenet of high-rise morality. So, Wee Eddie's flat is attacked, his father's flash motorbike set alight and Eddie is kicked around the place. "Ye cannae have grasses" - unless, of course, you're Charlie. As the first episode closes, Charlie and his moll (she's already smoking smack) are planning to introduce heroin - colloquially known as horse - to the masses.
During the heyday of Thatcherism Liverpool and, occasionally, Newcastle were TV drama's main centres of British urban decay. Clearly, Scotland was too far out. Now, however, Glasgow and Edinburgh seem to have won the franchises for depictions of pre-1990s city disintegration. Well, that's fair enough - except for the accents which, though doubtlessly authentic, can make possibly crucial moments utterly inscrutable.
Charlie, for instance, delivered a monologue about the transformative effects of Clingfilm and Nivea on the smuggling scene. You could understand, more or less, what he was on about and maybe it was a mercy that the detail was lost. This is, after all, rough drama and with smack and Aids about to come centre-stage, we can take it that things can only get a lot rougher. Deasy's script has yet to make its pronouncements about the causes and effects of poverty. But, while it does not have the searing vividness or scorching pace of Trainspotting, it is shaping-up to say something meaningful, Jommy.
Dramatised Scottish crime of the 1980s seems like a very wee dram indeed beside some of the real-life American stuff of the 1970s. Inside Story: Searching For Amy was a horror-doc which told the tale of an American woman's almost 24-year search for her daughter, who disappeared from their Florida home town in March 1974. Susan Billig's only child, Amy, was 17 when she went missing.
Common belief, shared by Susan (and her since-dead husband, Ned), local people and investigating police held that Amy was abducted by a passing gang of bikers. At the top, this Desmond Wilcox production told us that a recent lead suggested that Amy was still alive and living with bikers in England. This acted as a teaser for the denouement while we were brought through the awfulness of the story. We saw Susan retrace Amy's lastknown route and heard of how sickos - first young twins and then, over 20 years, a customs official, Hank Blair - had tormented the Billigs with phonecalls.
The twins' caper involved a ransom demand which, quickly, was their undoing. But Blair, a telephone stalker, phoned regularly, often claiming he and others were sexually abusing Amy in unspeakable ways. When he was finally caught in 1993, mega-creep Blair was sentenced to just two years in jail - the maximum allowable under Florida law for "a misdemeanour". Then we heard about the bikers . . .
Running drugs, prostitutes and guns, these motorcycle morons would sometimes drug and abduct girls as young as 12. Often, the girls would, initially, go willingly and then find that they had made a seriously negative career move. In the crapology that is biker morality, women can be treated as chattels to be bought, sold or traded. Obedience is pitched at more severe levels than even the Christian Brothers contemplated: breaches of the code which, for instance, decreed that sex on demand with a room full of bikers was part of the deal, could lead to crucifixion. Afterwards, the goons would wear the nails around their necks. How very macho!
Anyway, having travelled to England, Sue Billig was inevitably disappointed. A former biker, Paul Branch, had insisted to her that he had once "owned" Amy and that she was definitely still alive. It was all codswallop. Branch, who died of cancer last year told his final partner, Teresa, a different yarn. Amy Billig, he said, had got drunk and stoned at a bikers' party, where she began to mouth off at one bloke, who became incensed at this public affront to his masculinity. She was passed around the Pagan bikers' gang and either died from an overdose or was murdered. Either way, it all happened within a month of her disappearance.
Her body, allegedly, was then dismembered and fed to alligators in Florida's Everglades - a disposal method favoured by criminals. As we heard this plausible explanation told to Susan, the extra 24 years of torture she has endured struck you as being monstrous. "It's some kind of closure, I guess," she said as she too prepares to die, like Ned and Branch, from cancer. This was not merely another parable about an uncaring, selfish society. This story was infused with pure, emotional sadism. Vile.
In guff-TV this week, Ben Elton spoke to Jeremy Isaacs on Face To Face. Elton, hectoring stand-up comedian, television comedy scriptwriter and novelist, no less, is widely considered to be a thorough prat. It's peculiar this - after all, during the era (the 1980s again) of "alternative" comedy, Ben Elton was one of the most vehement vilifiers of Maggie Thatcher. You might think his time has long since come. But no, he's still regarded as a prat - if anything, more so than ever.
It's not just that he's a waffler - showbiz, everyone knows, is full of the breed. And it's not just that he's a motormouth who seems to have swallowed a microphone - these things may not help, but they do not explain the depth of public distaste for this man. However, watching him in action with Isaacs, it was striking how Elton could, in the same breath, be servile and swaggering. He did seem like one of those people who are capable of savouring the quality of their own "humility".
He also was unable to resist the temptation to explain that he has been misunderstood. Now, very often public people are misunderstood (and as often as not this is to their benefit - PR companies, after all, charge fortunes to promote such misunderstanding), but it is a grave misunderstanding of the public to blame them - even if they are at fault - for any such misunderstanding. Yet, rather than take the rap himself, Ben Elton did this. Even Isaacs, who really was too out of touch for his more youthful interviewee, couldn't preventing his guest stewing himself in his own conceits.
BACK on RTE, Carrie Crowley continues to present more and more programmes. She's a competent presenter but this Carrieon is beginning to get out of hand. Anyway, her latest (well, up to Thursday it was her latest) gig is fronting a cookery gameshow, Pot Luck. Clearly, Ms Crowley is RTE's dish of the day these times.
Anyway, on Monday's opener, chefs from Wicklow's Tinakilly House and Crosshaven's Oystercatcher restaurants had to make meals from ingredients selected by bingo balls.
Tinakilly's John Moloney drew pine nuts, chicory, celery, sprouts and peppers. His rival, Bill Patterson got fennell, asparagus, tomatoes, carrots and parsnip but under the rules of the show was allowed to ditch the parsnip and was given sole instead. Fair enough.
They got about 20 minutes to rustle up little feasts, during which time the presenter was expected to Carrie on Crowleying - i.e. talking in a dubiously animated voice.
To be fair, she coped well, but a little less guff wouldn't put people off their food. The chefs produced splendid-looking dishes, taste-tested by a studio panel of five.
Going out just before tea-time when for many people beans on toast would constitute a gourmet day, the timing of Pot Luck could cause the bile to rise, but for sheer inanity, Clare McKeon's Later On 2 is a stomach-curner in a different league altogether.
On Wednesday, six women sat around talking about "dating". Why such typical pub-guff should be on television is beyond me. The latest round of Network 2 talk TV - which on Tuesdays features discussion on popular culture and on Thursdays sees Fergus Finlay and Frank Dunlop (a mature Ben Elton?) tackle politics - is meant to be more informal, relaxed and intimate than traditional talk TV. But surely, it's not meant to be more boring. RTE publicity lists Ms McKeon's show as being "frank, funny and female" . . . maybe women enjoy it.